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(My unincorporated home town of 15,000 will finally get a sewer -- and at what cost!)

Los Osos Sewage Plant Clears Major Hurdle

Opponents vow they will fight on despite property owners’ vote

David Sneed
The Tribune

Los Osos -- Efforts to build a sewage treatment plant for Los Osos have cleared a major hurdle with the announcement Thursday evening that property owners there voted overwhelmingly to foot a large part of the project bill.

A relieved Los Osos Community Services District board of directors told residents that property owners in the community approved an assessment district that will pay for the $84.6 million sewage collection and treatment facility.

The assessment was approved by 85.7 percent of the voters.

“This vote is an indication that property owners understand and support the need to move forward with the construction of a wastewater treatment project,” said Rose Bowker, president of the board.

Opponents of the project, who believe the sewer is both too expensive and unnecessary, vowed to fight on. They are collecting money for a lawsuit to stop the project by challenging the state’s use of a federal law in requiring Los Osos to develop a sewer.

The state Regional Water Quality Control Board has mandated that Los Osos find a replacement for the septic systems now used in the community. State water officials in 1971 found that the community’s ground water was contaminated with nitrates, a common byproduct of septic systems.

Al Barrow, a spokesman for the anti-sewer group Citizens for an Affordable, Safe Environment — or CASE — said the community was intimidated by threats from state water officials to fine the services district if it failed to pass the assessment.

“This is not a surprise,” Barrow said. “When you are told you will be fined $10,000 a day, you don’t have a lot of choice.”

The vote means owners of a typical single-family home in Los Osos will pay about $100 a month for the next 30 years, in addition to a one-time cost of up to $4,500 to dismantle their home’s old septic system and connect to the new sewer system.

County Supervisor Shirley Bianchi, who represents Los Osos, said she was pleased by the vote. Bianchi said she supported the assessment but has stayed neutral on the design of the sewer, leaving it up to the services district to decide that.

District board members urged Los Osos residents to write letters to Congress asking for federal grants to help pay for the sewer and thereby reduce the monthly payment each property owner must make. Rep. Lois Capps, D-Santa Barbara, is working to obtain an appropriation of $7.8 million for the sewer in the 2002 federal budget.

Tattoos: Central Coast Program Gets Rid of Them

When the skin drawings go, often so do the stares and the bias
(God forbid we should have a bias -- Don)

Leila W. Knox
The Tribune

It’s much more than removing ink-embedded symbols of faded love and loyalty.

For participants of the Liberty Tattoo Removal Program, burning away tattoos also is the erasure of invitations to stare and permission to discriminate.

“What really got me is when I went to cash a check at one of the local markets, and I had short sleeves on and they refused to cash the check,” said Daniel Guzman, 40, of Nipomo who is enrolled in the program. “I went back to the market with long sleeves and a tie, and they cashed it.”

Guzman — a former member of a local gang — is one of 100 participants from San Luis Obispo County and Santa Maria having tattoos removed through Liberty, which was started last September when several government, private and nonprofit organizations pooled resources. In exchange for community service, anti-social and gang-related tattoos are removed by laser for free — a procedure that would typically cost $2,000 for even a relatively small tattoo.

“There’s social pluses to having tattoos removed,” said county juvenile services officer Robert Kraft, who helps coordinate the program. “The main focus is to help the participants become productive members of our community.”

Kraft, who works with kids at Juvenile Hall, said the program’s aim is not to label all tattoos as bad or anti-social.

“It’s not to say somebody with a tattoo isn’t productive,” he said.

The treatments are painful but quick, according to some who have had them. A solution is applied to the tattoo to numb the skin. Pulses of light from a laser are directed to the tattoo, causing the pigment to break up. Cells in the body then consume the pigment, and the tattoo fades away.

It typically takes four to five treatments for each tattoo, and there may be slight skin discoloration after the removal.

For each treatment, participants must volunteer 16 hours at a local nonprofit organization. Guzman volunteers at Lifebound Leadership, an Economic Opportunity Commission-run program in Nipomo that offers activities and mentoring to area youth. He says having his gang-related tattoos removed has increased his self-esteem.

But Guzman is only halfway to being tattoo-free. After more than a year of treatments, he has about 85 tattoos — roughly half the number his body once had. He still needs to clear images from his arms of topless women and from his legs of likenesses of Mexican revolutionaries.

Liberty, which was modeled after a program of the same name in Santa Barbara County, is the culmination of more than a year of county Juvenile Justice Commissioner Jim Brabeck’s efforts to organize groups to spearhead the program.

In early 2000, $50,000 from the state and $15,000 from the county were contributed to the program for laser tattoo-removal equipment.

Brabeck then received a pleasant surprise from the equipment manufacturer: for the bargain price of $65,000, the company would ship a perfectly fine, reconditioned machine worth twice that amount.

From there it wasn’t hard to find volunteers and businesses willing to contribute time and supplies. Dr. Jeffrey Herten, a dermatologist, donates his time to remove tattoos once a month at San Luis Obispo’s Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center, which donates space at the hospital for the monthly clinics. The medical center also loans out supplies, and nurses volunteer their time. Liberty quickly found a home for its office thanks to the county and General Hospital on Johnson Avenue in San Luis Obispo.

Almost a year later, the program includes 100 people who want tattoos removed; more than 40 are on a waiting list. Because of its popularity, Liberty will soon be turned over to San Luis Obispo County’s Economic Opportunity Commission.

“It has progressed to such a level of acceptance with people wanting to use this program that we went to EOC and asked them if they would take it over,” Brabeck said.

Santa Maria resident Jennifer Geronimo, 26, had a tattoo with the gang name of an ex-boyfriend removed from the middle finger of her left hand. The woman, who also works and volunteers at Lifebound Leadership, said she got tired of making excuses for the tattoo.

“I didn’t want to have to explain that it was in my past, and my son’s father was a gangbanger in San Jose,” Geronimo said. “When you are living that kind of a lifestyle, you don’t realize that it’s not going to be like that forever.”