There’s no statue of Sarah Christie at the Los Osos Water Recycling Facility. There should be.
By Andrew Christie, Chapter Director
May 18 [2008] was a sort of symbolic day for outspoken SLO County Planning Commissioner Sarah Christie. On that day, Christie won ECOSLO’s top environmental award, an honor that shows how she’s regarded by much of the environmental community. Yet that same day a Tribune editorial called for her to step down from the Planning Commission because of her “abrasive” personality. Indeed, Christie’s position as a county decision-maker—appointed to the Planning Commission post by 5th District Supervisor Jim Patterson in 2005—has become an election issue for Patterson’s opponents, who say she’s “been a divisive force and has alienated the building community,” according to the newspaper editorial.
- SLO New Times, 5/21/08
The occasion of the quiet opening of the Los Osos Recycled Water Project on April 22, 2016, after three decades of unprecedented civic strife, was simultaneously the biggest and most unremarked local story of the year. So before the year ends, this seems like the time to make sure the historical record reflects a salient fact that largely escaped the attention of the local media at the time: The crucial moment in the thirty-year-long Los Osos sewer saga was the four-month period in 2009 when the sewer came to the SLO County Planning Commission, chaired by Sarah Christie.
And here’s what happened there: My kid sister saved the County from the intractable problems and decades-long cycle of failure that plagued the largest public works project in its history. While simultaneously chair of the SLO County Planning Commission and a senior staff member with the California Coastal Commission, Sarah ripped up the defective Public Works Department’s sewer plan when it came to the Planning Commission and led her colleagues through five meetings that represented a high water mark of public participation and collaboration in SLO County's civic history. The process she conducted forced Public Works to agree to a completely reconfigured water reuse & recycling project.
Over the course of those five meetings throughout the spring and summer of 2009, the Chair of the Planning Commission stepped into a process that had degenerated into civic warfare, turned it into an actual public process, and saved the project.
Right about now, I’m pretty sure you’re pointing at the author’s obvious bias.
Very observant. But the fact that Sarah saved the sewer can be confirmed by watching any portion of the video record of those proceedings.
Those videos really should be edited down to feature length and released as a documentary on how local government is supposed to work. It would be a shame to allow that pivotal moment in the history of the most momentous and contentious public works project in the County’s history to slip down the memory hole beyond recovery. Especially as this piece of that history routinely goes missing from the false narrative -- annoying obstructionists caused delays but thanks to a determined county board of supervisors and public works department, the job finally got done -- that has become the story of the Los Osos sewer.
Before those planning commission hearings, testimony from residents concerned about the Los Osos sewer had long since turned into a period during which county supervisors endured the legally required comments of the public, then ignored them and moved on. The Board saw its mandate as just do it/full speed ahead/there is no alternative.
The sewer warriors got madder. The comments got hotter. The board got more defensive and narrowed the pen of public comment that “the sewer people” were herded into every week, imposing additional time restrictions. The message -- shut up and go away -- could not have been clearer.
Then, on April 23, 2009, its Environmental Impact Report complete, the project came to the County Planning Commission for review and approval.
Then as now, Sarah knew the coastal permitting process like the back of her hand. And, as an experienced horse trainer, she has a lot of experience calming large, panicky beasts. (As she told New Times, “Horses are big powerful animals, not unlike developers. In training, you make the right thing easy and the wrong thing difficult. You’d be amazed at the similarities between politics and horse training. That sums up my approach to this work.”) Both of those attributes were key to turning the tide for the sewer at the planning commission.
Department head Paavo Ogren threatened to personally appeal the project to the Board of Supervisors if the Planning Commission didn’t approve the project as his department submitted it instead of how they were remaking it. Begged by County officials to just approve the project as-is, Sarah was gentle but firm: The County’s pump & dump project would be dead on arrival at its ultimate destination, the California Coastal Commission. It had to be turned into something that could pass muster when subjected to the provisions of the California Coastal Act.
