Guy Kovner, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Two Italian-style restaurants have drawn generations of diners to Occidental while serving pasta, pizza and soup — in recent years under the burden of the steepest sewage treatment rates in Sonoma County and among the highest in California.
Negri’s Original Italian Restaurant and the Union Hotel, both run by local families, pay about $120,000 a year in wastewater fees included in their property tax bills, shouldering much of the cost in a west county sanitation district that serves about 100 properties.
“You gotta sell a lot of ravioli to pay for that,” said Al Negri, former operator of his family’s eatery, established in 1943. “It would be fantastic if we got some relief.”
There could be some help coming from Graton, about 6 miles to the east with an underutilized wastewater plant that would profit from handling Occidental’s output of 18,000 gallons of sewage a day.
But there’s a catch: Graton’s plant is on a wooded 20-acre site north of the town with no road access, and finding a place to connect with the community’s sewer system has proved elusive. Neighborhood protests thwarted so many attempts to deal with Occidental’s wastewater that officials resorted two years ago to trucking it to a plant in an industrial area next to the county airport.
Residents of the 53-unit Blue Spruce Mobilehome Lodge on Green Valley Road in Sebastopol mobilized quickly after learning of the Graton Community Service District’s plan to build a wastewater receiving station 3 feet from the entrance to their park and 20 feet from the nearest mobile home, occupied by a 100-year-old woman and her son-in-law.
Graton’s plan calls for pumping six truckloads of untreated sewage a day into a valve on a concrete pad at the edge of a gas station at the corner of Green Valley Road and Highway 116.
A petition signed by 53 residents, some from the same family, objected to the project, and 15 people attended a Graton district board meeting last week, complaining about lack of advance notice of the project and objecting to the potential noise, traffic and odor.
Read more at https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/10618162-181/occidental-home-of-sky-high-sewage