Sewer Saga Update...

The letter I submitted to the Gazette this week was limited to 250 words. This is the longer unedited version...

Editor,

At the July 11th City Council meeting, staff was directed to set up a meeting with PERC to discuss their ability to save $20 million building our plant using their award winning sewer plant design.

PERC submitted a bid for $15 million in 2002 to build our plant and percolation ponds. They are familiar with our discharge requirements. Their plant is efficient and compact and could have been built on city property saving millions. Providing percolation facilities combined with an NPDES permit would eliminate $26 million of the costs for the questionable practice of using the effluent to irrigate the schools and parks.

Two council members and two members of our group were greatly anticipating this meeting. It is now six weeks later and the meeting has not occurred. Why not?

The City will tell you that this plant is being built to improve water quality, not for growth. The truth is this plant initially will be twice (1.8 MGD) the size we require right now (.9 MGD), with planned additions to make it an astonishingly 150% (2.4MGD) over our current needs. Developers should be paying for most of this new plant.

One of the comments made about PERC was that they build a lot of plants for developers. Yes, many cities require the developers to build the sewer plant to accommodate growth. Why isn’t Fillmore? Developer Impact Fees(DIF's) will generate only $13 million (WRP Proforma 6/7/07) for the cost of the plant over 20 years.

Why has this bloated boondoggle been allowed to continue? The Council has not been allowed to meet with any other companies that provide solutions. And worst of all, this “state of the art” - multimillion dollar plant won’t even treat our water enough to discharge into the river and get an NPDES permit like other cities have done.

In the correspondence between the City and PERC there was a blatant effort to sabotage the meeting and keep it from happening. This represents a breach in fiduciary responsibility to the citizens of Fillmore.


Learn more at www.fillmoreca.org