David Athey will start in January, managing WRRF, personnel, and major infrastructure projects
The Cayucos Sanitary District was expected to finally fill its vacant general manager’s position, reaching up to Paso Robles to find their new leader.
The CSD was slated at its Nov. 20 meeting to offer the job to David Athey, a 1991 graduate of Cuesta College who earned a Bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering from Cal Poly, SLO (1995), and a Master’s of engineering degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2016.
Athey, who is scheduled to start work in January, would be the permanent replacement for former GM Rick Koon, who left the CSD last February after he moved out of state and had been working remotely. Koon’s employment contract wasn’t renewed following public criticisms for his essentially working remotely, returning to California for board meetings.
The CSD has had a temporary GM, Will Clemens, whom the CSD board hired on an interim basis last June and who will stay at the helm until Athey comes on board.
Athey has a diverse employment history in the public sector — working for a Resource Conservation District, several cities and the state — as well as the private sector.
He currently works as the water division manager for the City of Paso Robles, a position he’s held since 2023.
Prior to that, Athey was the city engineer in Paso Robles from 2017-23 and was the supervising engineer/assistant city engineer for the City of San Luis Obispo (2015-17), according to a resume contained in the CSD’s agenda.
He was also deputy public works director for engineering in Atascadero (2006-15). He was a contract engineer for the Upper Salinas Las Tablas Resource Conservation District (2005-14); and the principal engineer for Athey Civil Engineering in Paso Robles (2001-12).
He worked for the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, a state agency, from 1997-99 and had been with the San Francisco Bay RWQCB from ’97-’99. He was also a site engineer for the ACME Landfill Corp., in Martinez, California, from 1996-97, his first job out of college.
He is a licensed civil engineer in California; a past-president of the American Public Works Association, Central Coast Chapter; and is a member of the American Association of Civil Engineers, the American Water Works Association, and California Rural Water. And he’s even a member of the National Eagle Scout Association.
His salary is $192,000 a year plus benefits, according to the CSD’s report. He will be an “at will” employee “meaning the district can terminate his employment ‘with cause’ or ‘without cause,'” the report said.
With cause means he would have done something wrong or actually illegal to get fired, and without cause means the board doesn’t have to give a reason.
However, according to the report, “If the district terminates Mr. Athey ‘without cause’ during the term of the agreement, the District agrees to pay Mr. Athey a six-month salary severance with six-months’ notice, or if less than six-months’ notice, the District agrees also to pay six months [of] COBRA payments.” COBRA is a means to continue with health insurance benefits after leaving a job.
There’s one other quirk of Athey’s contract, according to the report: “The district agrees to no termination three-months prior to, or after, an election of a board member.”
As the CSD’s GM, Athey will oversee the operations of the district’s collection system and its new Water Resource Recovery Facility (WRRF), and the personnel of the district’s office, maintenance crew and WRRF staff.
He’s also going to have at least a couple of big-ticket items on his plate, including the ultimate disposition of the old sewer Treatment Plant on Atascadero Road in Morro Bay, which is jointly owned with the City of Morro Bay.
That old plant’s future is currently under negotiation. It will likely be demolished and the property eventually made ready for some kind of future redevelopment. Morro Bay has kicked around ideas for some kind of tourism-related reuse, as the property is zoned for commercial/visitor serving uses and sits across the street from Morro Strand State Beach. Cayucos has a 40% interest in the property, as well as an undersea discharge pipeline located about a mile north of Morro Rock and extending about a half mile offshore into Estero Bay.
He steps into a job that was made much easier after Cayucos divorced itself from Morro Bay and built its own new sewer treatment plant on Toro Creek Road, on former ranchlands owned by Chevron. The CSD also purchased one of the old undersea oil-loading lines from the Chevron Marine Terminal, which ceased operations in 1999 and discharges its teated effluent, as well as unusable wastewater via that line.
The WRFF project remains unfinished, as Cayucos must still come up with a scheme to recycle the treated wastewater.
Ideally, they would like to pipe the triple-treated and disinfected wastewater over the hill and store it in Whale Rock Reservoir, where all of Cayucos’ raw drinking water is stored and then treated at a county-owned treatment plant adjacent to Old Creek below the Whale Rock Dam.
Finishing this portion of their recycling project requires a modification of state law.
The other item is a potential leasing of a portion of the CSD’s WRRF property to the Marine Mammal Center for use as a triage facility for its mission to rescue sick and injured marine mammals and return them to the wild.
The MMC approached the CSF a couple of months ago looking for a new location for the organization’s triage facility that is currently located on the Morro Bay Power Plant property.
The CSD is considering a portion of the WRRF site that currently has a solar energy farm that supplies power to the treatment plant next door.
