Posted on 01/29/2009 9:49:34 PM PST by Hetty_Fauxvert
Stunned that several hundred homeowners turned out for a public hearing that had to be canceled because of overcrowding, state water officials said Wednesday they will reschedule the session and probably extend the deadline for comments.
Sonoma County fire inspectors told hearing officers for the State Water Resources Control Board to call off Tuesday night’s meeting when the 400-seat Harry Merlo theater at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts swelled beyond capacity. People filled the aisles, crowded the lobby and backed up traffic on Highway 101 and Old Redwood Highway.
“We are disappointed that the authorities shut us down, but they were watching out for our safety,” said William L. Rukeyser, the board’s communications director. “Those who showed up were disappointed, too.”
The hearing in Sonoma County on septic system regulations was supposed to be the next to last meeting in advance of a Feb. 9 deadline for public comment. The new rules could affect the estimated 45,000 property owners in the county who use septic tanks, instead of municipal sewer systems, to treat human waste.
“There is a comment deadline, which will likely be extended, depending upon how it works out with the meeting being rescheduled,” Rukeyser said.
The time and place for the new hearing has not been determined.
Cancellation of the session infuriated many of those who showed up to express their concerns about the cost to homeowners of the proposed regulations.
“Boy, they really blew their public relations on Tuesday night. There were rabidly angry people there,” said Gloria Ball, an organizer of the Sonoma County Land Rights Coalition. “Anything that has to do with our land rights is a big thing.”
The regulations would require anyone with a septic tank to have the system inspected every five years at a cost of $325. Anyone with a well would incur an additional $325 cost for the five-year inspection.
The major impact would be the required upgrade of any system that does not meet pollution standards. The average cost would be $45,000, according to the board.
The coalition was one of several organizations that called on members to appear at the hearing. Member alerts were also issued by the North Bay Realtors Association, the North Coast Builders Exchange and the Sonoma County Farm Bureau. Those same groups were instrumental in galvanizing opposition to proposals for water well monitoring and riparian setbacks during the county General Plan hearings in 2007.
The new septic rules are a major feature of legislation adopted in 2000 that aims to clean up leaky septic tanks by requiring property owners to fix their systems. Water officials said they are taking a proactive approach to septic contamination so they do not have to react to problems that already have caused environmental damage.
Over the past couple of months, the board has held hearings as part of the draft environmental review process at six venues, including Riverside, Susanville, Malibu and Fresno. Only the Fresno hearing attracted an over-capacity crowd and it lasted five hours, until midnight, Rukeyser said.
“All the rest went off without a hitch,” Rukeyser said. “Only Santa Rosa stands out.”
Ball said her organization and others were unaware of the proposed septic rules until reading about them in The Press Democrat last Wednesday.
“We were the ones that helped fan the fire with sending out e-mails and doing phone calling."
"The regulations would require anyone with a septic tank to have the system inspected every five years at a cost of $325. Anyone with a well would incur an additional $325 cost for the five-year inspection.
"The major impact would be the required upgrade of any system that does not meet pollution standards. The average cost would be $45,000, according to the board."
Forty-five thousand dollars!! I am so mad I am spitting tacks. If you are a fellow Californian with a septic system, well, or both -- or just a fellow Freeper who is as incensed about this as I am -- I hope you will immediately inundate the State Water Resources Control Board with your carefully expressed opinions (links to follow below). Our local rag, the Press Democrat, has had several short articles on the new septic and well rules coming our way, but none of the articles spelled out what they really had in mind. I think the Water Resources people have been deliberately keeping this under the radar. As I see it, this constitutes a taking of property. If the new rules put such a high price on fixing up your septic system to meet their standards that you can't afford to keep your property, that is a taking. And I have heard by the grapevine, though I haven't seen it in print, that they might not allow you to sell your property UNLESS the new standards have been met -- which means you must either fork over the money for the new system (probably a new mound system, hence the $45K) or, I guess, just abandon ownership.
This is completely outrageous. Please, please spread this information far and wide. This will be a huge burden for a lot of country people who simply don't have that kind of money. Please call your local talk show stations and get them to look into it, email Rush, email your friends, do whatever you can think of to get the word out before February 9, which at the moment is the end of the comment period. And email, phone and snail mail the State Water Resources Control Board directly! Here's the info for that (from their website at http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/septic_tanks/docs/ab885/deir_interested_parties_inclosures.pdf):
"Comments on the proposed regulations, proposed waiver, and DEIR must be received or postmarked on or before February 9, 2009. Please submit comments regarding these documents to AB885@waterboards.ca.gov or to the address below:
State Water Resources Control Board
Division of Water Quality
Attn: Todd Thompson, P.E.
