Eastern County says it will begin filing Tuesday in court equipping the legal wrestling of land from the city of San Diego, land that Eastern County needs to build its own wastewater-to-drinking water recycling project.
The board of directors of the East County Advanced Water Project has threatened to use eminent domain – power governments can exercise to take real estate for its use – against the city of San Diego a few months ago. But it held back to allow negotiations on a new agreement between the two parties.
But those talks did not produce results quickly enough, says Steve Goble, an El Cajon adviser on the board of the East County Wastewater-to-Drinking Water Recycling Project.
Why this matters: In order for East County to build their project, they need a series of pumps in the East Mission Gorge, which belongs to the city of San Diego. But San Diego wants East County to build a new pipeline to re-route all of its wastewater by-product to a treatment plant in Point Loma, instead of dumping it into a regional wastewater system that San Diego shares with a number of other cities.
But now San Diego is delaying the forging of a new agreement between the two parties, Goble said.
“The longer they take to delay, the worse they make the problem of their fear of (the pipeline) not being ready,” Goble said.
Kyle Swanson, CEO of Padre Dam Municipal Water District, informed San Diego of the eminent domain registration in a July 5 letter. They want a court to grant the trio of governments ownership of pieces of San Diego’s East Mission Gorge real estate, where a number of key water pumps are located to build this fall.
This move is a big deal for the city if East County were to move forward without having these other agreements in place, said Jay Goldstone, interim Chief Operations Officer in the city of San Diego. This salt line is used to “protect the city’s water supply” because San Diego is concerned about anyone dumping wastewater into their system from a treatment process, the city does not control aka East County’s recycling project.
“We will most likely fight (eminent domain),” Goldstone said. “But that does not change our relationship or desire to reach agreements with them and end everything.”
We have imagined why sewage treatment plant is now such a valuable commodity that it is worth fighting in a story in May. By June, it appeared that negotiations were going well, with the exception of a group of 13 other cities and agencies (called Metro JPA) that share the San Diego wastewater system, fearing they would be asked to chip in. If they helped pay for this new pipeline, it would mean that there is a regional asset, and therefore everyone’s problem.
The Metro JPA sent two letters to the warring parties in early June, warning that they would be better off sitting at the negotiating table if asked to pay. The Metro JPA is already on the hook to help pay for the City of San Diego’s multi-billion Pure Water Wastewater Recycling project. And they do not want to pay a penny more.
“(Metro JPA) will only bear costs that provide a clear and direct benefit to (Metro JPA) in their interest rates,” the agency’s president and Lemon Grove Mayor Pro Tem Jerry Jones wrote on June 2.