The city of Clearlake is asking residents to apply for a seat on the board that sets their sewer rates. The seat doesn’t exist yet.
Whether it ever does turns on Aug. 18, when the Lake County Board of Supervisors, sitting as the board of the Lake County Sanitation District, holds a public hearing on a plan to remake its own membership. The city said so plainly in the announcement it posted Tuesday: “The proposed reorganization is not yet final.”
Applications are being taken in the meantime, from the Clerk of the Board’s office in Room 109 of the Lake County Courthouse at 255 N. Forbes St. in Lakeport, or online through the county’s Board of Supervisors page. The release lists no deadline and says board service is voluntary.
What the seat would be
The sanitation district, known as LACOSAN, was formed in 1963 and has been governed by the five county supervisors for as long as it has existed. It’s a separate legal entity from the county, it employs no one, and it’s run day to day by Lake County Special Districts staff.
Under the resolution of intent in the supervisors’ July 14 agenda packet, that arrangement changes to a five-member board: the chair of the Board of Supervisors, one other supervisor, the mayor of Clearlake, one other council member and one member of the public.
The two extra government seats aren’t new representation. Each is borrowed from another agency. Kelseyville County Waterworks District No. 3 has handed its representation to the supervisors. Hidden Valley Lake Community Services District wants no part of one. In a June 1 letter, General Manager Paul Kelley wrote that his district has “no operational interest in LACOSAN” and would rather see the seat go to “another non-County municipal government — such as the City of Clearlake.” The county’s resolution takes him up on it.
That leaves the fifth seat, the public one, as the only place at the table not already spoken for by an agency.
The increase on the shelf
The district has a five-year sewer increase sitting on the shelf that would roughly double a single-family bill. The board set it aside in March and hasn’t brought it back.
A rate study presented to the supervisors on March 24 recommends raising operating rates in the Southeast Regional system, which serves Clearlake and Lower Lake, by 50% in the first year, 20% in the second, then 3% a year for three more. The Proposition 218 notice drafted alongside it puts the single-family base rate at $54.04 a month, up from $36.28.
The bigger jump is in a separate line item. The capital improvement fee, currently $5.02 a month, would go to $31.63. Add the flat $4.16 bond charge and a single-family bill rises from $45.46 to $89.83 a month.
The board didn’t adopt the increase. The minutes of that March 24 meeting read: “There was board consensus to return post emergency in 6 months for the SouthEast Regional Rate Study Consideration and consensus to move forward with the Lands End Study.” The Lands End study went forward. Clearlake’s went on hold, and the notice that would set a hearing date still reads “TBD.”
That’s what the seat would be voting on. The hearing that decides the increase hasn’t been called, and the board that would call it is the one being rebuilt Aug. 18. Under Proposition 218, ratepayers can stop an increase only if a majority of affected property owners file written protests.
The rate notice is blunt about what happens otherwise. Without an increase, it says, the Southeast system “will operate at a deficit and be forced to borrow from other County funds.” The rate study behind it puts operating costs at about $6.04 million against about $2.85 million in service charges this year.
The county has already reached for other funds once. On June 23 the supervisors, sitting as the district board, adopted Resolution 2026-57 cancelling $1,012,708 from the Southeast system’s operating reserve to refill the district’s budget after the Jan. 11 force-main rupture on Robin Lane.
A 1983 decision, undone
Clearlake incorporated in 1980. State law shifts a sanitation district’s board composition when a city forms inside it, and the city acknowledges it didn’t act on that. In May 1983 the council passed Resolution 83-22, which stated that the city “does not now desire to alter the membership” and designated the supervisors as the governing board. It reserved the right to take that back.
Forty-two years later it did. On Nov. 20, 2025, the council voted 5-0 to rescind the 1983 delegation, citing “infrastructure deterioration, inadequate maintenance practices, and insufficient capital planning,” and stating that its requests to meet about governance “have been met with no action from the District.”
The record behind that is long. City Manager Alan Flora’s May 7 staff report counts notices of violation from the regional water board in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2024. The 2024 notice carried three violations and seven additional areas of concern. One of the violations was that the district had no formal capital improvement plan. The report puts total spills from the system since 2007 above 2.8 million gallons, of which it says 1.55 million reached creeks and Clear Lake, and notes that 82% of that volume came in the past five years.
By the city’s count, about 60% of the people LACOSAN serves live inside Clearlake.
The county’s resolution doesn’t adopt any of that. What it concedes is narrower: that the district and the city have “a good-faith disagreement regarding the exact application of Health and Safety Code § 4730” — the statute governing who sits on the board.
What’s still unsettled
The new structure is labeled interim. It holds only until the Local Agency Formation Commission rules on detaching the Southeast Regional system from LACOSAN entirely, which the city has been pushing toward. Hidden Valley Lake is separately pursuing a detachment of its own boundaries.
How the public member is chosen is also not pinned down. The resolution says the seat is “appointed or elected” under Health and Safety Code section 4730.1. That subsection describes the tie-breaking member as either a supervisor named by the board or a resident of the district elected by its voters to a four-year term. The county is taking applications.
The supervisors also took up a capital improvement plan for the district on July 14, two years after the water board cited it for not having one — 17 projects, $10,684,197 over four years, covering all five systems LACOSAN runs. The two largest Southeast items are a $1.9 million lift station upgrade in the Bay Street area and a $1.67 million pipeline replacement program.
The Clearlake council backed the plan on July 16 and named Mayor Dirk Slooten and Council Member Jessica Hooten as the city’s representatives if the seats are created, according to Lake County News, which reported the vote.
The hearing is set for 9:15 a.m. Aug. 18 in the supervisors’ chambers at 255 N. Forbes St. in Lakeport. The board hears objections first, then votes on whether the fifth seat exists at all.