Water Authority Abandons Plan for New Agency

San Gabriel Valley water officials Wednesday abandoned a plan to create a super authority to manage the cleanup of ground water and moved instead to hand the job to existing water agencies.

The Main San Gabriel Basin Watermaster, a board that regulates the pumping of ground water, voted to develop an agreement among local water agencies to assist the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the cleanup of contaminated water.

The plan was recommended by a watermaster committee, headed by Reginald A. Stone, senior vice president of Suburban Water Systems, and a water producers’ committee headed by Thomas Shollenberger, general manager of the Alhambra water department.

Preliminary Proposal

In June, the watermaster committee made a preliminary proposal for the creation of a super water agency to push for cleanup of ground water. But, after further study, Shollenberger said water producers concluded that “there is no need for another bureaucratic layer of government.” Instead, he said, existing agencies through a cooperative agreement could manage and operate water treatment systems and carry out other cleanup functions.

EPA officials have said that it will take hundreds of millions of dollars and decades of work to clean up ground water in the San Gabriel Valley.

EPA’s policy is to provide 90% of the money to build and operate water treatment plants for 10 years, with the remainder of the money coming from the state. But the cleanup is expected to take much longer than 10 years.

Lynn Magoffin, watermaster chairwoman, said EPA wants assurances that once its participation in the project is finished, the state or local agencies will continue the work.

Robert Berlien, general manager of the Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District, said he has written to state officials asking whether the state will provide funds, but has received no reply.

If the state does not pay for the cleanup, money could be raised locally through fees imposed on water producers by the watermaster. But because the watermaster’s power was established through a court judgment on pumping rights, the judgment would have to be amended to clarify the watermaster’s authority over water quality.

The proposed cooperative agreement to assist EPA in the cleanup would involve the watermaster, the San Gabriel Valley and Upper San Gabriel Valley municipal water districts and a regional association of water producers.

10 Investigators

Ground water in the Main San Gabriel Basin, which supplies water to about 1 million residents, is contaminated with industrial solvents such as trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE).

The State Water Resources Control Board on Oct. 20 will be asked to approve a cooperative agreement that would channel more than $2 million in EPA funds to the search for contamination sources. The money would be used by the board’s Los Angeles region to hire 10 investigators to look for pollution sources near contaminated wells. The regional board now has only six investigators assigned to this task.

Jon Bishop, regional board associate engineer and coordinator of its San Gabriel Valley project, told the watermaster board Wednesday that there are an estimated 10,000 industrial plants and other facilities in the San Gabriel Valley that could be responsible for pollution of ground water. So far, he said, the regional board has inspected about 1,000 facilities.