This is a David and Goliath story in which the citizens of Los Osos/Baywood Park are David, confronting county, state, and federal agencies as Goliath. The battle revolves around a wastewater treatment plant, something an outsider might not consider particularly exciting. In a larger sense, however, it is a revolt of local citizens against pressures that have turned many coastal towns into high-priced enclaves for the wealthy.

Los Osos/Baywood Park is certainly not wealthy. The 1990 Census showed that almost one-third of the 15,000 residents lived in households with “low” or “very low” incomes. It's not poor, exactly, either, for it is surrounded by natural beauty, which—along with affordable housing prices—has attracted retired people, university students, and assorted free spirits who forgo monetary gains so they can have time to do what they wish in a place they appreciate.

Snuggled on the southern shore of Morro Bay, three miles from the city of Morro Bay and a pleasant 20-minute drive from San Luis Obispo, this unincorporated community is easy to love. It offers tranquillity, great bay views, and ample access to hiking, fishing, and other recreation. The main street, Los Osos Valley Road, leads toward Montana de Oro State Park just above town. You can stand there on high seacliffs, watching pelicans and whales, or walk on blufftop meadows carpeted with yellow mustard in spring. It seems almost miraculous that with all this, the community has maintained its modest character for so long.

One explanation is the moratorium on water hookups imposed by the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board in 1988 after local septic tanks were found to be, at least in part, a cause of nitrate pollution in shellfish in Morro Bay. San Luis Obispo County struggled with the problem for years and prepared to build a wastewater treatment plant. The design was for a sequencing batch reactor system, a type that had been popular years earlier, when the federal government paid 85 percent of project costs. Now, however, the cost burden would fall on property owners. Monthly charges per household were estimated at $100 or even higher.

It was not hard to imagine what this would mean to Los Osos. Homeowners who were just making ends meet would be forced to sell, and landlords would have to raise rents, driving out tenants living on fixed incomes. Small businesses would shut down. “I'm a single mom with two teenagers,” said Debra Avila, whose grandfather started Carlock's Bakery in 1958 and who expects to take over when her parents retire. “I thought: No way I can do this. I was having nightmares of having to move.” Annie Mueller, former president of the Los Osos Chamber of Commerce put it this way: “The county plan addresses nitrates, but it would cost us our people.”

Local citizens had fought the County's plan from the beginning, arguing that its high costs would displace about one-third of the community. By 1997, they realized they had to do more than object. They pooled $17,000 of their own money and organized the Solutions Group, to seek out experts who might be able to help them. William J. Oswald, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and a pioneer in alternative wastewater treatment technologies, designed a project for them that would use solar energy and a system of engineered algae ponds to provide tertiary treatment. It promised to cost far less than the County’s secondary treatment plant and, in addition, to provide a park, open space, water recharge, and complete water recycling. Oswald’s plant is a modernized, state-of-the-art version of his Advanced Integrated Wastewater Pond System (AIWPS), originally constructed in 1966, which has been operating ever since in St. Helena, Napa County, and is still viewed as a model of engineering with nature.

The Solutions Group adopted a Community Plan, calling for the formation of a local Community Services District (CSD) that would build Oswald’s system. It was late in the game. The County had already conducted numerous technical studies and five environmental reviews. It had a $47 million low-interest construction loan commitment from the State Water Resources Board. It had all the needed permits except that of the Coastal Commission.

The Los Osos group defied the odds. On January 16, 1998, the Coastal Commission met in San Luis Obispo and heard the County's permit request. The meeting room was packed with Los Osos/Baywood Park citizens, who pleaded for a comparative analysis of their Community Plan and the County's proposal, and an opportunity to form a CSD. A few property owners stepped up for the County's proposal, pointing out that the water hookup moratorium had been in effect for ten years already, but the majority prevailed. The Commission asked the County do a comparative study. This, in effect, allowed time for a vote on the CSD. (See “Five Dollars a Flush,” Coast & Ocean, Spring 1998.)

On November 3, 1998, an unprecedented 76 percent of the Los Osos/Baywood electorate turned out, and 87 percent voted for a CSD, in effect creating a local government. On January 1, 1999, the new CSD assumed responsibility for the local water supply, fire and emergency services, stormwater response, lighting, septic tank maintenance, and building a treatment system. “It's such a relief that it will be affordable,” said Debra Avila. “I only hope it works.”

George Milanés, chief operating engineer for the St. Helena Water Resource Recovery and Treatment Plant, was invited to take over as utilities systems manager at the Los Osos CSD. He did not hesitate. “It was the obvious next thing for me,” he said over lunch recently in an outdoor cafe on the Los Osos waterfront. “That it happens to be on the coast was just icing on the cake.”

Milanés had received numerous awards for his work in St. Helena, where he had not only operated the treatment plant but also instituted a program that demonstrates reuse potential by means of live exhibits. On the plant's grounds he had planted gardens, a vineyard, olive trees, and hundreds of redwood trees. “These trees now have thick trunks and can be seen from a distance,” he said. He took countless schoolchildren and others on tours of the system. “In the last five years I was there, we had 1,300 visitors from 32 countries.”

But Milanés was ready for new and greater challenges. He and Oswald had been teaching short courses for the American Society of Civil Engineers, and had the opportunity to visit numerous types of facilities around the country. He was brimming with new ideas to try out, and Los Osos was fertile ground. “This project embraced all that Dr. Oswald and I had been doing for years,” he explained.

