Cayucos, Morro Bay Lurking Behind WWTP
Summary: The Morro Bay-Cayucos meeting on February 14 to discuss and supposedly to try to resolve differences over their planned wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) seems to best be described as "nothing happened." But that was then. What had taken place about the future of the WWTP a few days before the meeting will surprise a lot of people. It certainly surprised the Morro Bay City Council and its staff who had no idea what the Cayucos Sanitary District board was up to behind the Council's back. And now it's tit for tat.
Little did the Morro Bay City Council and city staff dream that the Cayucos Sanitary District board would be conniving behind the scenes to plan a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) of their own when Morro Bay and Cayucos met on February 14 to discuss a joint WWTP development as called for in their long-standing Joint Powers Agreement. But the Cayucos board was. And still is.
Here is the way it unfolded:
— The Cayucos Sanitary District (CSD) board met on February 21 and discussed an outline the board had authorized to consider for a single WWTP owned and operated alone by the CSD. The outline was clear: "This proposal is to provide professional engineering services to develop preliminary conceptual alternatives for the treatment and disposal of wastewater collected in the Cayucos Sanitary District’s collection system." Leaving out Morro Bay.
— The date on that outline (Proposal Wastewater Treatment Alternatives Development CSD Draft) is February 15 (one day after the JPA meeting on February 14).
— That also means the February 15 document prepared by Water Systems Consulting (WSC) of San Luis Obispo had to have been prepared well in advance of February 15 in order for it to be ready for the date CSD discussed it — and appropriated $20,000 to "buy" in — which was February 21.
— That means that preparation of the WSC plan had to have been started prior to the February 14 JPA meeting, if it was to be dated February 15.
The Disrict board met on February 21, a week after the Joint Powers Agreement (JPA) meeting on February 14, to discuss the idea of hiring WSC as a consultant to design a plant of their own. That means that Dylan Wade, whose name is at the bottom of the WSC report as P.E. (which means professional engineer), and who until recently was an engineer for the city of Morro Bay, might be chosen to oversee development of the new CSD plant if the project were to go forward. (Wade notoriously has trouble speaking or writing English — see the WSC plan above.)
At the CSD meeting on February 21, the CSD approved a contract not to exceed $20,000 for a study of their options if they did not go with Morro Bay and build a plant together. See where their thinking was?
The CSD also scheduled a "workshop" for Tuesday, March 5, where all CSD board members could discuss their ideas for a new plant owned and operated by CSD — or conceivably staying with Morro Bay as partners in building a joint WWTP. The meeting is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. but the location reportedly was not determined on February 21.
For years, there has been talk of the CSD board withdrawing from the Joint Powers Agreement (JPA) with Morro Bay, and now it has intensified after the California Coastal Commission denied a coastal development permit for "upgrading" the existing, old WWTP in Morro Bay on the shores of Estero Bay, which is exactly what the CSD board and the previous City Council majority, who were turned out of office last June 5, wanted. The Commission rejected the plant upgrade on January 10 after the new Council majority (Jamie Irons, Christine Johnson, and Noah Smukler) asked them to, which served to divide Morro Bay from the CSD. However, denial of the upgrade seemed inevitable after the Commission staff had written several reports condemning rebuilding of that old plant as a violation of the Coastal Act.
CSD board members talk about the upgrade being economical and serving the financial interests of residents. But Coastal Commission staff reports showed how the Righetti site east of the city limits on Highway 41 would be more economical. (Either one would have to be a high quality plant capable of generating maximum recycled water, so the upgrade could not and would not have any advantage in the kind of plant that the JPA could build under Coastal Act requirements.)
At the February 14th JPA meeting, both the Morro Bay Council and the CSD board seemed interested, if not eager, to cooperate in finding a joint plan for development that they both could support. (Slo Coast Journal) But discussions by the Council and the CD board members at that meeting were markedly unclear and uncertain, leaving members of the audience confused, most said.
At one point, CSD president Robert Enns suggested the CSD board and the Morro Bay Council each develop plans for designing and building a new WWTP and then come together and seek to reach agreement on those plans. Morro Bay mayor Jamie Irons agreed. But no motion was made to put the idea into action.
Also, CSD board member Michael Foster proposed that Enns and Irons each appoint one member from their groups to meet with the Regional Water Quality Control Board staff to determine how much longer the JPA would be allowed to delay start of construction of a new WWTP. Irons said, "It is imperative we move forward with a joint facility." There have been long delays in meeting the regional board's timelines in starting construction of the plant over at least the past three years. But Foster's proposal also did not generate a motion, so it also died.
"Lots of talk and no action," one member of the audience commented in frustration.
If the JPA doesn't get started soon on a plant, "they (the regional board) are going to put guns to our heads," CSD attorney Tim Carmel said. That almost certainly means financial penalties for the Morro Bay Council and the CSD board. Morro Bay and the CSD have been warned by knowledgeable residents for some time that delays in getting construction of a new WWTP started threatens to cost Morro Bay and the CSD money.
Carmel's warning was the most concrete and meaningful of a four-hour meeting of the JPA, otherwise dominated by unclear and pointless comments from the Morro Bay Council, the CSD board, and their staffs, which made no headway in reaching some kind of accord in jointly pursuing a new WWTP. Going into the meeting, there were some expectations that Morro Bay and Cayucos could come to agreement on plans for a new joint WWTP when they met after the Coastal Commission had acted and eliminated the upgrade as an issue that had been clouding the picture. in other words, could it be the site of a new plant? But the Coastal Commission settled that question — NO!
Once the Morro Bay staff and Council heard what the CSD was up to, which was just before the City Council's regular meeting on February 26, the staff started doing some counter-planning themselves. It is about Morro Bay building its own new plant.
Here is an outline of what Rob Livick, the city's public works director, presented to the Council and those in attendance: Schedule of Tasks
