unincorporated area, unlisted in the 1970 Census but with a population of more than 7,000 a decade later. Arcata's sewage system, though more modern, had failed on occasion. All told, the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board estimated, Arcata, Eureka, and McKinleyville dumped about 3.5 million gallons of inadequately treated waste water into Humboldt Bay daily.

Two major engineering studies, one by a private firm and one by the state Water Resources Control Board, recommended a regional system in which towns along the bay would pipe raw sewage under the bay to a consolidated plant that would discharge its effluent into the ocean beyond. The board moved to enforce compliance with this plan, although a later report from its consultants estimated that it would cost up to 15 percent more than a system that would discharge into the bay.

Meantime, Arcata had joined with Eureka to commission a study that would help these two communities meet the tougher requirements of the 1972 federal Clean Water amendments. The engineering firm they hired recommended a bay-discharge system that would cost $16 million, 87.5 percent of which would be paid by the federal and state governments. By contrast, the estimated capital cost of the regional, ocean-discharge plan was $21 million in 1975.

The state Water Resources Control Board, under pressure from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, rejected the Arcata-Eureka proposal, insisting on the costlier regional plant. Yet the Arcata City Council, ignoring its city manager's advice, decided to prepare a counter-proposal. Talking, consulting, and weighing consequences were about to begin in earnest. Although the council had a clear idea of what it did not want, its notion of what it did want was only just taking shape, based in part on the findings of George Allen.

As early as the 1960s Allen, a fisheries expert on the faculty at Humboldt State, had raised salmon in small ponds in a mixture of waste water and sea water. By 1974 Dr. Robert Gearheart, a professor of environmental resources engineering, also at Humboldt State, was telling the city about scientific evidence that both plant and animal life in wetlands areas helped to "polish" effluent. Wetlands treatment systems, he believed, could make waste water environmentally safe for discharge into bays and estuaries.

In September 1974 Arcata applied to the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board for permission to let the city set up its own "low-tech" alternative system that would combine waste-water treatment with salmon ranching. The city needed a variance from the policy that prohibited direct discharge of effluent in the bay. The regional board denied it, insisting on compliance with state and federal policies promoting area-wide solutions.