On a foggy afternoon in tiny Arcata, Calif., strollers ambling through coastal marshland seem caught in the colors of an impressionist canvas. As they walk past, sandpipers and pelicans patrol the edge of Humboldt Bay. Just inland, a freshwater swamp is alive with thousands of mallard, teal and pintail ducks. Egrets and herons poke among islands of leathery bulrush. Joggers are framed against fields of daisies and Queen Anne's lace. One walker, former City Councilman Sam Pennisi, proudly points to a sewage pipe spewing dark water into the bay. "This," he tells a visitor, "is what home-rule democracy is ! all about!" Hold on, Sam. Mixing sewage and wildlife, then bragging about it in the name of democracy, doesn't sound like common sense. But Arcata (pop. 14,600), a timber and fishing town in Northern California populated by a curious mix of rural curmudgeons, refugees from suburbia, and college students, often thinks differently about things. Pennisi and his companions, Humboldt State University professor George Allen and HSU environmental engineer Robert Gearheart, are showing off an environmental vision they and others championed for more than a decade: a wildlife habitat and public park that help dispose of the city's sewage.
If the Arcata Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary sounds like the Whole Earth catalog gone bonkers, listen carefully. Sewage and wetlands wildlife, like each other when the sewage is free of industrial metals, Arcata has found. Since this is the case in most small and midsize American cities, combining them is technically easy. The swamp substitutes for some of the high-cost stages of sewage treatment. But take caution from weary Arcatans: skip the politics. The city's sewage saga sounds more like Gilbert and Sullivan than John Muir's diaries.
The story began 15 years ago. California was fat with grant money from the 1972 Federal Clean Water Act, so state bureaucrats planned a regional sewage system for Arcata and two neighboring cities accused of dumping inadequately treated wastewater into Humboldt Bay. The plan envisioned a network of pipelines carrying sewage from the bay's communities to a central disposal plant. New state legislation banned pumping waste-water into bays and estuaries unless a city's effluents "enhanced" them.
But Arcatans began to worry about environmental overkill. The idea of sewer pipes running amuck through bucolic farm and forest lands frightened them. And the system's budget, a mix of federal grants and local assessments, ballooned to $56 million. Frank Klopp, Arcata's gravel-voiced public-works director, concluded that maintenance costs might force him to double the city's sewage rates. Klopp, known as "Klippity" in a city hall addicted to folksy nicknames, took himself to the mayor's office. "We really ought to get out," he growled. Gradually, others agreed. The bay's tugboat captains were worried that a submerged pipe might snag their anchors. City Councilman Dan Hauser, now a state assemblyman, feared an invasion of developers along a pipe near Highway 101. Then a citizens' committee in nearby Manila, a residential ( district near a planned pipeline, sued and stalled the project for nearly two years.