Before the project got to the Planning Commission, County Public Works, responding to public comments on the Environmental Impact Report, had made its feet-in-concrete position clear:
“Several commenters focused on how the County is approaching water reclamation, beneficial reuse of treated effluent, and sustainability of the groundwater supplies. Several state that agricultural exchange must be a central component of the LOWWP…. These comments seek to expand the LOWWP beyond solving the wastewater issue.... An approach that attempts to solve all problems with one project could delay LOWWP construction under the premise that all problems must be solved simultaneously or nothing should be done.”
No clairvoyance was necessary to determine that the project as designed was in for trouble at the Coastal Commission, as the Coastal Commission had not been shy about weighing in on the project.
Those remarks included:
“We are concerned about and strongly urge the County to build into the project sensible and doable wastewater reuse and disposal components.... We strongly encourage design of a project that returns flows to the basin at project start up, particularly because if appears that multiple discharge options exist over the basin. As previously indicated, one of those feasible options is agricultural re-use, which has the added benefit of reduced pumping from the aquifer.”
(“We strongly encourage” is Coastal Commission-speak for “You should do this if you want a permit for your project.”)
Before the first hearing, County officials urged Sarah to request that a sheriff’s deputy be stationed at the back of the hearing room, as the meetings were bound to be full of the same angry people who had long been doing battle with a board of supervisors that had long since pulled up the drawbridge and reinforced the battements. Sarah nixed that suggestion, saying she was sure there would be no problems.
There weren’t.
Her secret: She actually listened.
With Chair Christie presiding, democracy suddenly broke out in the form of a genuine public process, a dialog in which the words of local citizens were heard and heeded and reshaped the project.
Local activists who clearly knew their stuff often impressed the commission, which was just as often unimpressed by County “experts.” Members of the public who had educated themselves on intricate details of specific aspects of the project and took their three minutes during the public comment period were astonished to find themselves invited back to the podium to elaborate further if Sarah had a question and wanted to get more information or test the assertions or facts or data offered by Public Works against opposing testimony by the public and independent experts. When invited back to the microphone, people were allowed to do so without limitation on their time. Actual public conversations happened between members of the public and the commission chair.
And their input actually determined the commission’s deliberations. When Keith Wimer of the Los Osos Sustainability Group submitted his analysis of the rate of seawater intrusion into the aquifer as much faster than what the County had been calculating, it was acknowledged as correct. When Dana Ripley of Ripley Pacific presented his analysis of the potential for agricultural use of recycled water, including a plan for where and how much could be done – an analysis dismissed and ignored by the County for years – it was incorporated into the project.
People who had been beaten down and waved off at countless meetings of the County Supervisors couldn’t get over the fact that they were actually being heard. “As an activist, I'd been there myself,” she recalls. “I know first-hand how frustrating it can be, and how much talent gets ignored. Without activists, we'd be sunk."
At the same time, Sarah overcame and calmed down the big, powerful animals of the County Public Works Department, whom she repeatedly caught in close questioning using bad stats, stale data and wrong numbers to support misstatements of the facts on the ground.
That’s how the treat-it-&-toss-it agenda of County Public Works got tossed. And on August 13, 2009, after dozens of hours of deliberations and testimony, two field trips, a review of 8,000 pages of documentation and the production of 170 pages of findings and conditions, the County Planning Commission approved a permit for a very different project.
And because, for that four-month oasis of time, the Los Osos Waste Water Project became a genuinely public process, hostilities were suspended long enough for the project to be changed into something that could receive a Coastal Development Permit that would pass muster at the Coastal Commission. Because it got changed into a project that would not, by virtue of its existence, virtually guarantee the destruction of the Los Osos groundwater basin.
Natch, the Sierra Club took full advantage of the fact that our chapter director’s sister was both the Chair of the County Planning Commission and a Coastal Commission staff member. So we helped. Lots of people helped. But the fact that the Los Osos sewer went into the planning commission as a sewage collection & disposal project and came out as a water recycling project? Sarah did that.
