Sewer Stink

By Bruce Robinson

WHILE SANTA ROSA is routinely bashed for taking more than a decade to devise a workable solution to its need for more wastewater storage, neighboring Petaluma is being criticized for moving too fast in its bid to privatize that city’s aging sewage treatment system. “The facility we have now is old and is at capacity, so it needs to be upgraded,” says Assistant City Manager Warren Sammons of Petaluma’s sewage facilities. That assessment is one of the few undisputed points in a long-running debate over the future of the city’s wastewater.

Since 1979, Petaluma has been blazing a trail in the area of “privatizing” its sewer operations, having hired an outside company to run the aging plant for the past 16 years. Now the city is preparing to go several steps further, and is seeking bids from private companies to both build and operate a new sewer plant. If that process is consummated, Petaluma would become the first city in California to completely privatize its wastewater system. But not everyone is pleased by that prospect.

“We are the guinea pigs. There’s nothing else to judge it by,” worries David Keller, director of the Petaluma River Council, a local environmental organization. “There is only speculative information from the city and consultants, and even that is inconclusive.” Although Keller says he retains an open mind toward the touted consumer savings that are the primary rationale for privatization, he is deeply concerned that the process, so far, has not been accessible enough to the public.

An earlier attempt to secure a private wastewater contract was emphatically shot down in 1991 by the state’s Public Utilities Commission, which ruled that the contract then under consideration was “decidedly in favor of the privatizer at the expense of the public interest.” The PUC also chastised city staff for failing to involve the public in the process, noting that the planning sessions for the sewer contracts “were private, if not secret.”

At the same time, the Fair Political Practices Commission also blasted City Manager John Sharer and Mayor Patti Hilligoss for owning stock in multinational garbage conglomerate Waste Management Inc., the parent company of the firm to which the privatization contract was being steered. They have since divested themselves of the shares, but a Waste Management subsidiary remains a leading contender to win the contract.

Four and a half years later, the renewed process has been somewhat more accountable, but Keller says it is still tilted away from the best interests of Petaluma residents. The fundamental structure of the basic contract documents “holds tremendous risk for the vendor,” such as making the vendor solely responsible for delays, change orders, and even acts of God, he notes. “The only way vendors can bid on this and hope to stay solvent over 30 years is to bid high. At best, we’ll get the lowest of the high bids.”

That’s also a concern for Petaluma City Councilman Matt Maguire. “We may wind up with five bids that are just outrageous, because we’ve tried to put too much risk on the vendor,” he offers. Supporters of the plan say that criticism is unfounded.

“Nobody can do any more than speculate at this point,” counters Bill White, chairman of the City Council-appointed Citizens’ Wastewater Advisory Committee. He believes privatization “is going to mean lower rates to the users, the residents, and the businesses in the community,” and White says the committee endorsed the plan on that basis.

“What we’re saying is that we believe that to be the case,” the real estate developer continues. “Now is the time to go out with our [Request for Proposals] and get the prices back from the contractors and see if we’re right. If we’re not right, we’ll know it.”

DRAFT CONTRACTS for the future operation of the yet-to-be-built sewer plant are part of the complex Request for Proposals that has been submitted to a short list of five “pre-qualified” bidders that includes Envirotech Operating Systems (EOS), the Waste Management subsidiary that has held the contract to run the existing Petaluma sewage plant since 1979.

The costs of building a new sewer treatment plant for Petaluma and operating it for the next 30 years are estimated at more than $460 million, but for the five companies vying for the job, the stakes are even higher. Numerous other cities–many of them larger than Petaluma–are also considering privatization, which was authorized under a state law passed in 1985, so capturing the first such contract is seen as an important key toward securing additional municipal business.

And EOS and Waste Management may have the inside track. They were the city’s sole choice in the aborted 1991 agreement, and, according to Keller, rival bidders reportedly are concerned that “the selection process can be distorted or manipulated behind the scenes.” In the November 1992 issue of PWFinancing, a utility trade magazine, Dennis Dandeneau, director of project development for Wheelabrator Clean Water Systems of Hampton, N.H., which owns EOS, confidently predicted his firm would prevail in the pending bidding. “If the others want to take us on our own turf, come and get us,” Dandeneau said.

