Bolinas could soon incorporate more homes into its sewer system and end a decades-old ban on new wastewater connections. The Bolinas Community Public Utility District is working to show state regulators that its sewer system, which serves 163 customers downtown and on the Little Mesa, could accommodate seven more homes on a small road that descends toward the beach from Terrace Avenue. Two Canyon Road homeowners who live just 400 feet beyond the reach of the plumbing and have failing septic systems must connect to the sewer to meet the conditions of a county-issued permit. Ultimately, BCPUD will explore ending the sewer moratorium entirely, though the regulatory process and costs pose major obstacles.
“We want to embark on a broader project to look at whether we have the potential to add service to anybody else,” the utility district’s general director, Jennifer Blackman, said. “That’s a complicated question, and we’re trying to get grant funding for that.”
The century-old Bolinas sewer system consists of about three miles of pipelines. Every day, around 30,000 gallons of sewage is pumped from downtown to a treatment plant on the Big Mesa, where it evaporates from open treatment ponds and irrigates a 90-acre parcel of land along Mesa Road. The San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board required that the town ban new sewer hookups in 1985 after finding that storm runoff and seawater intrusion were persistent problems. Five years later, the district repaired the lines and installed new laterals and manholes. Though storm water inflow still afflicts the system, the utility district believes there is now room for new customers.
“We still struggle with inflow and infiltration from time to time,” Ms. Blackman said. “But it’s substantially down from the ‘80s. We proactively went to the regional board to point this out.”
Meanwhile, two homeowners seeking a permit for a retaining wall at the end of Canyon Road met an obstacle from the county’s environmental health services department: their septic systems were leaking and couldn’t be brought up to code on the cramped properties. To get their permit, the applicants would have to connect to the nearby sewer.
When one of the owners, Jack Sylvan, first approached BCPUD about the possibility in 2019, the board pointed to the longstanding moratorium. But the request also provided an opportunity to re-examine that position, and soon the other five homeowners on the street expressed their interest in sewer connections. BCPUD made plans to seek the water board’s approval to add all seven homes and to study the system’s broader treatment capacity.
The utility district is still working on gathering the data it must present to the regional water board, held up in part by a bone-dry 2020 with little storm runoff to measure. But Ms. Blackman said the state has “indicated a willingness to evaluate lifting the moratorium,” even beyond the seven homes on Canyon Road. If the water board supported the move, BCPUD would consider using grant funding from the State Water Resources Control Board to expand its treatment capacity to allow for more new connections. Last year, a consultant estimated the overhaul of the utility’s treatment facility and collection lines could ultimately cost between $3 million and $5 million.
New sewer service would be optional for homeowners, Ms. Blackman said, and would only be cost-effective for houses situated relatively close to the existing system, not on the far reaches of the Big Mesa. Although septic maintenance can be expensive, it’s generally cheaper than BCPUD’s $1,450 annual charge for sewer service, and some eligible homeowners would likely stick to their septic tanks.
“If there’s a possibility for someone to move on to the sewer, we want them to do it,” Ms. Blackman said. “But on the homeowner’s side, they might say, ‘Why do I have to?’ So it’s not a forced issue; it’s an opportunity.”
Environmental health and housing development present the two most compelling collective reasons to shift from septic to sewer systems. The Environmental Protection Agency gives grants to help communities shift from septic to sewer systems in the interest of water quality standards. Because septic systems are maintained by private property owners, they are harder for authorities to monitor and thus more prone to causing environmental hazards. The county’s environmental health services department has no records for 30 percent of the county’s roughly 8,000 septic systems, many of which are likely substandard. Marin County monitors water quality at Bolinas Beach during the summer, and consistently gives it high marks, but there are few other ways of measuring the impacts of any failing septic systems on local water quality.
The lack of sewers in West Marin also hinders the development of new homes, and affordable housing advocates have called for a serious look at shifting coastal villages to sewer systems.
Development in Bolinas has long been defined by another moratorium even older than the wastewater moratorium: the ban on new water hookups, in place since 1971. A draft report released last month by the Marin Local Agency Formation Commission, the local service planning agency known as LAFCO, recommended that Bolinas reconsider the water moratorium in light of two new wells the district is planning to incorporate. Last fall, BCPUD received emergency state authorization to upgrade a well on the Resource Recovery Project site and connect another well on Wharf Road to its distribution main. The projects are awaiting a drought relief grant from the state’s Department of Water Resources.
At a board meeting last week, Ms. Blackman called LAFCO’s recommendation to reconsider the water moratorium “extremely premature.” “We don’t have either of the wells online and we really don’t know their sustained capacity,” she said. With any luck, BCPUD will be able to rely on the emergency wells as long-term sources, but Ms. Blackman stressed it was too early to count on them.
BCPUD has defeated legal challenges to the water moratorium since it was passed half a century ago. It has also built two reservoirs for additional storage. Ms. Blackman said that although the LAFCO report raised a reasonable question, Bolinas only recently withdrew from the brink of mandatory water rationing and the utility is still concerned with reliably supplying water to its existing customers, let alone to new hookups.