Water Agency to host town hall on Occidental wastewater woes

County officials and community members who have wrestled for years with Occidental’s wastewater woes will be back at it tonight, debating alternatives at a town hall meeting hosted by the Sonoma County Water Agency.

It will be the third community meeting within the past year aimed at finding wastewater treatment and recycling solutions that are affordable and palatable to the public, as well as compliant with strict state environmental rules.

But after more than a decade of moving forward on various proposals, then rejecting them because they were deemed too expensive, onerous or unpopular, there’s little prospect of a speedy resolution.

The clock is ticking on a deadline just more than three years in the future. At that point, the community will no longer be permitted to operate as it currently does - discharging treated wastewater into Dutch Bill Creek in the winter and storing it for irrigation by summer in a pond at the creek’s headwaters.

“It’s gonna be a struggle,” said Cordel Stillman, the water agency’s chief deputy engineer. “We are trying to move forward as expeditiously as we can. We have a pretty hard deadline.”

The Occidental County Sanitation District currently treats its sewage to what’s called a secondary treatment level. Between May 15 and Sept. 30, the treated sewage is stored in a pond on private property at the headwaters of Dutch Bill Creek and used to irrigate nearby pasture. Between Oct. 1 and May 14, small amounts are discharged into the creek.

But under existing permitting requirements and regulations contained in the state Russian River Basin Plan, the sanitation district is prohibited from discharging effluent into the river and its tributaries during summer, and can release only wastewater treated to the tertiary level into the creek during winter, officials said.

The North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board repeatedly has fined the county for noncompliance. It also has issued a cease and desist order setting January 2018 as the deadline for having alternative treatment and disposal options in place.

But because of the small size of the community, which has only about 100 ratepayers and the equivalent of 273 single-family dwellings, county officials are even more constrained by cost considerations than they usually would be. They are hoping grant funds may be available to help fund whatever solution is acceptable to stakeholders.

Occidental homeowners already pay $1,899 a year for wastewater service, even with the water agency subsidizing operational costs through its general fund.

“I think cost is going to be the biggest prohibiter,” west Sonoma County Supervisor Efren Carrillo said.

There may yet be a hero in this saga in the form of grape grower Steve Dutton, whose family-owned vineyard off Morelli Lane may turn out to be a suitable place for a reservoir to store highly treated wastewater for later use in irrigating 43 acres planted in chardonnay, pinot noir and old vine zinfandel grapes.

Dutton, who currently trucks water to the site, already was planning to build an irrigation pond when he learned of the water agency’s interest in finding a landowner willing to provide space for a storage reservoir and to use recycled wastewater for irrigation.

Talks are “very preliminary,” Dutton and Stillman said, but promising.

“The vineyard we have up there on Morelli Lane is very water scarce,” Dutton said. “We have two wells on the ranch that produce water for the vineyard at less than two gallons per minute each. … Any kind of stored water is a benefit for our agriculture there.”

“We can provide a solution to that,” Stillman said, “and not just a solution, a drought-proof solution.”

Preliminary cost estimates for a new modular treatment plant, storage and irrigation facilities are in the range of $3 million to $4.5 million, Stillman said, though no grant funding or loans can be sought until an environmental review is completed.

“We are very clear with the citizens of Occidental we don’t know where this money is going to come from yet, and that their rates will most likely climb,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out a way to not have that happen.”

The meeting runs from 6 to 8 p.m. in the back room of the Union Hotel, 3731 Main St. in Occidental.