The water reclamation facility must reduce its nutrient levels in treated wastewater that is released into Malibu Creek. The revised permit also contains tougher standards for discharging water into the creek during a storm event throughout the prohibition period of April 15 to Nov. 15.
By Sara Rosner / Special to The Malibu Times
The Los Angeles Region of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board voted unanimously in favor of implementing a revised permit for the Tapia Water Reclamation Facility in an Oct. 3 meeting in Simi Valley.
Under the revised permit, Tapia must lower nutrient levels in the treated water from 10 to 8 milligrams of nitrogen per liter and increase monitoring of treated water. The Tapia facility, which is owned by the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, must also adhere to stricter standards regarding the discharge of treated water into Malibu Creek.
Tapia serves 85,000 residents in Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Agoura Hills and Westlake Village and processes an average of 9.5 million gallons of wastewater everyday.
David Lippman, director of facilities for Tapia, said the revised permit was feasible and challenging.
“We believe that the permit they adopted unanimously is a workable permit. It’s going to be a difficult permit to comply with,” Lippman said.
In order to lower the level of nitrogen in the treated water, Tapia will have to add equipment to the secondary phase of the wastewater treatment. The current tertiary treatment at Tapia removes 86 percent of the nutrients from wastewater and the future equipment would remove an additional six percent.
Arlene Post, director of Resource Conservation for Tapia, said the construction of the $10 million improvements could take some time.
“Prior to even planning, the permitting and design phases could prove to be difficult,” Post said, adding that obtaining a building permit from the California Coastal Planning Commission could take up to a year. Tapia officials have until 2011 to reach the targeted amount of nitrogen per liter outlined in the revised permit.
Lippman voiced concerns over implementing the improvements in light of the Water Quality Control Board’s possible plans to tighten standards for Tapia’s Total Maximum Daily Loads. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Web site, a TMDL “is a calculation of the maximum amount of a pollutant that a body of water can receive and still meet water quality standards.”
Lippman said that although the EPA has already set certain minimums for TMDLs, a more stringent minimum set by the board could render the future improvements obsolete.
“The EPA has issued a TMDL for nutrients and that’s what this permit has incorporated,” Lippman said. “If that level changes, that facility would have to be demolished.”
Post agreed, saying, “If that occurred, $10 million dollars of public funding and investment would go down the drain.”
In addition to the cost of the facility improvements, Post said that the revised permit’s required increase in the monitoring of bacteria, nitrates and phosphorus in treated water would triple Tapia’s monitoring budget to $100,000 a year.
The revised permit also contains tougher standards for discharging water in a storm event during the prohibition period of April 15 to Nov. 15, which is a time when Tapia is banned from discharging water into Malibu Creek.
Under the former permit, Tapia was permitted to discharge water into Malibu Creek during a storm event of 0.1 inch or greater. Post said that Tapia had only discharged during the prohibition period 12 times since 1997.
The revised permit allows Tapia to discharge water into the creek in a storm event of 0.4 inch or greater during the prohibition period only if the facility has met several conditions, which include an exhaustion of available storage space, a significant reduction of recycled water demand, the maximum use of other discharge options and an existent breach of Malibu Lagoon. When a storm event is less than 0.4 inches, Tapia must garner the permission of the RWQC Board in addition to meeting the former conditions in order to discharge treated water into Malibu Creek.
“Anytime we have to discharge, we’re going to be under a microscope,” said Tapia biologist Randal Orton, LVMWD research conservation manager. “We really have to demonstrate that there’s nowhere else to go.”
When asked whether the facility could handle the requirements and conditions of the revised permits, Tapia Operations Manager Carlos Reyes said, “I think it’s going to be difficult, but it’s workable.”
Though the discharge of water into Malibu Creek has been a contentious issue with local surfers and environmentalists, Executive Director of Heal the Bay Mark Gold said the revised permit indicated progress.
“It’s an incremental process and this is an incremental step in that process,” Gold said. “There is reason for optimism but there is also a lot of work that still needs to be done.”
Jonathan Bishop, executive officer of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board said that the revised permit was passed for the benefit of people who swim, surf and play at Surfrider Beach.
“This permit reduces the opportunity for flow during the summer and the purpose of that is for folks’ health at Surfrider,” Bishop said.