Political Quotes

“I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. For 40 years, the city of San Diego has treated the region's sewage through the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant. It is a chemically enhanced primary treatment facility that treats wastewater to a level that can be discharged into the ocean without harming the environment. The Clean Water Act generally requires sewer systems to implement a secondary level of treatment. However, scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have consistently said that forcing San Diego ratepayers to pay billions of dollars to upgrade the Point Loma facility to secondary treatment would be a waste of money because the enhanced advanced treatment the plant currently provides, combined with its 4-mile-long outfall, causes no harm to the ocean environment. In fact, the construction of a new facility along the coastline could do more harm than good. For these reasons, San Diego has been allowed to avoid building a new facility through a Federal waiver process at a cost of millions of dollars every 5 years. Water has always been in short supply in southern California, yet, during my first years on the San Diego City Council in the early 2000s, I was one of only three council members to support blackwater recycling to improve the reliability of our regional water supply.…”