Best of Summer Public Comment: Los Osos Residents Fight Back Against Gibson Gag With Wit, Knowledge and Advice

Public comment on the Los Osos wastewater project at Board of Supervisors’ monthly updates is the time when no good deed goes unpunished, as  Supervisor Gibson and idling board sidekicks turn the vice tighter and tighter on critics of the County’s town-sweeping $200-million megasewer built on the flimsiest foundation of lies and fraud. Following is a just a sampling of the vital public comment from Los Osos residents at monthly project updates on July 14 and August 4—ignored or dismissed by a board that almost never responds. We bring back some folks for an encore because public comment passes too quickly and should not be so quickly forgotten...

GWEN TAYLOR ON LISA SCHICKER’S COMPLAINT: “We have waited a very long time to hear a determination by (County Counsel) Warren Jensen on the documentation of assertions that Miss Schicker brought to the County. I would hope that today would be the day that we hear what he has to say about the documentation that she presented to this board, since we have been here for several Tuesdays expecting it but always being told it was going to be postponed.”

Dr. C. HITE ON SEWER SCAMS: “Anyone who pretends that a $250 a month sewer bill is not going to affect homeownership in Los Osos is just pulling my leg… My mother lives in a resort town on a lake and pays $33 a month. Does my mother have the right to live in a resort community overlooking without being taxed $250 a month sewer bill? Yes she does. If she were hit by her County with a $250 a month sewer bill we would consider it a scam and potential elder abuse… Her decision to stay in her home now is dependent on what her bills are. She would not be expecting a $250 a month sewer bill (when) she is paying $33.”

DAVID DUGGAN ON CEQA IMPLICATIONS: “It’s not the environmentally preferred project, it’s the County’s preferred project—the opposite of what CEQA is trying to tell you to do. They want the environmentally preferred project, unless costs make it unfeasible… Without studying all the treatment alternatives, how are you going to say the cost is a factor here? You don’t have that assessment. … CEQA regulations clearly state that you have to look at all alternatives. If that has not been done, any responsible agency can shut this project down—or change it.”

GAIL McPHERSON ON THE BROKEN PROCESS: “The concern has always been about cost. Project cost savings are realized through three things. The first is competitive process of design-build—you’ve lost that. It can’t happen unless the project criteria will allow competitive and creative alternative designs and differing technologies to compete. That’s been blown out, that’s gone. The work to drive down costs is what people believed when they were voting for the 218 vote… Bid-rigging is not foreign to the County or other agencies, and of course it causes harm and taxpayers pay the price. I believe that bid-rigging has occurred in subcontracts, bid suppression, complementary bidding, and it’s gone on for a long time here.”

KEITH WIMER ON SEAWATER INTRUSION: “What you are looking at is the progress of seawater intrusion since 2005. What’s in yellow is the progress of seawater intrusion for the 20 years prior to that. We’re talking about what at least appears to be a major increase in the rate of seawater intrusion in the basin—four to eight times as fast. The first overhead actually shows [lower aquifer] Zone D seawater intrusion progress and, as you can see, the actual front edge of seawater intrusion is way under the downtown and commercial area. Zone E is a huge aquifer, so we’re talking about massive amounts of water being contaminating, huge percentages of the basin. The final overhead shows where we are in relation to the entire basin and the fact that it tapers off, so the progress of seawater intrusion could even be more rapid. Seawater intrusion is out of control in the Los Osos Valley water basin and immediate action is needed. Waiting even a few years could be too late. That’s why the Los Osos Sustainability Group is asking you to support the Planning Commission’s conditions on the Los Osos Wastewater Project for 20% conservation and using all the recycled water beneficially at project start-up. The LOSG is also now asking your board to implement a basin-wide management plan to stop seawater intrusion by stopping all pumping causing seawater intrusion within one year of project start-up. That will take about 800 [acre] feet of reduced pumping. This can be done by maximizing conservation, ag reuse and ag exchange with the project, and by implementing a basin-wide plan that does the same thing. You didn’t create the problem, but you are the only ones who can fix it. It must be done now, and it must be done with a basin-wide ordinance—you are the only ones who can enact such ordinance. You are about to okay a $100-200 million wastewater project that won’t be worth a dime if the basin is lost. What it comes down to is this: You can fix the problem with all the means at your disposal or you can preside over what is likely to be one of the biggest environmental, social and economic disasters this county has seen or is likely to see in the future. The decision is yours.”  

