Rincon’s Wild Ride

The Santra Barbara Independent

By Hillary Hauser

November 16, 2006

Victory at Last for the South Coast Septic-to-Sewer Project

On September 19, 2006, the Carpinteria Sanitary District (CSD) board room was filled with surfers young and old listening to the district board discussion of the environmental documents supporting the South Coast Beach Communities Septic-to-Sewer project. When the board approved those documents - and, finally, the project itself - the room erupted in cheering and applause, but those of us from Heal the Ocean sat there stunned, not sure whether to clap, cheer, or fall over dead.

For more than eight years, we had been pushing and poking and prodding this project along. We had been through lawsuits and the death of a sanitary district manager. We had experienced one setback after another. Had we really arrived?

When built, the septic-to-sewer project will remove aging septic systems from about seven miles of coastline on the Santa Barbara County South Coast, including Rincon. It is an enormous project that has had enormous wipeouts, and which has its beginnings in the outcry of surfers.

Back in 1998, Clyde Beatty got the ball rolling by asking me, “What in the hell are you writing about me for? You should be writing about this!” The son of the famed lion and tiger tamer, who shapes his surfboards under the famous tiger logo here in Santa Barbara, waved a piece of paper in the air. It was a questionnaire from CURE (Clean Up Rincon Effluent), an organization formed by a trio of surfers: Wayne Babcock, Joel Smith, and Doug deFirmian. The questionnaire asked for reports of illnesses people might have gotten from swimming in the ocean. Beatty was livid. “I am fed up with surfers facing the possibility of getting hepatitis every time they go in the water!” he barked. Surfers were saying Rincon’s pollution was caused by the septic tanks of the homes there. They were old, shallow, mixing with groundwater, and leaking into Rincon Creek and the ocean, surfers said.

In August 1998, Heal the Ocean was formed out of public protest, and one of the first things we did was to tackle the problem of the Rincon septic systems. We organized an expensive DNA study of Rincon Creek and lagoon, and raised the money to pay for it ourselves. Santa Barbara County Environmental Health Services (EHS) chipped in $12,500 to pay for getting assay samples (fecal matter) to Dr. Mansour Samadpour at the University of Washington. EHS officials went out in fields all over Santa Barbara County to collect the excrement of everything from great blue herons and chickens to humans, horses, and raccoons, so that Samadpour could establish a DNA bank of local bacteria. The DNA matches overwhelmingly revealed the presence of human bacteria in the Rincon lagoon, which empties to the sea. The test sites further up the creek and on the other side of the freeway tested clean, which implicated the lagoon itself, where the houses are.

Meanwhile, former Assemblymember Hannah-Beth Jackson went down to Rincon to see what the hell was happening. Her daughter had been surfing there and came down with something terrible. During her next session in Sacramento, Jackson authored AB 885, a statewide law regulating the use of septic systems. (AB 885 is still going through the hearing process, and Heal the Ocean is involved in supporting it.) Jackson also grabbed $2 million in state money to apply to Santa Barbara County’s septic system problem areas. (Heal the Ocean has been working with EHS on how to spend this money, and we’re finally going to the Board of Supervisors with our mutually agreed-upon septic problem shopping list on December 5.)

Heal the Ocean raised $9,000 for the Rincon sewer engineering study, which was completed in June 1999. On July 4, 1999, Rincon homeowners unanimously voted to proceed with the next steps necessary to hook up their homes to sewer, at a cost of $2.9 million, including the cost of an Environmental Impact Report (EIR). In August 2000, 75 percent of Rincon homeowners voted to hook up to sewer, when only 51 percent had been required for the measure to pass.

Then five Rincon homeowners sued to stop the project because, by law, an EIR has to be conducted before the vote is taken. A Catch-22 emerged: such projects can’t be done without an EIR, yet there are no funds for an EIR until taxes or special assessments are levied on homes. But the litigants were entirely correct, and the Carpinteria Sanitary District (CSD) withdrew the project.

We all retreated and tried our best to recover from the shock of failure. Then CSD manager John Miko called with great news. “I’m going after a state grant for the EIR money!” he said. After about a year and a half of lobbying to get the necessary $425,000, the EIR work began in January 2003. Then suddenly, John Miko died, stricken with a rare, strange disease that took him quickly. We were horrified, stunned, and sad. The Rincon project was rudderless again.

Craig Murray then took over as CSD manager and, luckily for us, brought great enthusiasm for the Rincon project. By March 2004, the EIR was finished and the CSD certified it. Then the first of three lawsuits hit. And with the lawsuits came the next lovely surprise: CSD was not able to spend ratepayer money to annex new customers, so the district couldn’t defend itself.

Heal the Ocean agreed to establish a $100,000 indemnity fund to pay CSD’s legal expenses. We also brought Marco Gonzalez of Coast Law Group to the case. Marco had already seen Heal the Ocean through to victory in our battle for the upgrade of Goleta Sanitary District sewage treatment. The indemnity fund was eagerly financed by homeowners in the sewer project areas, as well as Heal the Ocean boardmembers and singer Jack Johnson. To raise additional funds, Glenn Hening and the Groundswell Society organized Rincon Clean Water Classic surf contests.

In February 2005, Santa Barbara Superior Court Judge Thomas Anderle threw out the opposition’s complaint as “unintelligible”; in May 2005, he ruled the revised lawsuit “unripe, because no sewer project had been approved by CSD.” That’s when Heal the Ocean began another fund ($60,000) to pay for additional environmental engineering work, because we were certain that when the project was approved, it would be attacked again. The improvements were made, which led to the CSD board hearing of September 19, 2006.

Now, instead of getting beat up in white water, Heal the Ocean finally got an approval that seemed real. It seemed we’d finally caught a wave that would get us somewhere. The opposition had 30 days to file a complaint. We held our breath. No complaint was filed.

Right now, the annexation and assessment district engineering is underway, paid for out of the $2 million in state money obtained by Hannah-Beth Jackson. These processes will determine each property owner’s share of the cost to build the sewer. The homeowners will finally be able to vote for the project as early as spring 2007. Meanwhile, Heal the Ocean is helping CSD get a state Clean Beaches Initiative grant, which could pay up to 25 percent of Rincon’s sewer construction costs - or $1 million of the projected $4 million total cost. The state granting agency considers the Rincon project “high priority,” because the ocean there consistently receives F’s in water quality.

But the days of impairment and bad grades will soon be over. The septic-to-sewer project is one of the best clean water victories in Santa Barbara, and we at Heal the Ocean are preparing to be out there in the water at Rincon, celebrating and catching wonderful, clean waves.

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