California Elections : Bradley Attempting to Ease Doubts About His Ecological Credentials

It was the beginning of a major push to build up Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley as Environmentalist Mayor: The big-city, businesslike Bradley took off his shirt, donned a life jacket, and stepped into a raft on the Kern River last summer.

It was the kind of get-in-touch-with-nature publicity stunt that politicians traditionally have used to showcase their environmental concerns. For Bradley, it had another purpose: Advisers hoped to alleviate doubts about his environmental credentials.

Bradley’s ride down the Kern came six months after his controversial decision to allow onshore oil drilling in Pacific Palisades. Environmentalists, a liberal and usually middle- to upper-class group, held a vote potential largely untapped in Bradley’s 1982 gubernatorial campaign because many believed that Bradley cozied up to agribusiness interests they opposed. For the 1986 race, Bradley strategists targeted environmentalists as one of the top groups to cultivate.

But just a few months after the rafting trip, Bradley faced more environmental woes: spills of raw sewage from city sewers into Santa Monica Bay. The headline fines by the state against the city was a major political embarrassment as Bradley was stepping up his criticism of rival Republican Gov. George Deukmejian’s controversial record of handling toxic wastes.

The Santa Monica Bay problems and his approval of oil drilling in Pacific Palisades are two major blots on what most environmentalists consider a solid, if not innovative, overall Bradley record on the environment. Southern California-based environmentalists, unhappy about the condition of the bay and Bradley’s approval of onshore drilling, generally are more critical of his record than the Northern California-based activists who say they believe he has taken the right stands on the state’s major environmental concerns.

Based largely on his longtime opposition to offshore oil drilling and his recent conservation-oriented water proposals, he has received the endorsement of top organizations including the Sierra Club, California League of Conservation Voters and Friends of the River.

Rather than saying Bradley has a great environmental record, these groups invariably talk about how dismal Deukmejian’s performance has been by comparison.

“Environmental issues are not, I think, at the top of (Bradley’s) personal concerns,” said one environmentalist who has known the mayor for several years. “But he does think of himself as a political manager and wants to manage health and environment because it needs to be done. Usually that means he ends up in the same place as the environmental movement, but he may have arrived there for different reasons.”

Seen Emerging

Others describe Bradley as an evolving environmentalist.

“Tom Bradley is in the process of becoming an environmentalist,” said Carl Pope, political director of the Sierra Club, the San Francisco-based organization that is the largest environmental group in the state. “He’s not there yet, but he’s shown he can listen, can learn--unlike the governor.”

But in Southern California, however, those more directly affected by problems in the Santa Monica Bay and still-stalled Pacific Palisades oil drilling are not so kind.

The mayor’s approval last year of oil drilling “was a tragedy,” said Robert Sulnick, president of No Oil, a group that represents drilling opponents in the area. “I can’t vote for him. I don’t trust him.”

Don May, a Friends of the Earth representative in Southern California, supports Bradley. “But I’ve got to tell you, it’s kind of lonesome sometimes. A lot of people in the community are really upset about the bay.”

The Santa Monica Bay, where the city discharges concentrated sewage, known as sludge, and partially treated sewage, is “in one of the most polluted (ocean) areas on the West Coast,” said Paul Helliker, a water management specialist for the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Health Warning

Although in a recent interview Bradley insisted that “anyone who tells you there is pollution that is dangerous to human beings or fish just isn’t telling you the truth,” the county Department of Health Services last year posted signs at the pier warning that eating certain types of locally caught fish could be hazardous.

In recent years, elevated levels of DDT and PCBs, two known carcinogens, have been found in the blood of people who frequently eat fish taken from Los Angeles waters.

The carcinogenic DDT was privately dumped in the 1960s and ‘70s into county pipes, which carried it to an outfall off Palos Verdes Peninsula. While DDT dumping has long ceased, it continues to have an effect on the bay, according to EPA scientists.

Bradley campaign officials have said that the only toxics in the bay come from companies that have illegally dumped toxic chemicals into the sewer system. But EPA oceanographer Phillip Oshida said it is “highly unlikely” that illegal dumping alone could account for the presence of toxic materials in the bay. Under city law, certain chemicals, such as arsenic and cyanide, are allowed as long as their concentrations in waste water do not exceed established limits.

