Coalition Wins Right to Join EPA’s Suit Against L.A. Sewage Dumping

A federal judge on Thursday granted a coalition of environmentalists, lifeguards and fishermen the right to participate in the Environmental Protection Agency’s 9-year-old suit to end illegal dumping of Los Angeles sewage sludge into Santa Monica Bay.

U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Pregerson ruled that the coalition could inspect the city’s Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant, as well as review and comment on every status report that the EPA receives from the city. The reports purportedly explain why the city missed a 1985 “sludge-out” deadline that it had agreed to meet in 1980 and a second deadline in February.

The Fund for the Environment, representing the Los Angeles County Lifeguard Assn., the Marina del Rey Anglers, pollution activist Ellen Stern Harris and others, said the EPA has failed to end the city’s foot-dragging on construction of a federally and city-funded $200-million plant to dry and burn sludge.

In addition to the two most recent deadlines, the city has failed to meet several other deadlines dating back to 1976.

Ralph Nutter, a retired Superior Court judge representing the coalition without charge, told Pregerson that in light of delays, bay pollution and findings of toxins in local fish, the group wants to evaluate the city’s reports and suggest ways to hurry the process along.

Nutter cited signs put up in Santa Monica restaurants, which he said assure patrons that they do not serve local fish.

“There comes a time when citizens have to ask themselves . . . is the government involved in a maximum effort to ensure compliance,” Nutter told the judge.

EPA attorney James Dragna said there have been so many delays in building the sludge-burning system at Hyperion that the agency is looking for a temporary way to end dumping without waiting for the troublesome incinerators. Sludge is the concentrated sewage removed from waste water during treatment.

City Engineer Bob Horii said the city hopes to stop using the pipe that transports toxic-laden sludge seven miles off Santa Monica and instead truck sludge to a landfill or spread it in composting fields or use some other temporary approach. Such methods are used by sewage agencies elsewhere.

“We’re working on every possible idea,” Horii said.

Horii said he could not estimate when the sludge-burning system will be ready but said he hopes to work out new deadlines within a month. He would not comment on criticism by environmentalists that contractors working on the project are to blame for delays.

“There’s just a lot of work left to do; let’s leave it at that,” he said.

Pregerson chided both the EPA and the city for their roles in the controversy, noting that so many different EPA attorneys and technicians have been assigned to the suit over the years that the agency has lost its continuity in the case.

“What affirmative steps has the EPA taken over the last five years?” Pregerson asked Dragna. Dragna said he did not know because many EPA experts on the case no longer work there.