Let's Clear Up the Mystery of Morro Bay

By Andrew Christie

As we go to press (This piece was submitted mid-October), Morro Bay City Attorney Rob Schultz and City Manager Andrea Leuker have not been dismissed from their positions. The image of a city up in arms against the city council majority contemplating thisaction has been spread across multiple front pages. A notice of intent to circulate a recall petition against Mayor Jamie Irons has been filed by the mayor's political opponents.

Sudden self-made legal scholars have proclaimed their right to know the details of a confidential personnel matter. The Tribune has threatened to hurl a dreaded brickbat if it doesn't get some answers soon on exactly whyMayor Irons is seeking the termination of the City's senior staff.

The cry has resounded throughout the city — Why is this happening? As the Morro Bay City Council doesn't confide in us any more than it informs anybody else about the details of personnel matters, we can't definitivelyanswer that question. But we have been paying attention for the last few years.

We suspect it is pertinent to note that Mr. Schultz and Ms. Leuker oversaw the total botch of version 1.0 of the attempt to replace the Morro Bay/ Cayucos wastewater treatment plant, the most expensive public works project inthe history of either community. Throughout that years-long debacle, the Sierra Club, Surfrider, the SLO Coast Journal, Morro Bay Planning Commission, and the staff of the California Coastal Commission, along withhundreds of local residents in dozens of public meetings, told the city council and Cayucos Sanitary District they were going the wrong way: The project's Environmental Impact Report was defective; the project as designedcontained multiple violations of the city's Local Coastal Plan and the California Coastal Act; failing to include the recycling of treated wastewater was a mistake, etc. Most fundamentally: this is no longer the 1950s and theCity would never get a permit to put a new sewer plant on a beach.

Two consecutive city councils ignored these warnings because city staff assured them that everything would be okay. Staff continued to make those assurances even after the Coastal Commission found that appeals of theproject raised substantial issues of conformity with the Coastal Act and put the City on notice that the project was highly unlikely to receive a Coastal Development Permit.

The voters saw what was coming, and in June 2012 voted out every city council incumbent on the ballot who had gone along with the project.

With every light on the board flashing red, and all the changes in hand that the Coastal Commission had explicitly told them needed to be made in order to create a valid project, senior staff instead led the City over the cliff, taking a virtually unchanged project to the January 2013 Coastal Commission permit hearing.

The Coastal Commission staff report pronouncing the project deadon arrival noted "the practical reality of where the Applicant finds itself at this juncture... because they pursued a project in the existing locationnotwithstanding the issues associated with it that have been highlighted for many years, including prominently that alternative siting was necessary." The more than $2 million cost of the design work, Environmental ImpactReport, consultants and lobbyist went down the drain.

The question that mystified residents of Morro Bay should be asking themselves now is: "What would my employer do if I was responsible for an outcome like that?"

On October 7, 2010, PERC Water, representing the only potential alternative design that had been allowed into the staff-preferred project, told the city manager that due to "the lack of cooperation of City staff . . . we will nolonger continue our efforts on the wastewater project." The previous April, a hapless Mayor Janice Peters defended the city council's decision to go along with staff's preferred project: "We can't make decisions as informedand wise as the people we pay to give us advice."

The current city council – having been given a very expensive gift of hindsight and hard experience — does not seem inclined to agree with that philosophy. Good for them. As we noted in our March 2013 issue of the SantaLucian, after the Coastal Commission's inevitable denial of the Morro Bay/Cayucos sewer project permit: "It is now the job of the current city council to clean up the mess left by the previous two."

Morro Bay is now attempting to do a wastewater treatment project the right way. The people the City depends on to get it done probably should not include those who for years were hell-bent on doing it the wrong way.