Keller fears that the city is overmatched as it tries to negotiate a half-billion-dollar contract with huge international corporations. “The vendors have the consultants and the lawyers and the high-powered staff, and the city has zippo. Guess who’s going to win,” he warns. That grim prospect is likely, “unless the regulatory aspects for ratepayers are strengthened greatly, and unless the contract is cleaned up and put into standard terms, which it is not now.”

Should Petaluma wind up with a disadvantageous contract, it will be the city’s ratepayers who will bear the burden, critics say. But judging the fiscal outcome may prove difficult. “There’s no way to judge whether the ratepayers are being overcharged, and that’s because of the way the [proposed] contract is structured,” Keller complains.

“The contract and rate setting is based on the vendor providing a unit of service, which is changed annually based on various inflation factors,” he continues. “The problem is, there is no way of knowing if those charges accurately reflect the costs to the utility.” Adding to his fears is the fact that the 1985 state law that allows such privatization of public services also exempts them from review by the state PUC once the new system is in place.

As a means of addressing these concerns, Councilman Maguire and others have proposed that Petaluma create its own municipal rate-setting board. “I think we need to have an independent body, accountable to the ratepayers,” he argues, “one that is elected rather than appointed.”

Other council members are determined that authority should remain in their hands. “I don’t think it’s right for the council to give that away,” sniffs Mayor Patti Hilligoss. “That will be taken care of in the contract, that we will have the right to raise or lower rates.”

Maguire’s concept officially got the cold shoulder from his colleagues April 22, when none of the other council members voiced even conditional support for the idea.

This and other developments to date do not bode well for Petaluma, Keller says. “As long and complex and as onerous as Santa Rosa’s process has been, they’re doing a better job from many points than Petaluma in being thorough and straight with the ratepayers and the landowners,” he says disconsolately.

“And that’s not even a privately owned plant.”

From the May 2-8, 1996 issue of the Sonoma Independent

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&copy 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.

Stamps and Spit

By Gretchen Giles

It’s not easy being a celebrity, even if the celebrity you possess is the hard-earned and well-respected dignity of journalist Bill Moyers. In Sonoma to bestow the reward of himself–“I’m the prize,” he chuckles–on the community and on Readers’ Books for winning last summer’s nationwide poetry contest based on Moyers’ Language of Life series, Moyers pressed more flesh than a politician in the final desperate weeks of a fourth-year October.

“This has been an experience of a very high order,” says Moyers, seated comfortably alongside his wife and partner, Judith, in a back room of Readers’ Books. “I was just very, very touched,” he smiles, referring to the public lave of adoration that he and his wife had received the previous night at a private reception and poetry reading for boosters and volunteers of the 1995 Sonoma Valley Poetry Festival.

At a press conference the morning after the reception, the Moyerses talked with the charm of professional conversationalists about poetry, the mandate of television, Lyndon Johnson, and the importance of democracy.

“I said last night as I listened [to the poets] that poetry is at the heart of the democratic experience,” Moyers said, characteristically templing his fingertips. “Because a poem is someone’s own experience . . . and no one, no government, no corporation, no church, can own that. And it just hit me last night that democracy is much larger than government. We can’t all participate in government–though we can all vote–but we can all participate in the culture of democracy, and poetry is the most democratic of the arts.”

Democracy and interchange are two of the primary components of Moyers’ brand of journalistic art. “Our philosophy is that public television has a mandate to engage the public in the ideas that we are producing television programs about,” he says, looking to his wife.

“This is an effort to show that television is not a one-way street. It is not about us doing something for the people to watch. It is us collaborating with the viewers to try to create a dialogue about the subjects that we put forth.”

His next collaborative subject is Genesis: A Living Conversation. To be aired in 10 segments next October, the series features Moyers speaking with writers, philosophers, religious leaders, and artists about each book of Genesis. “In the beginning,” Moyers intones playfully, “there was sex, seduction, murder, and rivalry. It made a great book. Now it makes great television.”

