AFB LAND LEASE UNCERTAIN COUNCIL TO MULL SANITATION DISTRICT REQUEST.

Byline: Jim Skeen Staff Writer

LANCASTER - Sanitation district officials' proposal to lease land from Edwards Air Force Base for evaporation ponds is facing likely opposition from Lancaster city officials that will likely send the district to look for alternatives.

City staffers are siding with state Sen. William ``Pete'' Knight, R- Palmdale, in opposing storing treated sewage effluent on the base.

At their Monday meeting, the City Council is scheduled to vote to direct Mayor Frank Roberts how to vote in his capacity as a member of the sanitation district board.

Knight, a former Edwards test pilot who once served as the base's vice commander, believes a lease could lead to other agreements that would nibble away at land until the base could no longer perform its mission.

Roberts said he believes the council will agree with Knight and will also oppose the plan.

``This will be the city and the council telling me how to vote,'' Roberts said. ``This will force the sanitation district to look for alternative storage areas.''

Los Angeles County Sanitation District 14 is facing a 2005 deadline from state water regulators to stop the overflow of treated effluent from the Lancaster sewage treatment plant onto Rosamond Dry Lake.

So sanitation officials are talking with Air Force officials about the possibility of leasing four square miles of vacant land in the base's southwest corner.

Any such lease agreement would require approval from the Pentagon and the sanitation district's three-member board of directors.

The other members of the district's board are Palmdale Mayor Jim Ledford and Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. Roberts said he believes at least one if not both of the other board members will oppose leasing Edwards land.

Phone calls to Ledford and Yaroslavsky seeking comment were not returned Friday.

Proponents of the lease proposal say it would be less expensive and ultimately less costly to sewage district customers than purchasing privately owned land.

Acquiring large amounts of land would likely require going to court in eminent domain proceedings to compel owners to sell, and that would be expensive, with some preliminary estimates as high as $30 million to $40 million, according to county sanitation officials.

``They say it will cost the ratepayers more,'' Roberts said. ``I'm not certain that's true. It would cost us more if Edwards lost those emergency runways.''

Roberts said he has asked Lancaster's acting director of public works, Neil Hudson, to look at possible alternative sites for effluent storage.

The occasional overflows onto the dry lake bed are a symptom of a greater problem: the district's need for additional capacity to handle the region's projected growth. The Lancaster plant has the capacity to handle about 12 million gallons of sewage a day, but will need to handle 22.2 million to 25.7 million gallons per day by 2020 to deal with anticipated population growth.

District officials said the Edwards land, if they were to lease it, would not be enough, and that the ultimate solution will be a plan that includes agricultural use and municipal recycling.

Lancaster officials are working on a proposal initially to use 1.5 million gallons of recycled water to irrigate street median landscaping.

District officials also are moving ahead with an environmental impact report that looks at other options, including using the water on crops not used for human consumption, such as alfalfa, or in orchards, where the water would touch only the roots and not the fruit, or by creating more evaporation ponds around the treatment plant on Avenue D near Sierra Highway.

The problem of sewage spilling onto the lake beds dates back to 1960, shortly after the county's Lancaster Water Reclamation Plant was built at 1865 W. Ave. D.

To stop the flow, a dike was built along Avenue C in 1961. The water stopped by the dike formed what is now known as Piute Ponds. Over the years, marshlike habitat formed around the ponds and waterfowl began using the area.

Piute Ponds originally provided sufficient storage and evaporative capacity to keep the wastewater from going onto the dry lake bed about a half-mile away.

But as the Antelope Valley population grew, the capacity could not handle the additional wastewater and overflows occurred onto the lake bed.

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Photo:

Treated sewage from the Lancaster sewage treatment plant spills onto Rosamond Dry lake in an Edwards Air Force Base file photo.