Sanitation Rates

The Triunfo Sanitation District owns 1/3 of the Tapia Water Reclamation Facility. The other 2/3 of the facility is owned by Las Virgenes. This arrangement began in 1964. In that year a Joint Powers Authority (JPA) was established between Las Virgenes and Triunfo Sanitation Districts to cooperatively treat wastewater for these two bordering areas, which share the Malibu Creek watershed. Once the agreement was in place, construction began on the wastewater treatment facility that would be named Tapia Water Reclamation Facility. Tapia began operating at 0.5 million gallons per day in 1965. In 1972, the district began the practice of applying recycled water from Tapia to local landscapes.
In light of burgeoning local population in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tapia’s capacity was again expanded to its ultimate build-out of 16 million gallons per day. One year later, the JPA began operations at the Rancho Las Virgenes Composting Facility which transforms biosolids extracted from wastewater into market-ready soil amendment.

Sanitation Rates are governed by three things:

  1. The cost of Capital (i.e. paying for the debt incurred to build the facility).
  2. The cost of waste disposal
  3. The cost of operating the treatment plant.

In order to keep rates low the cost of operations must be kept low. As a Board member I will scrutinize the cost of operations. I will also explore the possibilities of other cheaper disposal methods.