FRANK AUSILIO ON WHO PAYS FOR SEAWATER INTRUSION: “My concern is that the additional cost that’s going to be for saltwater intrusion [is going to be] put on the people of the Prohibition Zone. This is a basin issue, not a Prohibition Zone issue. Seawater intrusion affects everybody in the basin. Everybody uses that water and everybody should be responsible for paying for that water.”

RHIAN GULASSA ON HOW TO AVOID A ‘TRAINWRECK’: “The staff has spent about $7 million so far and the result is a trainwreck. Dedicated citizens of Los Osos came here week after week warning you of these very issues. Mr. Gibson, when you became Chair, you chose to limit Los Osos public comment time, saying you that you had heard it all before, but were you actually listening? You, our Board of Supervisors, can help resolve the problems (Coastal Commission) Director (Peter) Douglas identified: No. 1, by adopting the Planning Commission’s conditions; No. 2, by using the Los Osos Sustainability Group’s conservation and water management program; and No. 3, by creating a strong basin management plan to stop seawater intrusion within one year of project start-up.”

CHRIS ALLEBE ON UNKNOWN COST OF BACKWARDS PROJECT: “We can’t say what’s going to happen until we spend $200 million on a project. The County doesn’t seem to have an answer to that except, ‘Well, we’ll find out after we build the project whether it’s successful or not’ … You don’t spend $200 million on a maybe. Eventually, unless we grow fins and tails, we’ll be getting our water down at Trader Joe’s and taking sponge baths for the rest of our lives.”

CHUCK CESENA ON CORRUPTION OF DESIGN-BUILD PROCESS: “Today I am reminded of the first time I addressed the LOCSD on this project. It was December of 2003 and I had just discovered that the engineering reports clearly stated that it would be cheaper to build and operate a treatment plant at the environmentally preferred out of town site even though the 2001 EIR had contained a Statement of Overriding Considerations alluding to the lower coast of a centralized collection system as the reason the plant had to be built in the middle of town. In my mind that was fraud, pure and simple. I remember stating that I was trying to convince myself that it was the consultant who had constructed that deception because it hurt too much to believe that public officials could have been responsible. But being a lifetime staffer at a public works agency myself, I knew that consultants rarely go where they are not directed to go, and they certainly would not override their own conclusions with a deceptive Statement of Overriding Considerations. Your Public Works Department just spent $7 million on an EIR that didn’t even satisfy your own agricultural policies, much less the Coastal Commission’s. If you are not shaking in your boots, either because of anger or fear, something is wrong. The questions asked by your incredibly brave and honest Planning Commission, and the comments from the Coastal Commission, are leading the project back to something very similar to the 2006 ‘Project Update’ that the LOCSD had prepared. A project with treatment facilities located north of the cemetery with effluent disposal based upon an agricultural reuse program within the Los Osos groundwater basin. The only difference is that we believed that a STEP system—with its totally fusion-sealed collection system—would be necessary to deal with the infiltration and inflows inherent in a gravity collection system. The extra cost of treating more water than necessary because of I&I from our high groundwater, and the possibility of saltwater leaking into the collection system rendering the effluent unsuitable for reuse, made a truly sealed system imperative. The fact that this system was guaranteed to be 20% cheaper than a gravity system in your Public Works Department’s RFQ process makes it even more attractive. Why was STEP ignored when it came time to short list the so-called qualified engineering teams? Public works says that a 20% savings wasn’t enough and that the engineering team wasn’t intimately familiar with Los Osos. This in spite of the fact that the Lyles team included Ripley Pacific, the author of the CSD’s 2006 ‘Project Update.’ The proposal outlined by Ripley Pacific was credible enough to be included in the 2007 ‘Water Reuse’ textbook co-authored by Dr. George Tchobanoglous of the NWRI, a non-profit research institute hired by the Public Works agency to review the current proposal. Dr. Tchobanoglous verbally stated that he was struggling not to use the words ‘gravity biased’ regarding the current proposal. Your $7 million EIR discarded a STEP system from further consideration because of a faulty greenhouse gas emissions study that was refuted by the Lyles team and a community survey that claimed that residents did not want the on-lot disturbance associated with replacing septic tanks. But without a maximum cost proposal from an engineering firm, how were residents to know how much they could save with a STEP system? And the extremely small lots in some parts of town could be handled by neighborhood cluster tanks, as are two subdivisions that currently exist in our community. The design-build process has been totally corrupted by the Public Works Department. You have to bring the design-build process back into control. Take it away from Public Works...”

