Mt. View Sanitary District Board Approves Rate Hikes, to Study Possible Consolidation with Central San

Facing public backlash, board opts for shorter-term, streamlined increase over original five-year plan; school board set to form refinery ad hoc committee for tour of MRC

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By Tom Lochner

The Mt. View Sanitary District board, facing growing pushback by ratepayers, on Thursday passed a shorter-term, streamlined variant of an earlier five-year, approximately 9 percent-a-year proposed rate increase schedule.

The board approved the first two years of the earlier schedule. Annual sewer service charges for single-family houses will go from the current $814.20 to $888 in the fiscal year that starts July 1, and $972 in fiscal 2024-25. In Year 3, running from July 2025 through June 2026, the charge will increase by the district's inflation index for that fiscal year. Other property types will face similar-percentage increases.

All four board members voted yes. The former fifth board member, Melody LaBella, stepped down at the end of April because she was moving out of the district, she said.

Several residents urged the board to delay increasing rates, pending a feasibility study of a proposed consolidation of Mt. View with the much larger Central Contra Costa Sanitary District, popularly known as Central San, where rates are lower – currently $690 a year for single-family houses versus Mt. View's $814.20. Many residents unhappy over Mt. View's rates have called for consolidation with Central San, saying that the economy of scale that comes with a larger district could increase efficiency and keep rates down.

Also joining the call to delay a rate hike was Martinez City Councilman Satinder Malhi, whose District 3 includes some Mt. View Sanitary neighborhoods. Speaking during public comment, Malhi said he had communicated with the office of U.S. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, whose congressional district includes parts of Martinez, about the possibility of securing some federal infrastructure funding.

Malhi said he was told "no one from Mt. View has contacted his (DeSaulnier's) office." Malhi called for "direct dialogue" with the offices of DeSaulnier as well as U.S. Rep. John Garamendi, whose congressional district also includes parts of Martinez, and urged the board to hold off on rate increases "until some of these conversations can take place."

Responding to the calls for delaying increases, Mt. View board President Brian Danley said: "You gotta bite the bullet. We can't kick the can down the road. 

"We can't not do something tonight."

Mt. View General Manager Lilia Corona added, "Certainly not for a year," the minimum length of time it is estimated a feasibility study would take. "Or two years," Danley chimed in.

Corona said she talked to Central San but had not talked to DeSaulnier. On Friday, in response to an inquiry about whether her district had looked into applying for federal infrastructure funds, she replied, in an email, that, "We have been exploring infrastructure funds for nearly a year," but did not elaborate on the progress of those efforts or which agencies or officials the district has contacted.

DeSaulnier's office, in an email, said it provides two services related to federal funding: through the Community Project Funding process, formerly known as "earmarks," and by supporting grants for applications for federal funding. 

"The Mt. View Sanitary District did not apply for any federal funding through our office as part of the 'earmark' process for FY24 and has not recently requested the Congressman’s support on any federal grant applications," the email continued. "That said, we do outreach regularly to let organizations know what funding opportunities are available, and Congressman DeSaulnier’s office stands ready to help eligible CA-10 (California's 10th Congressional District) organizations with community project funding and grant opportunities."

Thursday's public hearing was the continuation of an adjourned April 13 public hearing that was attended by three board members, an insufficient number to pass a rate increase. Four members of a five-person board must vote in favor of a rate increase to meet the two-thirds requirement for passage.

Mt. View will revisit its rates after the consolidation feasibility study is complete, which will take at least a year and possibly two or even longer, according to varying estimates by officials. 

At Thursday's public hearing, Corona reported that Central San made a "surprise offer" at the April 13 public hearing "to fund a collaborative consolidation feasibility study." On May 1, Corona said, she met with Central San General Manager Roger Bailey, and Bailey confirmed that his district would fund the study. Corona said it will be "a collaborative effort between the two districts with equal voice from each district," and that it will begin once the Contra Costa Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) concludes a Municipal Services Review focusing on wastewater, currently in progress.                       

The Mt. View May 4 staff report is available at 

https://www.mvsd.org/files/84ff3138a/2023-05-04+ITEM+4A-REVISED.pdf .

LAFCO will meet May 10, but its review is expected to be complete in June by the latest estimates, Corona said.

Earlier, during the delivery of her staff report, Corona noted that "a feasibility study may or may not result in a recommendation for consolidation." In the event of a negative recommendation and a resulting non-consolidation, "MVSD will suffer an increase in capital costs for postponed projects," she added.

