Huntington Beach residents in battle with O.C. Sanitation District over easement

Frank Clarke has lived at his house on Rhone Lane in Huntington Beach since the early 1970s. A couple of years after buying the property, he installed a pool, getting the proper permits from the city.

Clarke didn’t think anything of it for decades. But in December he got a letter from the Orange County Sanitation District saying they needed to access a 30-foot easement in the back of his property, which contains a sewer pipe.

The pool needed to go. OC San wants Clarke to meet with them and sign a paper acknowledging that, but so far he’s signed nothing.

“To me, somebody should have flagged [the construction] and said, ‘No, you can’t do it, because you’re on an easement,’” said Clarke, who turns 80 in June. “The communication process should have been better. If I was Orange County San, maybe every 10 years send out a notice, ‘Don’t forget, part of your property is on an easement.’ But the first time I heard from Orange County Sanitation was with that December letter.”

The public utility finds itself in a battle with 29 residents on the block on the west side of Rhone Lane, south of Heil Avenue.

Resident Frank Clarke’s backyard with pool shows the area that would be impacted where the O.C. Sanitation District is seeking to enforce a 30-foot-wide sewer easement.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

OC San wants to initiate the Miller-Holder Rhone Lane Sewer Easement Clean-Up. It says it needs to do this to ensure the public’s health and safety, and prevent sewage spills that could be environmentally damaging. The 69-inch wastewater pipeline, installed in 1959 when most of the area was farmland, is nearing the end of of its lifespan.

The pipeline transports 10 million gallons of wastewater daily, according to OC San, and is part of a regional wastewater pipeline system that serves Huntington Beach and seven other Orange County cities.

The cleanup is projected to start in September and run through December 2025, according to officials.

Jennifer Cabral, an administration manager with OC San, said there’s currently not enough space for their trucks, which range in width from 8 to 10 feet, to access the easement.

“We have our crews that are driving on an active railroad site right now, because we can’t get our trucks on our easement that was intended for access to the regional sewer line,” Cabral said. “We’ve been working around it as much as we can, but it’s gotten to a point where it just continues to get worse.

“It’s an unfortunate situation, and we understand that, but this has been something that’s been kicked down the line for years and years and years. We finally have gotten to a point where it gets to get done, because this pipeline has been aging and we need to be ready to do construction when it’s needed.”

Resident Frank Clarke’s backyard shows the area that would be impacted where the Orange County Sanitation District is seeking to enforce a 30-foot wide sewer easement.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

A letter sent to residents on Dec. 1 listed encroachments that each homeowner has built on the easement and needs to remove. For Clarke, that list includes his swimming pool and related equipment, pool decking, a block wall, wood fencing and landscaping.

The utility wanted residents to sign the settlement agreement within 60 days, and that Feb. 1 deadline is quickly approaching. Under the compromise, OC San would remove many of the encroachments at its own expense before constructing a 6-foot cinder block wall.

Clarke hasn’t signed anything yet, though.

Affected property owners went to the Huntington Beach City Council for help. The council voted unanimously on Tuesday night to ask for up to 120 days of more time for the residents. The next night, at the O.C. Sanitation District board meeting, the board agreed to offer at most a one-month extension, until the end of February.

The answers aren’t satisfactory for Phillip and Andrea Rizzo, who live a few houses down from Clarke on Rhone Lane. They have an above-ground pool that was installed last year, a swing and a fire pit all on the back portion of their property that would be affected.

Resident Andrea Rizzo talks about the impacted area in her backyard where the O.C. Sanitation District is seeking to enforce a sewer easement in Huntington Beach.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

The pool has a ramp behind it to accommodate their 19-year-old son, A.J., who has cerebral palsy and is wheelchair-bound.

“If you judge it according to the manhole, the pipe is somewhere between where the ramp is and the fence is,” Andrea Rizzo said. “They haven’t told us where the pipe is.”