1001 I St., 15th Floor, P.O.Box 2231
Sacramento, CA 95812
"If you have any questions, please contact Mr. Todd Thompson (primary) at (916) 341-5518 or tthompson@waterboards.ca.gov ."
More information on AB885 at http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/septic_tanks/
Please, do whatever you can! This is truly outrageous.
45K?
I just had a brand new one installed for 14K total. that included the tanks, house hookup, leach field, mound, engineering study. The whole shebang on a 2 acre property.
...looks like proponents of First Settler Syndrome are about to get hurt by the same policies that they’ve helped to push against new owner-builders.
Similar regulations in Massachusetts since 1995:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060305003633/http://www.ago.state.ma.us/filelibrary/title5.pdf
It only costs me $2K (including permit) to build a state-of-the-art system for larger properties. Hard-working people who wade through the bureaucratic builders’ rackets can learn a lot.
You got a good price! Or maybe they are just more expensive here in Sonoma County. I was talking to a septic expert up at county headquarters just yesterday (about a matter unrelated to this) and he guesstimated a mound system in this area to come in around $30K.
In any case, $14K is still outrageous, and far beyond the means of many country dwellers.
I don’t know why sane people would still want to live in California?
In a purely libertarian sense, if your septic tank is in poor condition and is polluting other people’s well water, it would cost you a boatload more than $45k.
That said, they should never cancel a public meeting just because the people show up! They should add more chairs, microphones and speakers in the parking lot. It is the arrogance of bureaucracy to turn away people from their right to redress grievances.
Of course the state should not mandate 3rd party inspections, nor the price of such inspection. And knowing how this state operates, they would make septic tank standards a moving target. A tank that is fine today would become “not fine” by way of new regulations or simply over time. This state is so out of whack I don’t know what to make of it anymore. It is practically a welfare state all of its own, where more than 20% of the population either work for the government or subsist on it via other means. That makes a voting block that cannot be broken. I cannot see a Reagan type leader rising in this state again. I hope I am wrong.
“Similar regulations in Massachusetts since 1995”
Yup, and the price then, as I recall was a ‘paltry’ $20k ~ $25k.
(crapped up some property sales too, as I recall)
I’d wager a lot of the cost is permits, licenses, etc. The installer probably needs a permit and license, too... thus reducing the supply of installers and raising the price. And I’d bet that the tanks and all connecting parts need to be approved by the state.
Los Angeles county runs a huge racket on water heaters. First they need to be special low emission heaters that cost 35% more than regular heaters. Then they need to be inspected and permitted, even when replaced. I found a small segment in the code that stated when replacing a tank with a same size or smaller tank no permit is needed but they will try to get you anyway. The inspector is supposed to want to see things like a grounding wire (for a gas heater!), an overflow tanks (separate from the pressure valve), new piping. It’s a total scam. Most of the time the inspector doesn’t show but a “professional installer” will definitely try to run the racket on you.
Permits and so forth are sky-high here. I was up at the county yesterday trying to find out if we had a Type II or Type III septic system (which would determine the size of the addition to our house that we’d like to build). The very nice septic specialist informed me that to bump us up to a Type II (which would allow us to make a larger addition), we’d need to get a pre-perk done on our land by a qualified inspector, who would then draw up a plan to expand our leach field at some nebulous future time, SHOULD our present system ever fail. (Which it shows zero signs of doing.) All this at a cost of $1K or so from the inspector and IIRC, a permit cost of $432 from the County.
I mean, WTF? Why does the County get $432? For what? For some clerk to enter the info into their database (say, 15 minutes of work) and an inspector to say yup, that qualifies, here’s your permit (another 15 minutes). Good gravy. Outrageous!
They may require more processing of the waste that costs more, who knows.
And can someone explain what difference it makes if the tank leaks underground? The excess water goes into leach lines that “leak” over a wide area as it is...
There's $100k without building the actual house...
Fire sprinklers for a house? A single family residence?
Move out of state. We moved from California back in ‘69, and except for the great weather in Laguna Beach down to San Clemente, we don’t miss that cesspool.
Anyway, during my conversation with said supervisor, he informed me that there was talk about 20 years ago to do just that. But nothing came of it. Its time now. Butte, Tehema, Shasta, Skisiyou, Plumas. That's enough of a state and everything we need. Maybe take Del Norte and Mendencino so we can have coastal access. If Yuba county asks nicely, maybe we would take them too.
Public Official Response: Well, simply sell your property to pay for the cost of the new septic system. After al, people all over the country are forced to sell inherited property to pay their taxes. We are simply extending this principle to our septic systems.
Yes.
We live in the country for the most part. It isn’t a “cesspool”.
My family is here and my business is here.
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