Ratepayers could have shot down a rate hike outright, if the owners of more than 50 percent of district properties had filed written protests – a tough-to-pass threshold. As of Thursday, the district had logged just over 750 such protests, representing about 9 percent of properties.

The Mt. View Sanitary District serves about 22,000 residents with "approximately 7,987 residential and 314 commercial, industrial and institutional sewer connections," according to an April 13 staff report.

The original proposed five-year increase schedule would have brought the annual charge for single-family houses to $1,260 in the fifth year, beginning in July 2027, or more than double the $615.60 rate eight years earlier, in fiscal 2019-20.

In her May 4 staff report, Corona recommended that the board commit to "annually reviewing the need for any rate increase," and to limit increases to funding only essential expenditures. In addition to reexamining all planned capital expenditures, Corona said, MVSD has frozen a recently vacated position; limited travel and training; and canceled the district's 100th Anniversary Celebration, which was planned for October.

The following items were written by Craig Lazzeretti

School board set to create refinery ad hoc committee

The Martinez Unified School District Board of Trustees meeting agenda for Monday night includes an item to create a Martinez Refinery Co. Ad Hoc Committee in response to the toxic dust release on Thanksgiving night that is the subject of ongoing investigations. According to the agenda item by Superintendent Helen Rossi, the district has been invited by the refinery’s manager to tour the facility and meet with him and the refinery leadership team. The ad hoc committee will consist of up to two board members who will attend the meeting at the refinery on May 15 and report back at the May 22 school board meeting.

There’s no mention in the agenda item, however, of any intention by the ad hoc committee to consult with regulators investigating what has been classified a major chemical accident, such as Contra Costa Health Services’ hazardous materials division or the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which created the computer-generated dust fallout map for the 20 to 24 tons of toxic dust that fell on the community from the “spent catalyst” release. The hazmat division of the county health department has been conducting a safety audit of the unit responsible for the toxic release.

The refinery’s owner, PBF Energy, is also involved in a contentious lawsuit with the air district over a new rule passed in 2021 that would require significant reductions in particulate emissions from the refinery and affecting the surrounding community, where several school sites are located. To meet the conditions of the new rule, the refinery most likely would need to install a device known as a “wet gas scrubber” that would replace its current electrostatic precipitator, which was turned off prior to the November spent catalyst incident because of an upset at the refinery’s catalytic cracking unit. Air district and Contra Costa Health officials have speculated that the presence of a wet gas scrubber could have mitigated or even prevented November’s toxic release, in which dust was observed on a car parked in front of Martinez Junior High School in addition to other locations around town. At a December town hall meeting, a refinery official denied that it would have made a difference.

The air district calls the new rule “the most health-protective and stringent regulation of its kind in the country,” and it has estimated that for the million people most affected, exposure to particulate matter from MRC increases mortality by an average of up to 6.3 deaths per year. In its lawsuit, PBF Energy says the need to install a wet gas scrubber to meet the required particulate reductions will result in “significant adverse cost, operational and business impacts.” But the watchdog group Communities for a Better Environment has noted that four of PBF’s five other refineries across the country already employ wet gas scrubbers, and that the device is common at refineries across the country.

Another issue that would seem to be of keen interest to this ad hoc committee is the fact the refinery has stated publicly and through its internal investigation of the accident that it didn’t immediately inform the public or local health authorities about the release because it had no way of knowing that it had spewed the dust into the community until community members observed the dust and reported it to the refinery. This suggests that should such an accident occur during a school day, school staff and students would be relied on to both observe the presence of hazardous materials on school grounds, including possibly playground equipment used by children as young as 4 and 5 years old, and report it before any public warning or safety instructions could be disseminated, including the activation of the county Community Warning System.

As someone who sent two children through MUSD schools over 13 years, it never dawned on me that a modern refinery processing hazardous, toxic materials on a daily basis near their school would knowingly operate without the technology necessary to immediately determine when an accident had released such materials over their school sites, or was likely to have done so.

Yet, in its own root cause analysis report of the accident, MRC said just that: “There was (and currently is) no mechanism to alert MRC personnel to the potential that an opacity event might result in a release of catalyst into the community.” This despite the fact that PBF Energy refers to MRC on its website as one of the “most complex” refineries in the nation.

What the refinery referred to as an “opacity event” resulted from a shift in the pressure balance between the unit’s reactor and regenerator, causing the catalyst level to rise and ultimately be released into the community as powdery, heavy metal-laden dust.