Phillip Rizzo, who spoke at Tuesday’s City Council meeting, said he would be fine with hiring a crane and moving the pool while OC San accesses the easement. But with the utility’s current offer, he would no longer be able to fit the pool in the reduced space of his backyard.

He believes that relocating the pipe when it needs to be replaced would be a better solution than taking backyard space from each house and constructing an 1,800-foot-long wall.

“If the pipe’s at the end of its life, then let’s discuss it when the pipe’s scheduled to be replaced,” he said. “If it’s replaced in 2025, then give us until 2025 to remove the alleged encroachments. This arbitrary, ‘We need to clean it up just in case,’ with no dialogue, is just not a solution. There’s a lot that’s unknown. To give us a 60-day letter on Dec. 1 is just dirty pool.”

Cabral said OC San needs to go through a public contract and get a contractor to pay an estimated $1 million to mediate the situation and get rid of the obstructions on top of the easement.

“We’re using public funds through our ratepayers to compensate these 29 property owners that did something that they weren’t supposed to,” she said. “That kind of puts us at risk, too, but it’s because we understand that it’s an unfortunate situation. Just because it was a bad decision and/or situation doesn’t mean we shouldn’t correct it, because we’re legally responsible for this pipeline. If something were to happen today, we could be found negligent.

“About three years ago or so, the board told us that we needed to take an active role in our property management, get an active understanding of where our pipelines are, where our easements are and actively manage them. We weren’t actively managing them previously. We were working around situations, but now it’s gotten to a point where the trucks that are being purchased now are bigger.”

Cathy Monastra shows the area that would be impacted at her Huntington Beach home on Rhone Lane.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

Mayor Pro Tem Pat Burns is Huntington Beach’s representative on the OC Sanitation District board. He said during Tuesday’s Council meeting that the utility is worried about the weight on top of the pipe.

“It would a hell of a mess if something happened and they didn’t get to it right away,” Burns said. “I don’t suggest that we get between OC San and the owners in a legally binding way.”

Councilman Dan Kalmick agreed with Rizzo that a 60-day notice sent at the holidays struck him the wrong way. He also shared residents’ concerns that more open space behind the properties wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

“You’ve got an area that property holders can’t see back there,” he said. “In the police blotter, we see there’s trash fires back there and we have unhoused folks back there. To give more footage back there, I don’t think that’s a great solution. Does the easement need to be executed at 30 feet? Can it be 28½ feet, and that saves somebody’s pool?”

City Atty. Michael Gates said the language of the easement document itself is sloppily worded and overly complicated.

“I think the homeowners have a point,” Gates said during Tuesday’s meeting, adding that he’s met with several of the residents as well as lawyers from OC San. “An easement basically holds that I have a right of certain use to somebody else’s property. But when that easement, as OC San is basically saying, transmutes into complete entire ownership and total possession of the entire ground surface, that’s really not an easement. That’s owning it in fee.”

Resident Andrea Rizzo’s backyard shows the area that would be impacted, including an above-ground pool, left, that was installed last year.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

Some residents have asked for a town hall meeting, but OC San has not provided one because every property’s situation is different.

“OC San wants to provide each property owner the opportunity to ask specific questions about their individual situation and not receive generic information in a town hall that could potentially lead to more questions,” Cabral said.

The Rhone Lane residents are still mulling their options. Cathy Monastra and her husband, Scott, have lived at their property for more than 30 years. They planned to meet with OC San on Thursday.

Like Clarke, they have an in-ground pool that would be affected by the cleanup.

“There’s zero consideration of us, because if there was, they would give us at least a couple of options,” Cathy Monastra said. “It’s not all or nothing. We built this [pool] for our kids, and we have four grandkids now that enjoy it too.

“We knew there’s an easement, but we didn’t know much other than that. Everything we’ve built has been permitted and approved, so we thought we were doing the right thing. If it’s approved [by the city], it’s like there’s a huge lack of communication between those two entities.”