The planning commission’s version of the project, unlike the County’s submitted proposal, did not sacrifice 645 acres of prime agricultural land. It kept the treated effluent in the basin, required the highest level of treatment, mandated reclamation and re-use -- over the strenuous objections of Public Works -- and more than doubled the originally proposed level of water conservation in order to reduce pumping and combat the intrusion of seawater into the aquifer.
After Sarah championed the activists, sided with the independent experts against the County's proposed project and showed the way at the planning commission, the degree to which County officials reversed course and came around (without ever acknowledging that they were doing so) can be measured in a quote from the Nov. 12, 2015, issue of New Times:
"It's virtually impossible to solve the Los Osos drinking water problem without solving the wastewater problem," said Bruce Gibson, SLO County 2nd District supervisor. "The deployment of that treated water is really the key to making everything else work." (Compare to: "An approach that attempts to solve all problems with one project could delay LOWWP construction under the premise that all problems must be solved simultaneously....")
But because the County dug in its heels and refused even to allow consideration of a design for a modern, pressurized collection system in the RFP process, the people of Los Osos will always have to live with the burden of significant additional cost, long-term undetected leaks and a future of repeated diversions of a precious percentage of recycled water to flush the system whenever the flow is too low for gravity to push effluent through the pipes.
That's the mixed bag that the inertial force of just do it/full speed ahead/there is no alternative delivered for Los Osos, countered to the maximum extent practicable by determined local activists, the advocacy of the Sierra Club, Surfrider, the Los Osos Sustainability Group, and the dumb luck of having the right County Planning Commission Chair in the right place at the right time. We saved the project and the Los Osos groundwater basin from disaster.
But ultimately, the Los Osos Recycled Water Project got done only because Sarah Christie set aside the exaggerated deference to authority and the official experts who had created yet another iteration of a project that was certain to take its place in an unbroken 30-year record of failure. She shrugged off enormous official pressure to rubber-stamp the project, and recognized that a number of the citizens of Los Osos had a better grasp of the issues and the condition of their groundwater basin than did the County Department of Public Works. She listened to citizens and independent experts, and took her job, state regulations, environmental protection and the public process seriously. She did her homework, followed lines of inquiry to their conclusion, corrected the Public Works Department's erroneous calculations in real time, engaged in reasoned argument, persuaded her colleagues on the dais to vote with her at every turn because there was no way they could not, and remade the project. The right person was in the right place at the right time with the right idea: to open a space for the community to have a meaningful role in the planning process, because she had so much empathy for how they'd been treated by the County. She listened and responded to public input from the community that would be impacted, and made sure they got the best project she could deliver as a public servant.
At the end of each of those meetings, it would often take her an hour or more to get up the aisle and out of the lobby of the County Government Center. She was thronged. People wanted to keep talking to her, wanted to see her up close. They wouldn’t let her leave.
That’s not to say everyone appreciated her efforts. Quite a few emphatically did not. This week, when I asked Sarah, seven years on, about her perspective on the Los Osos project and her time on the planning commission in general – marked by routine calls for her head -- she wrote the following:
"This was the event, following on the heels of the Energy Element Update, when I actually realized, in a personally tangible way, that women in public life who seek to challenge the status quo or question the paradigms of power get treated distinctly differently than men do. I guess I'd been pretty naïve until then, but I'll never forget the queasy feeling of disbelief as it dawned on me that my critics' vehemence was of a flavor and intensity that I didn't recognize as anything I'd ever seen directed at a man -- certainly not a man holding public office in SLO County. I had the same reaction x 1000 watching Hillary slog through the fire swamp this year. How impoverished are we as a society by our inability to tolerate women with good ideas."
So we may continue to await the dedication of Sarah’s statue, either outside the entrance of the brand new Los Osos Water Recycling Facility -- which owes its existence, its purpose and its name to her -- or in the lobby of the County Government Center. But the wait will likely be long.