The source of the PCBs is not easy to pinpoint, Oshida said, “but many toxic materials coming into the bay are suspected of coming into the system with sludge.”

Suit Over Sludge

The EPA filed a lawsuit in 1977 against the city for its continued dumping of sludge. Nine years later, Los Angeles, the only West Coast city still discharging sludge into the ocean, finally has agreed to stop dumping sludge by the end of next year, when a new plant to burn the concentrated sewage to make electric power should be completed.

The city will pay a $625,000 fine for violation of the Clean Water Act of 1972, which required an end to sludge dumping and more extensive treatment of waste water.

For years, the city fought the requirements, insisting that limited treatment was safe. At the direction of Bradley and the City Council, the city sought waivers while delaying improvements to the sewer system in the hope that federal financing would be obtained to upgrade the system.

Although Bradley supported a 1976 ballot measure that would have provided bond money for sewer improvements, his support apparently carried little weight with key City Council members, who opposed it. It was defeated by the voters.

After EPA sued the city in 1977, Bradley asked council members to end sludge dumping but they balked.

The continued haggling with the EPA over sludge was holding up needed federal funds for other sewer projects, he told them. But the council, encouraged by some city engineers and the Chamber of Commerce, voted to continue to fight the sludge ban.

Deadlines Again Missed

Bradley then stepped in and met with the EPA and state water board officials. Those discussions eventually led the city in 1980 to agree to stop dumping sludge, but the city again missed the extended deadlines until a new settlement was reached recently.

In the meantime, city engineers and representatives of the city Public Works Department, headed by a Bradley-appointed board, continued to lobby for a waiver that would exempt the city from upgrading its waste-water treatment. Los Angeles was not alone in seeking waivers, but unlike a number of other jurisdictions, the city dragged its feet in applying for federal grants to improve its sewer system in the 1970s when the money still was plentiful.

Only after the state last year levied its first of what eventually amounted to $180,050 in fines against the city for raw sewage spills into Santa Monica Bay--the result of an old system long beyond capacity--did Bradley publicly call for the more extensive waste-water treatment the city had for years tried to avoid.

The EPA lawsuit recently was settled. The city agreed to upgrade its sewer system at a cost of about $2 billion, including $250 million for a system that will burn sludge to generate electric power and $600 million for a new sewage treatment system. The city also agreed to spend $3.3 million to assess and reduce the effects on the bay of pollutants discharged from city sewers. Monthly residential sewer fees are expected to more than double from the current $5.51 over the next several years to help pay for the work.

“I think we deserve some praise. . . . We ought to be popping champagne corks because the City of Los Angeles did in fact make this financial commitment to make a major cleanup effort,” Bradley said recently.

Frustrating Problem

Nevertheless, questions about the Santa Monica Bay controversy have proven a frustrating campaign problem for Bradley at a time when he is trying to focus voter attention on toxic waste cleanup problems that have plagued Deukmejian.

As part of his defense, Bradley underscores the fact that he has taken a strong stand in favor of Proposition 65, the anti-toxics measure on the November ballot, while Deukmejian has opposed the measure.

The measure would set strict limits on the amounts of chemicals known to cause birth defects and cancer permitted in drinking water. Opponents, including Deukmejian and many farm and business interests, say the measure would be unfairly restrictive and hamper control of crop pests.

Bradley’s environmental point man, Deputy Mayor Tom Houston, helped draft the measure. Since arriving at City Hall two years ago, Houston has been working to promote Bradley as an environmental activist. The usually low-key Bradley suddenly began holding press conferences to denounce federal oil drilling policies or showing up at toxic dumps, labeling one “Duke’s dump.”

Controversial Decision

Then last year Bradley made a decision that one adviser called “political idiocy.”

The mayor, who had been elected in 1973 partly on the strength of his pledge to oppose an Occidental Petroleum Corp. plan to drill on the coast in Pacific Palisades, did an about-face on the issue. Dumbfounded opponents said that nothing had changed since 1978 when Bradley vetoed a City Council-approved measure to authorize the drilling, calling the idea “inappropriate.”

