wastewater treatment – Enviro Updates

Sonoma Water awarded nearly $48 million to upgrade lower Russian River wastewater system

May 19, 2026

Amie Windsor, PRESS DEMOCRAT

A long-awaited overhaul of the lower Russian River’s aging wastewater system is on deck after Sonoma Water was awarded a $47.8 million grant from the state.

The money, funded through California’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund program, will support the Russian River Sanitation District’s efforts to rehabilitate the system’s 34 miles of sewer lines and four miles of mains, serving 3,300 parcels between Rio Nido to Vacation Beach in Guerneville.

“I can’t promise anything, but I think we’re going to see a significant benefit and improvements to the overall functionality of the system,” Carlos Diaz, deputy director in engineering design with Sonoma Water said.

The award is the largest ever for Sonoma Water, the parent agency that first applied for the grant in 2019. It has seen repeated spills on its watch linked to the Neeley Road plant. The latest, and largest in more than 40 years, came in January, when an estimated 5.5 million gallons of wastewater, including untreated sewage, overflowed from the treatment plant into the lower Russian River for more than three days.

WaterRussian River, Sonoma Water, wastewater, wastewater treatment

Untreated wastewater spill reported in lower Russian River, people urged to ‘stay away’

January 6, 2026

Anna Armstrong, PRESS DEMOCRAT

People are being asked to stay away from the lower Russian River after an unknown volume of untreated wastewater spilled from a sewage treatment plant in Guerneville during the tail-end of a storm that drenched Sonoma County and flooded many roads across the region.

Heavy overnight rainfall — part of the region’s prolonged atmospheric river — caused storage ponds at the facility to overflow early Tuesday morning, said Stuart Tiffen, a spokesman for Sonoma Water, which operates the Russian River Treatment Plant.

Affected residents were alerted of the spill Tuesday morning, officials said.

Tiffen described the spill as an “ongoing situation” and said it is currently unknown how many residents are impacted or how much wastewater, including raw sewage, is spilling into the river.

WaterRussian River, Sonoma Water, wastewater discharge, wastewater treatment

Seismic retrofit, repairs planned at regional wastewater treatment plant

February 17, 2025

Paulina Pineda, PRESS DEMOCRAT

Improvements are planned at the regional Laguna Wastewater Treatment Plant serving Santa Rosa and other cities to reduce risks of failure during an earthquake and repair other damage at the aging facility.

The repairs are planned within the headworks facility, the plant’s so-called workhorse where raw sewage is first collected and pretreated before it flows through the rest of the facility.

A city-funded study of the facility’s seismic loading and structural condition found significant deficiencies.

Gases emitted during the treatment process also have led concrete and metallic components of the facility to crack and corrode, said Tetyana Mokvyts, a water reuse engineer with Santa Rosa Water.

WaterLaguna de Santa Rosa, Laguna Wastewater Treatment Plant, Santa Rosa, sewage, The Geysers, wastewater, wastewater treatment

Occidental, home of sky-high sewage rates, eyes outlet in Graton, but some residents object

January 29, 2020

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.

Land Use, Sustainable LivingGraton, Occidental, sewer systems, wastewater, wastewater treatment

Septic systems Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL): How this rule impacts us

July 13, 2019

Vesta Copestakes, SONOMA COUNTY GAZETTE

In mid-June, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors took action to meet State mandated septic system regulations that protect water quality and public health.

“Our Local Agency Management Program balances state regulations with local septic policy,” said Board Chair David Rabbitt. “In some areas we are providing more flexibility to homeowners. For example, the new policy no longer requires septic system review for certain building improvements to existing structures.”

Community education and engagement was a central component of the regulation update process. The County hosted six community meetings, met with numerous community associations, welcomed comments in person and online, and provided materials to educate people on the process and technical details.

This has been a VERY long process with community meetings going back decades, yet STILL the problem remains complicated for homeowners from the headwaters of the Russian River, all the way throughout the watershed out to the sea. The estimate is that 18,000 homes will have to comply, so you can see this could take a while!

A central component of Sonoma County’s Local Agency Management Program is the County’s updated Onsite Waste TreatmentSystems (OWTS) Manual. This manual provides the regulations, procedural and technical details governing individual onsite wastewater treatment systems (also referred to as septic systems). The four main changes to local septic requirements relate to:

• Repairs, replacement systems, and new systems;

• Qualified consultants and OWTS designers; and

• Building permit thresholds for septic system review.

The approved changes to the OWTS Manual takes effect July 1, 2019, but it could be another five years before all systems are in place to clean up the problem that impacts water quality along the Russian River and all tributaries leading to the river.

TMDL stands for Total Maximum Daily Load

What that means is how much human waste can the river handle before it becomes toxic for fish, wildlife and humans.

People always bring up that not only human waste ends up in the river, but what they may not know is that human waste is easily differentiated from animal waste, and it’s the human waste that poses the problem.
What’s the major contributor of human waste?

OWTS – Onsite Wastewater Treatment Systems. They are not always SEPTIC systems (a tank that pretreats/decomposes water and waste before the water enters a leach system which disperses the wastewater into soil). They are also often Cesspools (a box that leaches waste into the soil without treatment).
Options to cesspools and septic systems are available…

Sewer systems – complicated and too expensive for small, rural communities).

Sustainable Living, Waterseptic systems, TMDLs, wastewater, wastewater treatment

Santa Rosa proclaims flood emergency after 250 million gallons of treated sewage released into streams

March 5, 2019

Will Schmitt, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Santa Rosa officials said Tuesday that managers at the city’s wastewater plant have been forced to release at least 250 million gallons of treated sewage into two creeks and the nearby Laguna de Santa Rosa amid record inflow to the facility that began in last week’s storm.

The three-day deluge pushed more than five times the normal flow of wastewater and runoff into the city’s Laguna de Santa Rosa plant, City Manager Sean McGlynn told the City Council on Tuesday. It was the highest inflow ever recorded at the site, according to the city.

To avoid overwhelming the Llano Road facility, managers began last Wednesday releasing fully treated sewage into Santa Rosa and Colgan creeks and the rain-swollen Laguna, which overtook city blocks on the eastern edge of Sebastopol, including the upscale Barlow shopping and business district.

The emergency release is ongoing, city officials said Tuesday. All three waterways drain into the Russian River.

McGlynn’s report came as the City Council affirmed a local emergency declaration he made last week at the end of the storm. The move is meant to ensure the city has both the flexibility and legal protection to alter operations at its wastewater plant, where flows have abated but remain higher than normal.

Partially treated waste also was diverted last week into storage basins, with plans now underway to fully treat that sewage. That diversion took place from late Tuesday to Thursday afternoon and has not impacted nearby waterways, according to the city.

The plant has enough remaining storage space to handle the extra volume from this week’s rain, Santa Rosa Water officials said. They have yet to discover any damage at the plant stemming from the past storm, which dumped a one-day record of 5.66 inches of rain on Santa Rosa.

WaterLaguna de Santa Rosa, Russian River, stormwater, wastewater discharge, wastewater treatment