A typical home in Costa Mesa is charged a little more than $5 per month in sewer fees. That’s much less than the state average of more than $30 per month, according to state water board spokesman Bill Rukeyser, although the state average includes small remote towns and big cities alike. Orange County’s average is much lower.
Fauth attributes the rapid increases to stricter county and state controls on waste disposal passed down at the beginning of the decade that districts have had to either obey or face potential fines.
To reduce the amount of human refuse and waste water spilled from Costa Mesa pipes, the district has had to expand drastically, Fauth said.
Since 2000, its number of employees has jumped from four to 12, its headquarters moved out of City Hall into a $1.5-million building on 19th Street, it purchased a $920,000 piece of land to store equipment on Wilson Street and it overhauled the pump station off of Irvine Avenue for $700,000. The district has a roughly $10-million annual budget.
Countywide, though, there is evidence that the stricter controls are working. The Orange County Health Care Agency, which keeps records of local sewage spills, has seen a decrease in spills since the new regulations went into effect. After peaking in 2001, the number of sewage spills reported to the agency has decreased, and the number of spills in 2008 is the lowest since then, said the agency’s environmental health Program Manager Larry Honeybourne.
“The trend has been down in the last five years. We’re actually seeing a much lower number of sewage spills reported to us and the volumes are down,” Honeybourne said. “All of the agencies have been doing a better job of looking at their pipelines.”