ELAINE WATSON ON ACHIEVING A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE: “You all are obviously aware of the position that the Planning Commission, the Coastal Commission, even water purveyors (such as) Golden State have taken on the use of Tonini and sprayfields outside our water basin. They’re saying the very same things that Los Osos residents have been coming here and saying for many, many months now. Tonini, in the words of Coastal Commission Executive Director [Peter Douglas], is ‘an impending trainwreck,’ a trainwreck because once again it uses prime ag land and literally wastes vast amounts of our precious water. Getting rid of Tonini is the first step. Water must come back to our basin and we must stop seawater intrusion. The one and only way we can accomplish this is through conservation. A Pacific Institute Report found that California can meet its water needs for the next 30 years by implementing off-the-shelf, cost-effective urban water conservation. Keith Wimer and the Los Osos Sustainability Group have brought you eminently implementable suggestions on how to do it, and begin it now with ordinances if necessary. Retrofit low-use toilets, shower heads, washing machines, zeroscape landscaping, etc. Begin water audits, with leak detection and repairs. Over the longer term initiate LID technologies, from the collection system that is least prone to leakage and breakage, and despite the Provincetown event, this would still probably be small field pipes. Design a recharge and disposal system that efficiently returns our water to our basin. Be certain treatment is as sustainable as possible. … Los Osos is unique and very fortunate. We have our own water source. Over-pumping and misuse can no longer be tolerated. Everyone who takes from this basin must participate in sustaining it. It is your responsibility to help us sustain and maintain a healthy, viable basin. It is eminently do-able, it is just a matter of vision and your political will to make it so.”

DR. MARY FULLWOOD ON ADVANCING STEP: “If STEP can provide the benefits that the Planning Commission is conditioning for the LOWWP and be more affordable within these parameters, why wouldn’t it be advanced to the RFP? Lyles has had a 100% advancement rate to RFPs until this project, and the reason given (by Public Works) was that they didn’t show intimate understanding of the issues in Los Osos. The Planning Commission has shown otherwise because Mr. (Dana) Ripley, one of Lyles’ consultants, has provided detailed, intimate input at the PC hearings. Additionally, Lyles is planning to bid a guaranteed maximum price proposal to prevent hidden costs from occurring during construction.”

RET. JUDGE MARTHA GOLDIN ON ADDRESSING SEAWATER INTRUSION: “The Los Osos Sustainability Group has presented to you more than once and again today plans that would help solve the saltwater intrusion problem. The Planning Commission was alarmed at information they received about saltwater intrusion in the basin. The Coastal Commission’s staff members are highly concerned and hopefully the Coastal Commissioners are concerned about the fact that the basin is going to be destroyed if we don’t stop saltwater intrusion. It is time for this board to direct staff to start looking at solutions that have been presented as do-able solutions, instead of having a staff that recalcitrantly goes out and tries to oppose every kind of change that would be environmentally sound and sustainable in our basin… If you directed staff to be a little creative we could have an environmentally sound treatment system that was not an industrial plant but used ponding or some other technology which would be green, attractive, unobtrusive and no doubt, with the slightest bit of education, not opposed by any of the landowners on the proposed closer-in sites that are within the basin, and they would help do the job of stopping saltwater intrusion.”
 
