Waiver’s Reversal Shows Bureaucratic Infighting

For Los Angeles city officials, it was a case of bad timing.

The city had been fighting for 10 years to win a waiver from a requirement in a federal law for secondary treatment of sewage discharged into the ocean. The waiver, which would have saved the city enormous construction costs at the Hyperion sewage plant in Playa del Rey, won tentative approval in 1981.

But hopes for the waiver faded last year amid an 11th-hour public outcry sparked by warnings from health officials that eating fish from Santa Monica Bay could be hazardous to health. In November, the city request for a waiver was denied.

Now, activists who helped defeat the waiver are asking how it nearly went through unchallenged, despite longstanding scientific evidence that waste-water discharges were damaging Santa Monica Bay. Legislators and marine scientists have charged that published studies and underwater surveys dating from the mid-1970s went largely ignored by the very state and federal agencies assigned to regulate marine pollution.

“I think there (was) a regulatory breakdown . . . the full extent of which is yet unknown,” said Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), who joined environmentalists in working to block the waiver. “I don’t know if the word is malfeasance . . . but we know when you have data pointing to a hazardous problem . . . and you never act on it it’s got to be more than a bureaucratic snafu.”

The federal Environmental Protection Agency admits that its 1981 tentative approval of the waiver was an error based on contradictory information about Hyperion’s effect on the ocean.

In one critical portion of the EPA’s tentative ruling, for example, the agency concluded that the balance of marine life in Santa Monica Bay would be upset if the city discharged more than a recommended volume of organic pollutants. At the time, however, Los Angeles was already discharging at levels 50% above the limit EPA was proposing, and by 1984, the city’s waste water contained more than double the recommended level.

Somehow, EPA officials acknowledge, the contradiction went unnoticed at the time and later was not called to the attention of state water officials. (Waivers require approval from state water quality officials as well as from the EPA.)

Sheila Wiegman, an EPA environmental engineer who began working with state water officials in 1984 to draft a proposed waiver agreement, said she was aware of contradictions in the 1981 tentative approval. However, she said, “My job assignment was to go forward with (the tentative approval) and develop a permit.”

Wiegman said she and perhaps other officials reasoned that the waiver was justified because it called for the city to build at least some additional secondary treatment.

“We felt that any energy (the city was) willing to put forth was better than what was going on,” Wiegman said.

Some critics also questioned the timing of the 1981 tentative approval, granted by then-EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch shortly after Los Angeles entered a lawsuit settlement to stop discharging sludge into the ocean.

To some critics, it appeared that Los Angeles might be receiving favorable consideration on the waiver in exchange for meeting federal sludge-dumping laws that it was already required to meet. Others said they were simply baffled by the tentative approval.

“Where the hell did the EPA come out making this recommendation?” asked James Grossman, chairman of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, whose unanimous vote ended waiver hopes in November. “How in the hell can I have faith in an agency who did this?”

Bill Pierce, chief of the EPA’s permits and compliance branch for West Coast states, said the tentative approval was written by a task force of 15 to 18 scientists and staff members in Washington. He said he suspected the contradictory approval came about because of the large number of individuals working on the 1981 decision.

“I don’t think we really thought through the decision document and gave it a clear reading when the decision was made,” Pierce said.

Robert P. Ghirelli, director of the regional water board staff that later drafted the proposed waiver, said state officials did not believe it was their job to redo the work that EPA officials had done.

Without those warnings about sport fish, his staff would probably have supported the waiver, based on the sewage-treatment improvements required under state pollution laws, Ghirelli said. But ultimately, after listening to public testimony, state water officials recommended that board members deny the waiver.