AgdaPkt 2003-02-03 - Laserfiche WebLink

Browse Search

9.0-1 To: Redwood City Council Merttbers From: Colleen Jordan Re: Motion to implement Council Policy on Recycled Water Use in Residential Areas Policy: Redwood City will not make the use of Recycled Water Mandatory to Current Home Owners or their Associations Fellow Council Members, Tonight I would like to ask you to make a commitment in the form of a Council Policy, as stated above, not to force recycled water use on current homeowners. The following are the reasons why this policy is logical, rational and reasonable. 1) OUESTION OF SAFETY. a. We will never have Absolute Proof. Whether or not treated effluent is "safe" is currently a hotly debated issue. As you can see in the attached report from the California Recycled Water Task Force, "despite a long bistog of mater reuse in California, the auestion o_fsafety of mater reuse is still diiitcult to defint..." We will never be able to prove with absolute confidence that there will never be negative consequences as a result of it's intended use in Redwood City. b. What is Acceptable today can become Unacceptable tomorrow. Both the State and the EPA are studying the potential health risks of recycled water. Even if one or both agencies declare a certain "acceptable" level of risk, we've seen various examples in history where government agencies have had to backtrack. The most recent example takes place in Mountain View (see attached articles) where the EPA had to backtrack on what they thought was an "acceptable" level of a compound in the ground. This compound is now known by the EPA to be 60 times more dangerous than they previously thought. 2) Equitability. The primary goal of Redwood City's Water Shortage Contingency plan is to "Share hardships equitably among all water user classes." Vet, so far, the primary, biggest, most expensive proposal in our Water Supply Reliability plans, is to force ONE CLASS of residential water users (those with common landscaping) to disproportionately carry the burden of a potential drought by mandating the use of treated sewage on their lawns near their children and pets. The irony is that residents with HOAs (condos, townhomes and many single -family homes) are already using less water than single -family homes without HOAs because they have, on average, much less lawn and landscaping per family. 3) Benefit of the doubt. The debate about the safety of recycled water is, for the time, a no- win debate. The point here is that there is a substantial amount of residents in Redwood Shores that do not want the thousands of unregulated substances found in treated wastewater around their homes, their children and their pets. If the health of the rest of Redwood City were at stake (i.e. probable or even possible death or illness for single- family