In approving the plan, which is still being fought at the Coastal Commission and in the courts, Bradley said that Occidental had satisfied the objections he raised in 1978. But those close to Bradley said that Occidental lobbyists focused on Bradley’s bureaucratic instincts and got him to focus strictly on his past objections.

When Occidental met those objections to the mayor’s satisfaction, it was the resolution of those specific objections, and not a symbolic opposition to oil drilling in Pacific Palisades, that made the difference to Bradley. Sulnick said he believes that Bradley’s close relationship to Occidental Chairman Armand Hammer and to the law firm dominated by Democratic Party heavyweights that represented Occidental, made the difference. “During the lobbying period, I never got one meeting with Tom Bradley,” Sulnick said.

Seen as First Step

Many opponents like Sulnick argued that drilling at Pacific Palisades would lead to even more objectionable offshore drilling along the California coast.

Bradley has been a staunch opponent of offshore drilling for more than 10 years, and that position has earned him strong support among most statewide anti-drilling factions. He has traveled to Washington to lobby on behalf of a continued offshore oil-drilling moratorium and supported coastal protection laws.

Even those environmentalists who were upset with Bradley’s turnabout on the Occidental drilling issue give him high marks for his stalwart opposition to offshore drilling.

“One of the things we look for in a candidate is someone who sticks to an issue when it’s tough to continue to do so,” Pope said. “He’s been tough on offshore oil drilling a long time, even though that stand is an anathema to powerful financial interests.”

The issue of water was another reason why environmental groups that had shunned Bradley four years ago endorsed him this year.

In 1982, Bradley supported the Peripheral Canal, the 43-mile project that would have diverted water from the Sacramento River to Southern California. The measure, opposed strongly by many environmentalists and Northern California residents who charged that the plan would rob the North of water, was soundly defeated.

Later that year Bradley opposed another water proposition that the environmentalists pushed that would have mandated stricter water conservation. That measure also failed at the polls.

Takes Different Approach

But Bradley in the last year has announced different views on water, changes that have boosted his once lackluster image with Northern California environmentalists. Last year he called for greater water conservation and storage in Southern California, which he said would reduce the need to import more water from the North.

This year he announced that he favors increasing the flow of water into Mono Lake, east of the Sierra Nevada, 340 miles north of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has for more than 40 years diverted water from streams that feed Mono Lake. Those streams, along with other sources, provide a major portion of the city’s water. Lawsuits have been filed against the city by environmental groups seeking to restore the brine shrimp in Mono Lake and fisheries in tributaries whose flows have been reduced by water diversion.

Martha Davis, executive director of the Mono Lake Committee, is pleased with Bradley’s switch. “A year ago, the mayor’s office would have said there was no problem. Now they’re saying, yes, a problem does exist and here’s a first step.”

In his fourth term as mayor, Bradley has had plenty of experience dealing with urban environmental issues, such as mass transit and development.

For most of his political career Bradley has been closely allied with downtown big business, working closely with organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and the Central City Assn. that routinely push for new office buildings and redevelopment in the central business district.

Backer of Metro Rail

Bradley has been a leading champion of the Metro Rail subway, contending that it will be the backbone of a regional transit network that will not only prevent traffic gridlock downtown but also reduce congestion throughout the Los Angeles metropolitan area. But his critics say Bradley’s support is mainly a reflection of the downtown business community’s backing for the project. The critics fear that the subway will do more to attract overdevelopment and traffic nightmares in the central city than to reduce traffic.

While Bradley usually sides with the downtown development community, he has often opposed major developments in heavily residential areas. Last year Bradley supported a court settlement that required zoning and planning changes to prevent the construction of high-rise office buildings in the middle of residential neighborhoods.

Overall, Bradley’s environmental record, Pope said, indicates “he’s not (naturalist) John Muir . . . but I’m not sure John Muir would have made a very good governor.”

“The environmental community in L.A. is disgruntled,” said Lucy Blake of the California League of Conservation Voters. “But we don’t necessarily expect candidates to have a 100% record.” If that were the case, she added, the league would only endorse one assemblyman this year.