Part of what makes great television is Moyers’ onscreen persona. Possessing a master’s degree in divinity, he posits himself as a seeker, one who is vulnerable to experience. “I’m honestly not aware of what you call my vulnerability,” he responds, when asked about this quality. Quoting the adage that a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, he continues, “I am aware of not being a cynic.

“Deep down I really believe that . . . what makes this country unique is the First Amendment, which gives us the right to climb up on the deck of the Titanic and grab the arm of the captain and say, ‘That’s an iceberg up there! You’ve got to turn the ship of state around before there’s a collision.’

“That keeps me hopeful even though, as a journalist and as a father, I’ve seen my children stumble, and fall, and get up again, and I know that human beings trip, but I also know that human beings can get up . [I have an] awareness of the dark, depraved corners of the human heart that flower into the Holocaust, genocide, [and] the horrors of Liberia and Rwanda, but I also know that we’re capable of the Gettysburg Address, Browning’s sonnets, and the Washington Monument. I can never see the human stage lighted only one way.

“That’s what I am; I’m just not aware that it comes out in my work.”

This man, who veritably speaks in poetry, has an affinity for poets. In addition to the Language of Life, his 1989 series The Power of the Written Word was extensively devoted to those who wrangle with rhythm and meter. “I would say that the one overwhelming realization that struck me while doing those series is that poets may be the last people in our society who truly speak the truth. They aren’t paid,” he smiles, “so they have no commercial stake in deception. Politicians have a stake in deception because they’re always trying to be exposed.

“All poets out there–without exception–are eager to speak from the heart,” he continues, “irrespective of critical res-ponse, irrespective of any commercial value, and that may be the last sanctuary for the honest person. Of course, not all that they tell you is true. But they don’t intend it to be a lie–it’s true to them, and that’s why it’s so valuable to me as a journalist. When I pass it on to you, I’m conscious that I’m giving you something that’s authentic, because with poets, I do not join the con game, like I do when I interview politicians.”

Moyers, who has won some 30 Emmy awards, acted as deputy director for the Peace Corps, published Newsday magazine, and worked as the senior news analyst for CBS before forming the Public Access Television company with Judith, has some experience with politicians.

One of his first jobs was with Lyndon Baines Johnson, the man who hired Moyers sight unseen in 1954 after the then-college sophomore wrote the senator a letter suggesting that he could help with Johnson’s appeal to the young people of Texas. “Lyndon Johnson felt that politics was 50 percent stamps and spit,” Moyers smiles.

In the equivalent of placing Moyers in a room piled high with straw and telling him to spin gold, Johnson escorted Moyers upon his arrival to the basement of the Senate, where he directed the young man to address envelopes–175,000 envelopes.

Using a foot-treadle machine, Moyers spent the night in that basement pressing on addresses to Texan constituents. Johnson approved. “Because I was willing to do that,” Moyers remembers, “he put me in his correspondence office.” Office policy dictated that Moyers’ initials appear at the bottom of each letter he penned, finally prompting LBJ to demand who the heck this BDM was that kept appearing at the end of his most important letters.

“He liked my letters; I guess it was my turn of phrase,” Moyers says self-effacingly. He eventually worked for the president from 1963 to 1967 as Johnson’s special assistant.

“Never underestimate the importance of representing yourself as someone who writes,” Moyers says, getting to the moral of the story.

From the April 25-May 1, 1996 issue of the Sonoma Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
&copy 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.

Final Cut

By Bruce Robinson

“It seems to be the one issue that has galvanized people on one side or the other,” sighs Windsor Planning Commission member Laura Hall, reflecting on the ongoing debate over her town’s new General Plan. “I thought, perhaps naively, that good design could be where the two groups–the slow growth and the let’s-just-do-more-of-the-same–got together, that we could actually do some nice village neighborhoods, that we could all learn to love growth again and love our community.

“And it just didn’t happen.”

No kidding. When it came down to the final vote last month, the General Plan for the county’s newest town was adopted by the narrowest possible margin, a 3-2 vote, and the most hotly debated aspect of the plan still awaits ratification by the county’s Local Agency Formation Commission next week.