As now envisioned, the Los Osos project will create a Resource Park, built around five scientifically engineered ponds on 60 acres in the center of town, within view of the Bay, between Los Osos Valley Road, the public library, a residental area, and a mobile home park. Septic tanks will be retrofitted and connected with a modern collection system that will transport effluent to the ponds, where algae, sunlight, and filtration will purify wastewater to drinking water standards. Some of this clean water will be sold for landscape irrigation, the rest will be fed into gravity wells, thereby replenishing the groundwater supply. Some of the algae will be dried, and used as soil amendment. Milanés said the St. Helena plant produced no primary sludge in over 30 years of continuous operation (The County's plant would have produced one truckload a day.)

As Milanés was describing how trails and trees would surround the ponds, how schoolchildren would learn about the system and its function within the watershed, CSD vice president Pandora Nash-Karner, a prime mover in the Solutions Group, came by and picked up the story.

The State Water Board was reluctant to reassign the $47 million loan commitment it had made to the County to this little novice CSD. Other projects that seemed more likely to succeed could use the money. So “we went to Sacramento and told them we can do the job. I'm surprised they didn't laugh at us. We didn't even have business cards yet.” With 15 minutes to present its case, the CSD decided “to show them our project was not about pipes and pumps, it was about keeping people in their homes,” she said.

Rather than offer facts and figures, the CSD team presented a slide show to convey a sense of the place and community. They had images of the natural beauty of the surroundings, a downtown with many vacancies because businesses could not grow under the water hookup moratorium, and people—diverse young families and older people, concluding with Kim Smith, the Nash-Karners' elderly neighbor, holding a rose at the gate of her lace-curtained little house.

“She's almost 90, a retired teacher, blind and almost deaf,” Nash-Karner said. “She lives on $1,000 a month. A hundred dollars more would make her move. We formed the Solutions Group because she wasn't going to beat down the doors to prevent that. Someone else had to do it.”

Soon after, the Water Resources Board committed the $47 million to the Los Osos CSD.

The project's estimated cost is $55 million, compared to a 1998 estimate of $72 million for the first phase of the County's three-phase project. Monthly charges are expected to be considerably less than half that of the County's plan, and homeowners will not have to pay for hookup costs. “It must be affordable; we can't displace even one family,” said Nash-Karner.

None of this is a sure thing, of course, until studies now under way are completed and permits are granted. Navigating through regulatory mazes is a challenge. Some work was delayed five months by a wait for a permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to make borings at the site proposed for gravity wells. The permit was required because the site is habitat for the endangered shoulder-banded snail. To pay for the work now in progress, the CSD has been using transfers from its fire and water fund.

Sorrel Marks, sanitary engineering associate at the Regional Water Quality Board, said “it may turn out that [some of what the CSD now plans] may not be feasible.” However, she added, “I'm optimistic.”

The enthusiasm of the CSD and its supporters has proved infectious and generated support among staff in government agencies. With help from Congresswoman Lois Capps, the CSD team met with staff of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Sacramento, then trekked to Washington, D.C., to meet with national FWS staff to learn how to resolve endangered species and other issues related to the project, and to seek funding for some features of the Resource Park, such as trails.

The project manager is Montgomery Watson, a global firm. It was one of two firms to respond to the CSD's request for proposals, and showed an understanding of both the concept and the vision. “At first we were leery—concerned—that this giant firm would come into a tiny town with a bunch of amateur politicians,” said Nash-Karner. But she soon found Mark Ysusi, the project manager, “remarkable” in his commitment to the project and to seeing it through the regulatory maze. Ysusi has 30 years of experience in public works projects. Montgomery Watson is interested in George Oswald's patented AIWPS technology, and sees possibilities for its application elsewhere.

In March, the CSD called a town hall meeting—the first time the town was officially called together. “We presented the plan, with slide show and work done to date. Over 300 people came,” said Milanés. “The directors were surprised. They anticipated some opposition, but they got only kudos. I thought that was remarkable in itself. There were a few questions, but we had answers. The level of confidence went up a lot.”

With hopes of an end to the water hookup moratorium rising, real estate prices have also gone up. How this will affect the residents of Los Osos, especially small businesses and renters, remains to be seen.

LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

Milanés took this visitor out to the proposed Resource Park site, a brushy open space with a stormwater drain running into it. An egret flew up as he talked. “I see aquaculture, botanical gardens, a visitor center, trails, all around. I see a world-class institution. I don't think there is any limit to what the people here want this to be.” Already a fifth-grade teacher has approached him about turning his pupils into local experts on the Resource Park concept, so they can explain it to others. Milanés is delighted with the idea.

He has committed himself to five years, to see this project through. After that Los Osos may become his home base, although if opportunities arise to work with Oswald and take the resource park idea international, he may want to do that. When he first met Oswald in 1989 at the University of California, Berkeley, Oswald had just returned from a trip to Cuba; where he had seen lively interest in his system. Milanés was born in Cuba; he has relatives there he has not seen for decades. It's not a big stretch of his imagination to envision Cuba becoming a pioneer in Latin America in the use of natural treatment technologies like Oswald's system for sound and reliable water resource management.

He smiles as he considers new frontiers: Los Osos today, maybe Cuba tomorrow. But right now it's full speed ahead with Los Osos. In fact, he has to end the interview: there's a drainage committee meeting he must attend. This might sound boring to an outsider, but not to those who live here. Some people will probably come just to listen. Getting citizens to participate in the democratic process is not a problem in Los Osos/Baywood Park right now. They have the energy, confidence, and persistence that can make democracy work.

Rasa Gustaitis