The plant will replace the use of aging septic tanks at the mobile home park. With an already operating treatment plant at Ramirez Creek, it is hoped that water quality will improve at Paradise Cove Beach.
By Hans Laetz/ Special to The Malibu Times
A sophisticated new sewage treatment plant will be treating Paradise Cove’s sewage by the end of summer, replacing septic tanks that are in some cases 35 years old. The completion of the sewage plant will pave the way for tenants to get their first rent hike in at least seven years. Mobile home park owners say they hope that the plant will reduce any likelihood of pollution from possible failing septic tanks.
In addition, Paradise Cove land and cafe owners and the Santa Monica Baykeeper say they are confident a small water treatment plant treating Ramirez Creek runoff will put a stop to occasional failing grades for the ocean at that popular beach. Paradise Cove beach was listed as one of the state’s top ten beach bummers by the environmental organization, Heal the Bay, this year.
Just up the hill, workmen are installing a new pocket sewage treatment plant for the mobile home park, but will miss the Aug. 1 deadline set five years ago, when the city of Malibu and the Kissel Co. agreed that no rent increases be collected until the park’s substandard septic system was replaced.
Once the sewage plant is operating, the park will start phasing in the rent increase over the next seven years, said Steven Dahlberg, who manages Paradise Cove for its owners, the Kissel Co.
Depending on how long tenants have rented the land beneath their homes, the rent will go up from 5 percent to 50 percent over the five-year period, Dahlberg said. Average monthly rent for the 257 spaces is $940, he said.
That rent may be considered low, Dahlberg said, noting that mobile homes sometimes sell for more than $1 million “for the right to rent the land below.”
He said the sewage collection system, pumps and treatment center will cost more than $2.5 million. “It’s a very sophisticated system,” he said.
Effluent from the park will soon be pumped uphill to a series of 10 filtration pods in the park’s maintenance yard off Pacific Coast Highway, ending the use of septic tanks at the park.
The pods use textiles to filter out solid material. Ultraviolet lights and ozone bubbles will treat liquid waste, and that purified water will eventually be recycled for landscape use at the park.
“It’s something we just want to do, because it is environmentally and financially the responsible thing to do, to recycle water,” Dahlberg said.
The septic tanks will be retired and new state-of-the-art sewage system will be running by Sept. 1, Dahlberg said, putting an end to the sometimes acrimonious negotiations over rent increases, sewage disposal and beach pollution at Paradise Cove.
As for the Ramirez Creek plant, Santa Monica Baykeeper, a volunteer group that works to protect the bay and adjacent waters, has partnered with the mobile home park owners and Bob Morris’ Paradise Cove Beach Cafe in renting a high-tech ultraviolet and ozone water purification system for the creek, which drains Ramirez Canyon and empties into the Pacific Ocean next to the Paradise Cove Pier.
Baykeeper’s Beachkeeper Program Director Angie Bera said the treatment plant removes nearly all the biological contaminants from the creek water it treats.
“Now that water flowing out of the pipe is clean,” she said.
Record-breaking rains last year have caused Ramirez Creek to flow heavier than normal this spring and summer, sending bacteria-laden untreated water into the ocean at the exact location that beach report card readings are taken, Dahlberg said.
“Ramirez Canyon is a good-sized watershed, there are a lot of horse stables and a lot of residential septic systems that are too close to the creek,” he said.
Pollution levels in the creek upstream of the treatment plant can be thousands of times greater than allowed by clean water regulations, Dahlberg said. This spring’s bad beach report cards were caused by surfacing groundwater from heavy winter rains, more water than the treatment center could handle.
Those flows have diminished, and nearly all the creek discharge is now being cleansed. Bera said Baykeeper takes weekly pollution readings at seven locations in Ramirez Creek, and Dahlberg posts the results on a bulletin board at the treatment center, just north of the Paradise Cove Beach Cafe.
Testing shows dirty water coming down the canyon, clean water coming out of the new plant, and then increasing pollution as the treated water crosses the sand and enters the ocean next to the pier. Excrement from seagulls and other birds cause some of that pollution, Bera said.
“We think that another phenomena is happening here, that the sediments in the mud and sand are adding significant bacteria back into the clean water,” she said.
Dahlberg said ocean bacterial levels “are constantly clean” at the lifeguard station just west of the beach cafe, while readings at the creek’s mouth east of the beach cafe sometimes are not good due to contaminated creek water.
The treatment plant’s $2,500 monthly rental and operating costs are paid for by the Kissel Co. and the adjacent beach cafe, which approached Baykeeper to come up with a way to end persistent pollution from urban runoff and horse corrals up the canyon, Bera and Dahlberg said.
“I admire the fact that they came forth and paid for this out of their own pockets,” Bera said. “The best thing is that we’ve learned so much with this project that we can apply at dirty creeks up and down the Santa Monica Bay coast.”