RICHARD MARGETSON ON LOST FUNDING OPTIONS: “It’s interesting that Mr. (Supervisor Adam) Hill can compose a question to Mr. Waddell about a treatment plant not located in this state, and Mr. Waddell can go on and on about the specifics of what happened there, but at the Planning Commission, when the Commissioners asked staff how much it would cost to seal 5.2 miles of pipe in the high groundwater area, for two days they couldn’t come up with an answer. … Funding. $7 million. You heard there’s hardly any money left. Everything’s been put on hold. I hope a component of this project that has not been put on hold is how we’re going to fund this project and the pursuit of the grants and the SRF process and the money from the Department of Agriculture, because at the last meeting there were a number of slides put up about what the funding possibilities were to get the cost down. Well, in consultation with Mr. Diodati, who I’m surprised is not here—I’m also surprised Mr. Ogren is not here today—two or those scenarios have been deemed unfeasible, and one of them is SRF funding with stimulus for 30 years at 1%. And I have an email to that affect from County staff. The Holy Grail is now out the door. So now what are we banking on? We’re banking on the new Holy Grail that was brought before us today… Elimination of Tonini took the Commissioners less than a half an hour. It may have been less than 15 minutes. Unanimously they eliminated Tonini and wanted the project moved inside the basin. … For those who want Tri-W back, I want anyone in this County who’s been involved with this project to show me a document that says Tri-W is the environmentally preferred project without overriding considerations. Until that comes forward that site cannot come forward as an option.”

JERRI WALSH ON STAFF LOBBYING: “I’d like to bring a complaint to this board. I find it highly inappropriate for County staff on the Los Osos project to lobby via email and stir up sentiment against moving the project closer into our basin from the Tonini site. The recent sentimental letter in the Bay News decrying the Planning Commission’s suggestion of moving the sewer plant from the $7-million, prime-ag-land Tonini site because it was next to the graves of deceased military veterans was written by one of the landowners near to the cemetery, Mr. Branin, as a direct result of the email request sent to him by Mr. Waddell. I ask you, is it appropriate for County staff to send such emails lobbying behind the scenes against the County Planning Commission and Coastal Commission? Was this done on County time? Are we, the people of Los Osos, paying staff to lobby against saving our water by rejecting sprayfields at Tonini and bringing it back to Los Osos? Are you as supervisors supporting behind the scenes lobbying by staff, or do you find it as highly inappropriate as I do?”

ALON PERLMAN ON PREDICTING THE COUNTY’S ERRANT PLAN: “There’s something very wrong with the system when ordinary citizens can come up with the same conclusions that regulatory agencies do… Now the people of Los Osos are even further out from the decision-making process.”

LiSA SCHICKER ON HER COMPLAINT SUMMARY: “I have prepared for you a seven-page summary (of my complaint against MWH and Public Works’ Paavo Ogren). Please, Supervisors, just skim the summary. If you do nothing else, skim the summary. Reading from page three: “It now that appears that Carollo, Lou Carella and John Wallace Associates had both financial and business relationships with the applicant, MWH, through prior LOCSD and County projects, including the LOCSD wastewater project and the design at Lopez Lake, and these projects were supervised by your Public Works Director. Both of these gentlemen served on the interview panel interviewing their former business partner, MWH. Mr. Carella conducted all the reference checks on all the interviews for all the terms. This is a conflict of interest.”

ERIC GREENING ON ‘CASH FOR CLUNKER’ SEWER: “I have to make the kind of jaundiced observation that seeing what’s going on in Washington, DC with ‘Cash for Clunkers’ perhaps we need to forget all of the urgency, build the most obsolete, inefficient and polluting project we possibly can and use that to try to qualify for government money to demolish it as a ‘clunker’ so that we can finally get the funding to build something right. I’m hoping we don’t have to go that way but that seems to be the way the White House and Senate are pointing right now.” [Mr. Greening is not a resident of Los Osos.]