The school board’s ad hoc committee may also want to inquire with refinery officials about why the refinery’s official employee headcount, as detailed in PBF Energy’s annual reports, has fallen from 585 in 2020 (the heart of the pandemic when demand for fuel and other petroleum products plummeted across the country and world) to 561 in 2022, and what impact that reduction has had on safety? This reflects a steady decline in PBF’s headcount across all six of its refineries in recent years. The company employed 3,135 refinery workers at the end of 2020, but that number had fallen to 3,016 by the end of 2022 — despite the significant jump in demand for fuel and related products during that period.

Despite the close proximity of several MUSD school sites to the refinery, district leadership has largely taken a passive, disengaged approach to the matter in the months since the accident. In contrast, the city has hosted several public meetings with local and regional health, safety and air quality officials, consistently addressing questions around public communication of the event, of lack thereof, as well as ongoing health and environmental concerns. School district leadership have been, for the most part, absent from, or silent at, such meetings, and are not represented on the independent, county-run oversight committee investigating the issues related to the release.

However, at the Board of Trustees’ April 24 meeting, trustee Yazmin Llamas called on her fellow board members to return a recent $20,000 donation from MRC and “pause” the district’s relationship with the refinery until it agrees to install the wet gas scrubbing technology. She pointed to an article from the online education site EdSource documenting the impact of air pollution on the cognitive development of children. “I think it’s really important that we protect our children from any potential future toxic releases that can be solved by just installing wet gas scrubbers,” she said.

The nonprofit Martinez Education Foundation (MEF) has long partnered with the refinery on an annual “Run for Education” event that raises money for district schools. When Llamas mentioned the run as an event that the district should pause its involvement with as a result of MRC’s resistance to installing the wet gas scrubber, school board President Anne Horack-Martin pointed out that MEF is a separate entity that operates independently of the school district. Horack-Martin’s mother, former school board member Bobbi Horack, is an MEF board member. The 21st MRC-MEF Run for Education is scheduled for Sept. 30.

Other than Horack-Martin’s reference to MEF, there were no other comments by the other board members on Llamas’ request that the district “pause” it relationship with MRC and return the donation.

Rossi has met with Martinez police Chief Andrew White about the city’s efforts to enhance public notification of hazardous incidents through the Community Warning System (which occurred after I asked the City Council for greater collaboration with the school district on MRC issues at a February goal-setting workshop). Yet, the first Rossi learned about the dust detected at the junior high school by a Contra Costa Health Services inspector two days after the release was while watching video of an April 5 presentation by the air district at a City Council meeting on the dust fallout map.

For context, here are the distances, using an online calculator, as the crow flies from MUSD school sites to the official street address of MRC (3485 Pacheco Blvd.) Keep in mind that the refinery is a sprawling, 860-acre complex, and that portions of it may be closer or further than the distances from the official address.

• Morello Park Elementary: 0.8 miles

• John Muir Elementary: 1.2 miles

• Las Juntas Elementary: 1.5 miles

• Vicente High School: 1.6 miles

• Martinez Junior High: 1.7 miles

• Alhambra High School: 1.7 miles

• John Swett Elementary: 2.4 miles

Meanwhile, a toxicologist hired by the county to conduct soil testing to determine whether there are any ongoing health or environmental risks from the catalyst that landed in the community began collecting samples on Thursday, according to a Contra Costa Health news release. From the release:

The samples will be sent to a lab to analyze for concentrations of metals associated with the catalyst that may pose risks to human health through skin contact, inhalation or from consuming produce grown in the contaminated soil. Lab results of the soil samples are expected in late May or early June.

• Also on Monday, the school board is expected to approve a resolution recognizing LGBTQ+ Pride Month, including flying the LGBTQ+ Pride flag at the district office during the month of June, as it did last year. The resolution, which has been discussed at two previous meetings and appears to have the support of the majority of the board, would also remove the yearly requirement for the board to pass a resolution in order to fly the flag. The resolution can be read here.

The board meeting begins at 6:30 p.m. at the district offices. The full agenda can be read here.

Park district gets more funding to close Bay Trail gap

The East Bay Regional Park District announced Friday that it has received $1.4 million from the California Natural Resources Agency’s Urban Greening Grant Program for its Bay Trail Gap Closure Project in Martinez, which would close a half-mile gap between Carquinez Strait Regional Shoreline and Radke Martinez Shoreline near the Martinez Intermodal Station. The San Francisco Bay Trail is a planned 500-mile walking and cycling path around the entire Bay.

The park district previously received $1.8 million in grants for the project from California State Parks and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Safe Streets and Roads for All Discretionary Grant Program via the Contra Costa Transportation Authority (CCTA).

The total costs for the gap closure project are estimated to be $3.7 million. The park district said it is working to obtain the additional funding needed to complete the project.

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