Morro Bay - Cayucos Wastewater Treatment Plant Milestones

by Jack McCurdy

Synopsis: The planned new Morro Bay-Cayucos wastewater treatment plant will reach two major milestones in October when the Environnmental Impact Report on the project will be discussed publicly and details of the hotly-debated PERC Water alternative design for the plant will be revealed for the first time. 

Two milestones on the road to building a new Morro Bay-Cayucos wastewater treatment plant will be reached this month when PERC Water's hotly-debated, detailed alternative design will be unveiled, and the draft Environmental Impact Report on the project will be discusssed publicly for the first time.

On Monday, October 4, the Morro Bay City Planning Commission will take the first step in the review of the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and receive public comment.  It will be the first opportunity for Morro Bay residents to weigh in on the specifics of the proposed design of the new plant.

The Commission and the City Council are responsible for reviewing and approving the EIR. 

The EIR is required by the California Environmental Quality Act for all such capital projects to provide the public and agency boards with information about potentially significant effects on the local and regional environments, to identify mitigation measures to minimize any significant effects and to consider reasonable project alternatives. 

Alternatives is where PERC Water comes in. The EIR was conducted on the basis of the current new plant design by MWH, the design contractor. City staff calls the MWH design traditional, and those who have supported and won consideration of PERC Water as an alternative see it as much more technologically-advanced. And potentially less expensive by about 30% than MWH's proposal.

The EIR, which consists of an independent review of the project and an evaluation of it compared to state requirements, can be accessed and read at CEQA Post, and the executive summary is the fifth chapter down on the documents page. The alternatives chapter is numbered 6-0 and is the last one before report preparers, acronyms and indices are listed.

But the PERC Water alternative apparently was not considered by the EIR because it was only in June that the Joint Powers Agreement (JPA) board, composed of Morro Bay City Council and Cayucos Sanitary District board members, who jointly own and operate the plant, agreed to consider PERC Water as an alternative contractor. But the contract for the EIR was approved long before that. 

All of which raise the question: will PERC Water be evaluated as one of the alternatives? And if so, when? If it isn't included as an alternative, then calls for the EIR to be revised can be expected. 

Then on Thursday, October 14, PERC Water is scheduled to present to the JPA board its much-discussed custom design review (CDR) of how it would design, build and operate—and possibly even finance—the plant, now located on the shores of Estero Bay in Morro Bay. The general concept, as described by Steve Owen, vice-president of PERC Water, before a community group last March, has been a topic of debate since then. But the October 14 meeting will be the first where details will be divulged, including the cost along with MWH's estimated cost.  

Owen has indicated that his company could build a new plant for approximately $20 million, about $11 million less than the MWH estimate. The way Owen has described PERC Water's concept, it would have many more desirable features, among them, the ability to produce pure recycled water that could be used for outdoor irrigation and on farms east on Highway 41 and Highway 1. Of course, piping would have to be installed to carry the water there, and the cost of that has not yet been estimated. 

And that's where location of the plant comes in. Whether the EIR addresses the alternative locations of the new plant is not yet known.

So for the first time on October 14, the board and residents will get a detailed picture of what PERC Water has to offer.

At the June JPA meeting where PERC Water was initially accepted as a possible alternative, the board also approved a plan to conduct a "peer review" comparing PERC Water with MWH. But no contract has been awarded for that work, although Kitchell CEM was identified as the likely contractor at that meeting. The status of that review is unclear.

The EIR was released on September 20, and the public has 45 days from then to file comments on it, ending on November 4.

Comments, the city says, should be sent to: Rob Livick, city public services director, at 955 Shasta Ave., Morro Bay, CA 93442, by fax to 805-772-6268 or by email to rlivick@morro-bay.ca.us.

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