It doesn't sound like a radical idea: Watering Golden Gate Park's meadows and bowers with treated wastewater.
But for a city that for 75 years has relied on a pristine water supply from the Sierra Nevada, it is.
Today, San Francisco's water utility will unveil a proposal for the city's first large-scale water recycling project, an arc-shaped facility near Ocean Beach that would filter and disinfect 2 million gallons of sewer and storm water each day for use on 1,000 acres of San Francisco land.
The $152 million Westside Recycled Water Project would be used to water Golden Gate Park, the Presidio Golf Course and Lincoln Park.
For San Francisco, the system marks a fundamental shift in water policy. Since the 1930s, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission - which now also serves two dozen Peninsula cities - has been drawing the majority of its water from the Tuolumne River in the Sierra Nevada.
The city's tap water, most of which is collected in the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, is considered so pure that federal regulators don't require it to be filtered. But opponents have condemned the city's reliance on the far-off watershed ever since San Francisco power brokers succeeded in damming the river and flooding the verdant Hetch Hetchy Valley.
Conservationists have insisted that San Francisco and its partner cities draw on subterranean water stores and install high-tech recycling systems to reduce the 265 million gallons a day diverted from the Tuolumne. In other words, they say, don't water flowers and flush toilets with pristine mountain water.
"They have a point," said Steve Ritchie, assistant general manager of the PUC's water enterprise division. "Recycled water is part of California's future, and it's time (San Francisco) got with the program."
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