North Marin Water District is balking at the idea of connecting Dillon Beach to a sewer—and hoping for an opportunity to shed control of its existing Oceana Marin wastewater system.
But last week, N.M.W.D. sent a letter to county officials pushing back on the idea. The district’s leadership is unprepared to take on 160 new sewer connections and is already struggling to fund vital maintenance projects on infrastructure for the 235 customers it currently serves.
“It’s daunting to think: ‘My god, we’re barely able to keep the current system up and running,’” said Tony Williams, N.M.W.D.’s general manager. “How are we going to accommodate almost doubling the size?”
North Marin, which provides drinking water to Novato and Point Reyes Station, is not in the business of wastewater—with one exception. In 1973, the district was tapped to take charge of a sewer system for the brand-new subdivision of Oceana, a collection of modernist vacation homes with stunning views on cul-de-sacs with Hawaiian names, perched just uphill from the jumble of cottages in Dillon Beach.
A few of West Marin’s village cores rely on small joint wastewater systems. But outside of Oceana, most coastal homeowners have individual septic systems. A stone’s throw from the subdivision, some of the original cabins in Dillon Beach are still using redwood cesspools that date from the earliest days of the beach town—when there were no regulatory standards.
The high concentration of old septic systems may be affecting the eight drinking water wells near Dillon Creek. One of the village’s regularly monitored wells has high nitrate concentrations during the summer months, though it has always conformed with health standards.
“Although monitoring data shows that drinking water nitrate limits have not yet been exceeded at the wells, future increases in occupancy and wastewater generation in the village could pose a threat to the community drinking water supply,” county staff wrote in their recent study, which was funded by a grant from the state’s Department of Water Resources.
N.M.W.D. does not provide drinking water to Oceana or Dillon Beach, which both use private companies that maintain the nearby wells.
The Oceana sewer consists of collection pipes that, powered by gravity, feed to a pump station near the bluff that in turn sends wastewater to treatment and storage ponds on a hill above the development. The system is isolated from the rest of N.M.W.D.’s infrastructure and needs costly capital improvement repairs. The ponds were damaged by flooding in 2017, and the district hasn’t yet gathered the $2 million necessary to fully restore them. It is also searching for grants to build a new secondary pipeline to supplement the single line that pumps sewage uphill to the ponds.
North Marin can loan money to its sewer operation from its separate Novato water operation, but it must maintain a healthy reserve within the water system’s bank, so the bulk of operational spending on the sewer comes from Oceana customers, who pay a relatively high annual sewer rate of $1,300.
The district has been strained by drought, Mr. Williams said, and the board worries that the major project could be either financially infeasible or require major rate increases to both Oceana customers and new Dillon Beach customers.
And although county officials are concerned about the impacts of so many aging septic systems, surveys show Dillon Beach residents are split over the idea of a sewer. Mr. Williams said he was uncertain whether they would want to pay the district’s sewer rates. Ultimately, he said, the district’s “primary mission is water.”
At a board meeting last week, North Marin’s directors appeared ready not only to decline any new connections, but to consider giving up control of the Oceana system altogether. In nearby Tomales, N.M.W.D. controlled the wastewater system before the Tomales Village Community Services District took over in 1998. Mr. Williams said a similar district could be formed to take charge of Oceana and, ultimately, expand to include Dillon Beach.
“It’s an opportunity for more local control,” he said. “Let’s face it: we’re not physically out there. We’re this remote district who’s doing a great job managing this system, but it is an anomaly.”
North Marin has been in a similar situation before. In 2000, after the county had asked N.M.W.D. to provide sewer service to several lots in Dillon Beach, the board resolved not to consider any additional individual sewer customers beyond a handful of homes on Ocean View Avenue that could easily connect to an existing sewer main. At the time, the district’s directors said expanding boundaries would lead to “unreliable and expensive” service.
Though the county’s study ranked the idea of connecting the entire “village area” of Dillon Beach to the Oceana system as the best alternative, it also identified five others. Ranking second was a plan to connect only the eastern side of the village and the beach restroom to the sewer, while creating a program to manage and upgrade existing septic systems on the western edge. That hybrid alternative, focusing on the homes closest to Dillon Creek, would likely be about $430,000 cheaper, though N.M.W.D. would still not support it.
The study’s lower-ranked alternatives involved expanding the sewer even further south to homes on Cliff Street, creating a septic maintenance program for homeowners, and maintaining the status quo.
Mr. Williams said the county’s consultants, Questa Engineering Corporation, sent the district a draft of the study and N.M.W.D. staff gave feedback. But in the end, he said, their objections only led to small changes.
County officials say the groundwater problem in Dillon Beach is a serious concern, and they didn’t want to squander the opportunity provided by the state grant to probe the issue, regardless of the water district’s reaction.
“My perspective is: it’s good to hear from a potential partner, but the problem is not going to go away,” said Tom Lai, director of Marin’s Community Development Agency. “We’re not going to let lack of interest from North Marin sway us into going away.”
The next step could be to study options for a new authority to manage a consolidated Oceana and Dillon Beach sewer system, Mr. Lai said. The county could step in to run the system, as it did in Marshall.
But the county’s Local Agency Formation Commission could also recommend, or even require, that N.M.W.D. expand its service boundary to include Dillon Beach, Mr. Williams said, overruling the board’s objections. He told the board: “I’m willing to fight that however we can legally.”
Clarification: The print version of this article may have led some readers to believe that the feasibility study was final; in fact, it was an administrative draft. The county has not yet settled on a preferred alternative or made a formal recommendation.