LINDE OWEN ON LOSS OF WATER TO TREES AND SHRUBS: “The project does little or nothing to address the loss of 1000 acre feet of effluent disposal that is currently taking care of landscape, shrubbery, and even some native areas that are now dependent on that water. This project addresses nothing about in one or two years removing every drop of that water for that habitat. It needs to address it. How are you going to get the water back, put it on Broderson and that’s going to take care of 5,000 septic tank disposals? That’s not going to happen. I think everybody is missing a very serious point... the loss of that water to the habitat that’s so important to Los Osos. So, if we don’t need trees and shrubs and bushes in Los Osos, yeah, this will be a great project.”

ELAINE WATSON ON ECO-IMPACTS OF TAKING SEPTICS OFF-LINE: “In a report on the water basin last Thursday we heard from a consultant who acknowledges that when septic tanks and leach fields are taken off line, Los Osos will see a dramatic change in our landscape vegetation and our precious ecosystem. I believe he called it the regime change, which is apparently a euphemism for a significant loss of wetlands vegetation and naturalized trees and plants that make up our present landscape. We also heard from Spencer Harris at the Planning Commission June 30 meeting that, as a consequence of the present project, Willow Creek will go dry because of the loss of several hundred acre feet that presently feed Willow Creek and the vegetation that runs along South Bay Blvd. The photograph that you’ve got is of Baywood in the 1930s. As you can see this was before Baywood was developed, before septic tanks and leach fields. As you can also see there is almost no vegetation. It is all sand and sage. When our septic tanks and leach fields are taken off line, and we no longer have the 1000 acre feet feeding these systems, what will Los Osos look like? What will Los Osos look like without Sweet Springs, without our trees, without our wetlands? These are what make Los Osos the special environment that it is. This is not a matter of if; the question is not whether it will happen, but how close it will come to returning to predevelopment. The experts agree. Everyone one understands. How will Broderson’s 440 acre feet of disposal, whether or not it percolates as we’re told it will, how will that replace the 990 acre feet we have now? The answer is, it won’t. It can’t. No one wants to see our community return to some approximation of the image that you’ve got and without water, which it most assuredly will. Where is the mitigation and the County plan for these issues? Why wasn’t this addressed in the EIR? Without a carefully crafted mitigation plan, the only recourse will be to use aquifer water to keep our trees alive, resulting in more plumbing, further exacerbating seawater intrusion. Seawater intrusion is the most significant threat to our aquifer. The Los Osos Sustainabilty Group has presented a comprehensive, integrated plan that addresses the potentially very severe impacts of seawater intrusion and the impacts on our ecosystem. Please re-read our recommendations carefully and please carefully consider what will happen without adequate remedy.”

RET. JUDGE MARTHA GOLDIN ON REVERSE MORTGAGE HAZARD: “It seems the more we change, the more we are the same. You have heard the 20-year-old comments by Pandora Nash Karner, among them the fact that the project being then planned by the County was going to cost over $200 million. Today’s guestimates, without considering operation and maintenance, without considering how to recharge the basin, is estimated to cost the homeowners of the Prohibition Zone $250 a month, or more, every month for 30 years. A number of years ago, one of the big proponents of the current County plan—it was a little different then, but basically massive, antiquated, so-called gravity sewer with lots of pump stations … cavalierly said, ‘well, if people can’t afford the $250 month they can get a reverse mortgage.’ So today I would like to make a few remarks about this wonderful tool for paying for a sewer. This is how it works, in case nobody has bothered to look at it. Your home is presumably worth $300,000. You have some equity in it, maybe a lot of equity in it, and you borrow $100,000 to pay for the sewer and to pay off the old mortgage, and to fix the roof and do whatever the place needs so that you can continue to live in it. You can either get this as a lump sum or you can get it on monthly payments. Now, you get to pay $15,000 or more right up front for closing costs, you have to pay another $15,000 right up front for insurance that’s going to go on through the life of your loan, and of course you are paying, most likely, a variable interest rate. That money didn’t come for free. So now you’ve taken out the money and now, because in the United States we don’t have a single-payer decent healthcare system like other civilized countries do, you have a serious illness and you need $200,000 to pay for that exorbitant treatment. But you don’t have any equity left in your house, the only source of your income. That’s how people are expected to pay $250 a month plus for dumping their you-know-what down a wastewater treatment system.”

