A sewer plan at last, but action necessary
After more than three years in the making, the city of Los Altos has its sanitary sewer master plan before the city council and public. Now what?
Nothing until Nov. 29. That’s when the council is expected to give one final look at the plan before adopting it. Members postponed adoption Oct. 24 to allow residents an opportunity to examine the 300-page document and provide feedback.
Residents should pay close attention to this. When it goes into effect, they will be paying approximately $2.75 a month more every year until fiscal year 2023-2024 when monthly costs will rise from $21 now to $64.72. That’s a climb from the current $252 annually to more than $776.
What will they get in return? A much-needed overhaul of the nearly 50-year-old system. The master plan, put together by engineering consultants Brown and Caldwell of Walnut Creek, concluded that the city needs approximately $47 million in capital improvements, additional staffing for maintenance and better oversight of the system.
The conclusions, however professional, were drawn from a limited view of the city’s 130-mile system. Although Los Altos has a plan in place to run a video camera through the entire system every five years to check for blockages, the city had managed to document only 24 percent of the system since 1994. Of these 34 miles of pipes, Brown and Caldwell noted only 2 percent were in bad shape and 63 percent were in moderate condition. However, the consultants noted that incidences of blockages and overflows were significantly higher than similarly sized cities. Most of these issues have occurred within the last 10 years, as tree roots made their way into the aging system.
The fact that the city has only limited video documentation of its system, has carried on a mostly reactive maintenance program and even dipped into the sewer enterprise fund for other uses, speaks to its overall lack of attention to its sewers over the years. This has made little difference to the populace in general, but the February 2003 destruction of Dr. Tom Burns’ home by a massive sewage overflow underscores the potential dangers of a poorly working system.
The master plan, then, proves a step in the right direction toward addressing the old system with needed improvements and better maintenance practices. It’s now in the city’s - and residents’ - best interests to implement these recommendations despite the cost increases involved.
Sewer systems are easily ignored and taken for granted, but when they fail, the results can be disastrous. We don’t want to see what happened to Burns happen to anyone else.