That five-member body has the ultimate authority to decide whether or not Windsor will be permitted to include a 250-acre area north of Arata Lane–now part of a lush greenbelt–in the town’s Sphere of Influence, the area outside of the present-day city limits into which the town is expected to expand over the next 20 years. “I know there is going to be controversy,” says LAFCO assistant executive officer Steve Sharp, “but I haven’t seen a real measure of it yet.”

The dispute may be gathering steam as the LAFCO date draws closer. The Sonoma County Farm Bureau has weighed in against the inclusion of the Arata Lane properties, and the Healdsburg city officials also have expressed concerns. “Windsor has no need to go north of Arata Lane at this time. None!” objects Christa Shaw, who heads the Santa Rosa office of Greenbelt Alliance. She argues that the road itself represents “this incredible political and psychological line that is a de facto urban growth boundary.”

“I have a question whether the citizens want this type of growth,” says Sam Salmon, one of the two Windsor Town Council members who voted against the General Plan’s adoption. “The larger the sphere, the more people we’re going to have. Anything that comes into the sphere is intended to be urbanized within the 20 years of the plan.

“We’re going to start casting shadows into areas that really should stay agriculture.”

As adopted, the Windsor General Plan anticipates that the town will nearly double from its present 18,900 residents to a population of 35,000 by 2015. But “a lot of that will depend on the growth management strategy we’re still working on,” comments Windsor Mayor Alan Rawland, a supporter of the document. He notes that the Sphere of Influence anticipated in the General Plan totals 900 acres of potential annexations, “compared to 3,000 acres in Cotati,” and says he is perplexed by the objections from Healdsburg, since more than four miles still separate the two communities.

“Even though it’s in the sphere, it has a long way to go before it can be developed,” Rawland says, but the Town Council, instead of the county, now has control over what happens on that land. “If we decide not to develop, it will serve as a nice visual boundary.”

Most of the disputed lands on the north edge of Windsor are slated to eventually hold large single-family homes, 660 of them on 267 acres for 1,881 new residents, which would make only a modest contribution to the expected population gains. “It’s really sad that a town would bring in that much land at such a low density,” laments planner Hall. “It just means that eventually we’re going to have to sprawl more and more into the greenbelt.”

“The citizens of the city have made it abundantly clear they don’t want that to happen,” states Mark Green, executive director of Sonoma County Conservation Action, the local environmental advocacy group that boasts a high concentration of members in Windsor. “The survey that the town sent out indicated that the citizens want extremely slow growth. It’s pretty obvious that the growth rate that’s being allowed in the General Plan is far in excess of what anybody in the city wants, other than a few financial interests.”

Among those interests, Green charges, is Windsor Town Council member Marjorie Smith, who owns an interest in some of the land now due to be included in the new municipal Sphere of Influence. “She stands to make more than $1 million if it is approved as is,” Green says. Once city services are extended and the land is available for development, “the value of her land skyrockets.”

Yet Smith cast the deciding vote to approve the General Plan, despite her apparent personal economic interest in the decision. The matter has been referred to the state Fair Political Practices Commission, but that “really doesn’t affect the vote, as far as I can see,” says Salmon.

In any event, LAFCO retains the final say, not just on the Sphere of Influence, but also on the eventual annexations, whenever they may be proposed. “Whatever LAFCO does, I don’t think they will lay it to rest,” observes Mayor Rawland. “It will continue to be a sensitive issue.”

Meanwhile, opponents of a proposed huge new Wal-Mart store who say the planning document fails to consider the traffic congestion and other problems the “big box” development would cause in the area, also are planning to challenge the General Plan. Last year, Windsor officials decided to consider the Wal-Mart proposal separately from the General Plan, which envisions a light industrial use of the site at Shiloh Road and 101 being eyed by the retail giant.

From the April 25-May 1, 1996 issue of the Sonoma Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
&copy 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.

Food Fight

Cotati grocer mobilizes opposition to proposed huge new Lucky store

By Bruce Robinson

While large, modern box stores that formerly housed Kmart and Price Club stores stand vacant a few miles north in Rohnert Park, a mammoth new grocery outlet is being proposed near the freeway in Cotati–a 62,000-square-foot Lucky Food Center that, according to its leading detractor, threatens to change the face of this low-key central Sonoma County community.