DR. MARY FULLWOOD ON STEP’S COST-SAVINGS: “It is overwhelmingly clear that cost is PZ homeowners’ No. 1 concern and, as stated by (Project Engineer) John Waddell, the 12% fusion-sealing for gravity collection will add millions of dollars to the project. STEP, which is 100% fusion-sealed, would represent at minimum a 30% reduction in collection costs and a 20% reduction in treatment costs over gravity collection and treatment. This estimate made to the Planning Commission by the consultant to the Lyles design-build team. Why would you not verify this statement via the bidding process? All we are asking is for STEP to participate, for a direct comparison alongside gravity. We urge you to reconsider this significant issue and allow the RFP design-build process to do what it is designed to do.”

LEON GOLDIN ON ‘OTHER SOLUTIONS THAT MAY EXIST’: “I want to direct your attention to a paragraph on page four of the staff report … which states, ‘It is important to recognize that the groundwater pumping solution considered in the Cleath Harris Report is just one potential scenario, that other solutions may also exist, and that the ISJ parties have not agreed to a specific plan at this time. The next step in the ISJ process is the development of a basin management plan which will formalize the specific plan to balance the basin.’ Now, aren’t we entitled to find out what these other plans are? Now you may think, since my qualifications is I’m an inactive member of the State Bar, that I’m a nitpicker about this, but I’ve sat here and listened to a whole procession of things—‘shovel ready,’ we forgot about that, didn’t we? ‘There’s money on its way.’ A matter of fact, I think it was at the last meeting we heard it that was bankable because it had been put into some bill or other, which is dreaming of the worst kind. And then we come along with this (Cleath Harris Report). What’s going on here? And this report, by the way, costs the County almost $100,000. … Really, isn’t it time, particularly since despite the allegations at the beginning of this project that the wastewater project was not about water, we are discovering time and time again that it is about water. Don’t you as supervisors want to have a staff that when it says ‘other solutions may exist’ are going to tell you what those other solutions are? So at least you can have an informed judgment as to what you’re going to vote for?”

JULIE TACKER ON RISKS OF DRINKING BLENDED WATER: “(District Engineer) Mr. Miller’s presentation (on seawater intrusion) shifts reliance to the upper aquifer and its safe yield, largely depending on a blending of good lower aquifer water with bad upper aquifer water for supply to the people that live in Los Osos and drink water from purveyors. The definition of safe yield relates to quality and quantity. In 2006 … Cleath & Associates was hired to do a characterization study of the constituents in that upper aquifer. Let me read one sentence from the conclusion: ‘Use of the upper aquifer for a community drinking water supply is not without potential risks based on the documented wastewater influent.’ What that means is that medications, including hormones, solvents from gas stations and dry cleaning facilities, detergents, these are endocrine disrupting constituents that are pollutants that can’t be blended away. I would like a little more information about the LOCSD’s blending station. It was years in development. It was constructed some 10 months ago and is still not on line. ... We’re going to be drinking wastewater in Los Osos. This was not analyzed in your EIR and I believe you have CEQA implications.”

ALON PERLMAN ON EXPERTS AND AQUIFERS: “I’m not a hydrogeologist, but I did have a career in applied science, with the production and interpretation of complex interdisciplinary documents, and during that time we had a tongue-in-check (line). There’s something called ‘The Journal of Irreproducible Results’ in that they identified as an expert as anybody who has made three correct, successive predictions. In other words, you don’t have to be a doctorate, you just have to be right. … You have to accept responsibility. Whoever takes on the Los Osos Wastewater Project takes on responsibility for the aquifer, and it’s very clear that since conditions that you cannot ignore was made by the Coastal Commission, the condition to have changed the project to supply tertiary water. Once this tertiary water is available, the County has magically transformed itself, not into a wastewater project implementer, but into a basin management implementer. Embrace your role as the stewards of the aquifer.”

— Compiled by Ed Ochs