Bad odors from the sludge drying beds, which contain treated waste solids, bother neighbors of the town of Sahuarita's Wastewater Treatment Facility.

Sarah Garrecht Gassen / arizona daily star

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How Sahuarita is handling its population boom is a good case study of what happens when towns don't adequately plan for growth.

The town has asked Pima County for permission to ship its raw sewage to the Green Valley wastewater treatment plant, because its own plant is about to hit its limit and a planned expansion won't be completed for months.

Sahuarita, a bedroom community south of Tucson, has exploded from a rural town just topping 4,600 people in 2001 to a suburb of nearly 18,200 by 2006. The driving force is Rancho Sahuarita, a planned development that heavily advertises family-friendly parks, pools and schools on television, billboards and in newspapers.

Because of its location, the development is popular with people who work along the border, and those who work in Tucson. Homes are going up with lightning speed, and commercial development is starting to move in. A Fry's Marketplace is under construction at Sahuarita Road and Interstate 19, and there are plans for a hospital, retail and restaurants.

Rancho Sahuarita now contains 3,800 homes, with about 8,000 more planned. The spike in new homes and the plans for commercial development mean more people. With that come busier roads and more crowded schools.

But all those homes and businesses also mean new toilets — plus sinks, dishwashers, washing machines and bathtubs. That's a lot of new wastewater to treat.

As the arrangement with Pima County shows, Sahuarita was caught unprepared to handle its dramatic growth.

Residents near the sewage treatment plant complain of foul odors emanating from it. Part of the problem is a lack of vision by both the Rancho Sahuarita developer and the town in allowing homes to be built so close to the sewage facility, which was present before homes started going up. Their experience should be a lesson to other fast-growing communities — and to people buying homes near sewage treatment plants.

The plans for Rancho Sahuarita were approved in 1996, two years after Sahuarita incorporated. Looking around the expanses of desert, it may have been difficult to envision the sea of tile roofs that would sprout up within a decade. Other Southern Arizona communities, such as Marana and Oro Valley, were going through their growing pains at the time. They could have provided careful observers important lessons in how quiet, sleepy parts of a community can turn into bustling suburbs seemingly overnight.

Sahuarita Town Manager Jim Stahle says the town failed to recognize what was happening quickly enough. "It was an exponential growth rate, and all along you think it can't continue at this breakneck speed, and we were wrong, it did," he said in an interview this week.

Because of that blind spot, Sahuarita has come up short. Several times last summer the town's treatment plant exceeded the 250,000 gallons of wastewater it was permitted to handle per day, according to Arizona Department of Environmental Quality spokesman Mark Shaffer.

An expansion to 490,000 gallons daily capacity was completed in October, but not before ADEQ told homebuilders that residents couldn't move in because the plant permits weren't ready.

Rancho Sahuarita has already outgrown that expansion. According to ADEQ, the Sahuarita plant routinely hits an average of 482,000 gallons daily. While town officials say the plant can physically handle more flow than that, ADEQ disagrees, so it should approve the deal Sahuarita has made with Pima County to ship the wastewater to another plant if necessary. The town will have to pay to transport the waste and treat it at the county plant. The arrangement is necessary, but could have been avoided.

Sahuarita will soon apply to ADEQ for another 200,000-gallon interim expansion, which Stahle said should be finished by December. The town will also seek a permit to cover a new indoor addition, at the same site, that would boost the capacity to 1.5 million gallons a day — still just half of what Rancho Sahuarita will need when it's built out. The 1.5 million expansion is expected to be done by 2009.

The town is right in applying for permits for the two expansions at once. But Sahuarita will pay at double or triple the regular fees, which could reach $300,000, to fast-track the permits through ADEQ in about six months. Because these expansions are within the Rancho Sahuarita service area, they are not affected by a measure voters approved in March that requires a vote before the town can approve new treatment plants outside that boundary.

The town is doing a good job of notifying residents of what's happening with the wastewater treatment plant through mailers and its Web site (www.ci.sahuarita.az.us/).

Stahle says it doesn't make sense to put a moratorium on building, because by the time homes that get permits today are built, the interim expansion should be ready. But unless Sahuarita slows construction, it will remain behind the curve, proving that a town can grow too fast.

Restraint is sometimes necessary. Faster isn't always better.