"waivers". OCSD was the largest waiver. This awful situation took years to develop, during which incremental growth overloaded a system which was designed in the 1960's -- when no one thought that OC residents would ever outnumber OC Orange Trees.

On the losing side, 10 Directors were in favor of the waiver (from Villa Park, Santa Ana, Garden Grove, Placentia, Tustin, Brea, Midway/Westminster, Yorba Linda, Cypress and Stanton). Chief among them was Placentia Director Norm Eckenrode, formerly the Chairman of the Board. Eckenrode's letter to the editor ("Secondary-treatment costs will have impact on businesses", Sep. 22) both misleads and conceals important facts, typical during OCSD's Eckenrode era.

While the vote against the waiver was 13 to 12, two of 12 (Jempsa of Los Alamitos, and Sigler of Buena Park) wanted an even stronger resolution against the waiver. Both their Councils had unanimously voted to end the waiver. So it was not, as Eckenrode implies, a "bare majority" against the waiver. Nor is it a "cave-in" to finally meet minimal secondary wastewater treatment standards, 30 years after they were legislated.

Eckenrode's concern for the "impact" on business is also misleading. Eckenrode lived high off the Taxpayer himself. Directors earn $170.00 for attending each of their many gourmet-catered "committee" meetings every month. Reputedly, state law only allows Directors to be paid for six such meetings a month. They also receive pay as City Council members and from other Districts (Water, Mosquito, etc.). After all, left to their own devices and without public scrutiny, some officials would pay themselves for dozens of meetings each month.

As Chairman of the Board, Eckenrode enabled himself to attend multiple meetings each day, receiving $20,415.40 in 2001 from OCSD alone. Taxpayers and Ratepayers do not generally know that this traffic in "meetings" occurs, or that getting on multiple "boards" seems the stairway to wealth for ambitious politicians.

Eckenrode states "...Disneyland's cost will increase from $300,000 to just over $1,000,000 per year; Kimberley Clark's will rise from 400,000 to $750,000 a year...". Yet there are no studies to back these numbers up. In the words of OCSD staff (SANITATION, story in OCR Oct. 21, 2001, page News 4), cost "estimates...were just that -- estimates...", and projected "...rate increases could ... differ from predictions...".

Bloated and misleading cost figures, as well as what OCSD's financial advisor referred to as a need for a fiscal controller, are typical of the Eckenrode era at OCSD.

Kimberley Clark is charged based on the dissolved solids--paper pulp--in its wastewater. They could make a business decision to expand their pre-treatment program at a far lower cost than treatment after it's mixed with waste from other contributors. Eckenrode ignores the business-like, fiscally responsible Kimberley Clark approach, which goes to solve the problem, and continues to generate misleading figures.

Eckenrode, and the few retrograde Directors, stand in stark contrast to the brilliance of the Directors who voted to end the waiver -- who know that putting off the problem to the next generation is only going to make it worse.

The wise Directors -- McCracken from Anaheim, L. Cook from Fountain Valley, Boardman from Huntington Beach, Campbell from Seal Beach, Jempsa from Los Alamitos, Sigler from Buena Park, Walker from La Palma, Brady from IRWD and Krom from Irvine, Steve Anderson from La Habra, Alvarez from Orange, Bankhead from Fullerton, Adams from Newport, Ferryman from Costa Mesa and Wilson from the Board of Supervisors met the future head on. As the new Chair, McCracken points out that a comprehensive water use and treatment policy that maximizes our resources and looks to eventual total reclamation of all "wastewater" is necessary.

Resources are finite, especially water resources. We cannot seriously propose to seize a never-ending supply of fresh water from "somewhere else". Nor does good business sense allow us to foolishly use it -- currently 700 acre feet per day -- to carry away our waste products and foul the Ocean. When OC was mostly farms, we could get away with dumping it "somewhere else", but there is a limit.

But too much is known of OCSD to ever go back to past slipshod oversight. The jig is up, as OC moves into its own as a major urban center from its past as a sparsely populated farming community. Eckenrode looks to the past, more responsible Directors look to our even more crowded future.

Respectfully,
___________
Doug Korthof

etc.

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