“I think it is the antithesis of what Cotati is all about,” worries grocery owner Steve Maass. “Cotati has resisted these types of businesses in the past, has tried to distinguish itself by its quality of life rather than having those big businesses come in and take over things.”

As the co-owner of Oliver’s Market, the only major grocery store now operating in Cotati, Maass has a clear economic stake in the issue. The new corporate competitor would be nearly twice as big as Oliver’s. A store that size “needs to do $500,000 to $600,000 a week, just to break even. If they pull $100,000 from us, we’re going to be out of business.” Maass frets. “This would be the largest Lucky in Northern California, 18 percent larger than the one [on Lakeville Highway] in Petaluma, which is huge.”

Plans submitted to the city call for a single, hangar-sized building at the back of the seven-acre lot, which is slightly southwest of the intersection of Highway 116 and Old Redwood Highway. Most of the remaining land will be paved over for 274 parking spaces and a stand-alone fast-food drive-thru, but the city does require that 20 percent of the area be landscaped.

The new Lucky superstore would include its own pharmacy (Sav-On Drugs is a Lucky subsidiary), video store, bank, bakery, and other departments competing directly with existing local businesses. “This is typically what we have been building nowadays,” says Todd Skoro, the store’s project manager.

A division of American Food Stores, the largest grocery retailer in the country, Lucky stores operate throughout Northern and Southern California, including Sebastopol, Sonoma, and three locations in Santa Rosa. The Lakeville Highway store in Petaluma (one of two Luckys in that community), at approximately 52,000 square feet, is the largest of the existing local Luckys.

The proposed new store is slated for an area long designated for general commercial development. “For a long time, we thought there was going to be an Albertson’s going in there,” says Cotati Planning Director Dennis Dorch. The Lucky plans have been given a preliminary environmental review, which identified few major concerns. One Little League baseball field will be lost, and traffic on Old Redwood Highway will be markedly increased, but “there are no unknown impacts that we are aware of,” Dorch says.

To accommodate the increased traffic, a series of new stoplights is proposed to be installed, along with a center median strip in Old Redwood Highway. With these mitigation measures in place, Dorch says, the project could be approved without any further environmental studies. Economic analyses are not required as part of an environmental review, but projects that generate extensive controversy in the community are sometimes required to perform a full EIR because of the intense public concern. The first hearing on the proposed Lucky store is scheduled for May 6 before the Cotati Planning Commission.

Maass, however, is getting some additional input of his own. He has commissioned a review of the city’s traffic impact analysis, including the proposed mitigation measures, as well as an economic study to assess the impact the new Lucky store would have on surrounding businesses. And he has begun circulating petitions of opposition among his customers and other townsfolk. “Within a week, we had 3,000 signatures. Overwhelmingly, the people in town don’t want it,” Maass reports.

“I really wouldn’t object so much to Lucky coming in,” he continues, “but one of this size, such a superstore, it’s pretty devastating to any of the competing businesses and would change the complexion of the town. It really dictates to the community what things are going to be like, let alone what it’s going to do to traffic.”

He also argues that the city may be overestimating the fiscal benefits it would get by approving the project. “The politicians want to get the tax revenue, but if we go out of business, they’ll lose our revenue,” Maass contends.

According to Cotati Finance Director John Ellis, the sales tax income from a new grocery store is generally estimated at $30,000 per year, “although this [proposal] is probably above industry standards because it’s larger.” Food items are not subject to sales tax, but other goods are. Increased property tax revenues from the development would probably benefit local schools more than city government, Ellis adds.

But then there are those empty stores just up the road. “That’s a regional concern and I do share that concern,” says Dorch. “Unless you have population gains, retail in itself is a closed system” that gets divided up differently as new businesses open and close. That said, he adds, “I believe there will be a market for this particular Lucky store, and obviously they do, too, or they wouldn’t be investing this much in it.”

From the April 18-24, 1996 issue of the Sonoma Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
&copy 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.