Coastal Tells Tapia to Stay Out of Malibu Creek

• Commission Votes 6-4 Against Las Virgenes Proposal to Put Treated Effluent in Ponds

BY HANS LAETZ

Concerns about adding additional water to overburdened Malibu Lagoon were voiced last week by the California Coastal Commission, when it rejected a request from operators of the Tapia Wastewater Treatment Plant to build a series of disposal ponds on the banks of Malibu Creek upstream of the coast.

Meeting in San Francisco on Aug. 8, the commission voted 6-4 against a proposal from the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District to reconstruct ponds covering 2.5 acres adjacent to the creekbed.

“Because of the nature of the sandy soils there, these ponds would be connected to the stream,” said commissioner Sara Wan, a Malibu resident, voicing worries that adding water to the Malibu Creek watershed would increase groundwater levels in Malibu Lagoon. “There is a reason why the regional water board has prohibited discharge [into the creek] during the dry season.”

The district had hoped to use the ponds to hold treated effluent at times throughout the year at varying intervals, let it evaporate and then seep into the ground. The Tapia plant treats 9.5 million gallons of sewage every day from five cities along U.S. 101 from Westlake Village to Calabasas, and during the winter rainy season, reclaimed water that is described as nearly clean enough to drink is dumped into the creek.

But during dry summer months, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board does not allow Tapia to put its so-called clean water into the creek. Although the district sells most of the cleansed water for agriculture and park use in the Conejo Valley and Calabasas areas, it has too much clean water on its hands during spring and fall, when recycled-water demand is low.

The seepage pits would have formed a wildlife sanctuary and been open to the public for birdwatching. But they would have been located within 10 feet of the creek, and would have fed the underground plume of water that flows down Malibu Canyon into central Malibu, raising groundwater levels and causing Malibu Lagoon to breach during summer months, polluting beaches.

Sarah Abramson, a scientist at Heal The Bay, testified that her group and Santa Monica Baykeeper are both opposed to the seepage ponds. “We view these as simply an attempt to sidestep the prohibition against dry-weather discharge into the creek,” she said.

She noted that the federal government has set a zero level for dissolved nutrients to be discharged into the creek, and charged that Tapia’s owners have been violating that limit for five years.

“Their discharge causes additional breaching of the lagoon at Surfrider Beach,” she said, “and as a resident of Malibu and a surfer at that beach, I am particularly disturbed by that.

“Tapia has neither earned the right nor demonstrated the need to discharge to these proposed ponds,” she said.

Malibuite Connor Everts blames a massive die-off of an endangered fish species in the creek last year on too much water flowing into the creek and lagoon from Tapia. “Two hundred of the remaining steelhead trout turned yellow and died last year as a result of the nutrients in that creek,” he said.

“To put further nutrients in the form of new water in that creek would exacerbate the problems that we have had,” Everts told the commission.

Tapia’s operators had said a new $60 million upgrade being built at Tapia now will remove nitrogen and phosphorous to a level below drinking water regulations.

The ponds would be built where similar ponds existed before floods in 1983 washed them out, just above the Malibu Canyon Road bridge over the creek.

Commissioners said they might approve seepage ponds if Tapia moved them further away from the creek. But some commissioners said the surplus water should be sold to farmers and recreational interests in the Oxnard area.

In other Malibu-related action, the Coastal Commission unanimously approved the State Parks Department’s plan to rehabilitate the old Rodeo Grounds housing area in Topanga State Park, that is located northwest of the Pacific Coast Highway intersection with Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

Some 26,000 tons of material will be excavated from a berm along the creek, which will be restored to its natural condition.