Critics Say They’re in Dark About Superfund Process

Over the past six years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has paid almost $280,000 to two contractors to provide community relations for its Superfund program to clean up polluted San Gabriel Valley ground water.

But the community relations plan for the program is not finished, project documents that are supposed to be available in local libraries are not in place, and one environmentalist who tried to get some information on the project from the EPA said he was told that he would have to file a request under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

Wil Baca, an engineer who has headed environmental committees of the Hacienda Heights Improvement Assn. and is on the Board of Directors of the Santa Monica-based Coalition for Clean Air, said the community relations effort has been invisible to the public. Far from involving the community in the ground-water project, Baca said, the EPA has made it difficult for residents to find out what it is doing.

“The public has been shut out of the Superfund process,” Baca said. “They want to keep us dumb.”

The EPA has a $402,250 contract with the Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District for community relations and technical assistance.

In his quarterly reports to the EPA documenting his district’s work on community relations, Robert Berlien, the district’s general manager, lists attendance at community meetings, review of EPA documents, conferences with politicians, meetings with EPA officials and interviews with the news media.

At the end of March of this year, the district had received and spent $246,973 under the cooperative agreement. Of that amount, about $63,000 went to an engineering firm to provide EPA with technical assistance, and the remaining $184,000 was spent on community relations.

“I think we’ve served a purpose in at least giving people a place to get their questions (about the Superfund project) answered, in keeping some contact with local government agencies about what’s going on,” Berlien said. “I think we’ve served a good purpose in reviewing EPA plans.”

In addition to its $402,250 contract with the district, EPA has budgeted $207,000 for community relations work by CH2M Hill, its major consultant on the San Gabriel Valley project.

The community relations plan is being prepared by CH2M Hill. The staff member who wrote the latest version declined to comment on it, citing her company’s policy of referring all matters about work for EPA to that agency. An EPA spokesman said the community relations plan is being reviewed and should be ready for adoption in July.

David Jones, remedial branch chief of the EPA Western region, said CH2M Hill has been paid $95,000 of the $207,000 budgeted for it to develop and implement the plan. Jones stressed that community relations work, such as preparation and distribution of fact sheets, has been done without waiting for the plan to be completed.

The EPA and the state Department of Health Services hired CH2M Hill in 1983 to write a plan dividing community relations tasks between the federal and state agencies. That plan, completed in May, 1984, was outdated nine months later when the state drastically reduced its role in the cleanup. But Neil Ziemba, EPA manager of the San Gabriel Valley project, said the plan was still useful because it outlined the tasks to be performed.

Amy Schwartz, EPA community relations coordinator, said work on revision of the plan began in 1986 but was not completed until this year because other projects had higher priority.

The federal government has spent more than $8.5 million on the San Gabriel Valley ground water project, mostly for studies and engineering reports characterizing the extent of the pollution and analyzing ways to treat contaminated water.

Because the San Gabriel Valley project is run from the EPA Western regional office in San Francisco, the only local access to EPA studies and reports is through files maintained at libraries and water district offices.

The EPA sends information on the San Gabriel Valley project to eight libraries, but ships complete files to only two--in La Puente and Baldwin Park--and to a water resources center at UCLA and to the El Monte office of the Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District.

Baca said that, on a recent visit to La Puente library, he found only a few documents available. The Baldwin Park library’s file also is incomplete. For example, it is missing three of the six fact sheets that the EPA has issued.

The documents include maps of polluted areas, reports on contaminated wells and proposals for water treatment projects.

Baca said that he called Ziemba to request that libraries be restocked with documents, but was told that the agency is reluctant to do so because libraries just throw the material away. Baca said that he then asked for documents to be sent to him personally, but was told that he must file a request under the Freedom of Information Act.

Ziemba said that, although there has been a problem with libraries discarding the documents sent to them, EPA plans to restock library files by the end of July. He said he had asked Baca to file a Freedom of Information request because the EPA cannot supply its documents free to everyone in the San Gabriel Valley who might want them, but he wanted to establish a basis for giving them to Baca in his capacity as a representative of community groups.

Requests Rebuffed

Baca said he has tried to find out how the EPA is pursuing companies that are responsible for leaking contaminants into ground water, but he has been rebuffed on grounds that disclosure could harm the government’s legal case. The EPA’s position, he said, makes it impossible for the public to judge the agency’s performance.

In addition, Baca said, the agency has never disclosed an overall plan for cleaning up ground water in the San Gabriel Valley. It has invited public comments only on scattered projects. The result, he said, has been to avoid public scrutiny of the agency’s strategy.

Ziemba said EPA is preparing a document that will outline proposed priorities for cleanup projects and will seek public comments on the plan.

EPA spokesman Terry Wilson denied that the EPA is discouraging public participation. In fact, he said, the agency offers $50,000 grants to help community groups obtain technical assistance to study Superfund projects, although no one has yet applied for a grant to study the San Gabriel Valley ground water problem.

The EPA originally planned to organize a committee of residents, called a community work group, to monitor the ground water cleanup effort. But the revised community relations plan says that formation of such a group is being abandoned for lack of interest.

Citizens Group

However, without any funding from EPA, the League of Women Voters recently organized a committee, called the Superfund Working/Information Group, to monitor the cleanup project.

Mary Johnson, who used a $2,500 grant from the League of Women Voters Education Fund to form SWIG, said she began by contacting community organizations that might be interested in learning more about the water problem.

“The thing we did,” she said, “was get on the telephone. We just called the heads of organizations and from that, we were really surprised at the results we got.” She said the group’s informational meetings attracted up to 70 people and that about 30 people have indicated interest in meeting regularly to monitor the water project.

Unlike Baca, Johnson said she has found the EPA staff interested in drawing the community into the Superfund process. “The staff of EPA is terrific,” she said. “They are very happy to do anything we need.”

But, she said, she sees little difference between the community work group, which EPA’s proposed community relation plan says cannot be organized, and SWIG, which she and other residents have formed on their own.

Ziemba noted that public interest in the ground-water problem has risen and fallen several times. When the EPA signed a cooperative agreement with the Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District in 1985 to provide community relations and technical assistance, he said, the district was going to play a much bigger role than it is playing now.

District’s Early Efforts

The district initially hired a full-time community relations officer to perform work under the EPA contract. But the employee quit after six months to take another job and was not replaced. Berlien said the community relations effort was scaled back after it became clear that “there weren’t any citizens groups or community people that were particularly interested in what was going on.”

Berlien said there was a flurry of interest in ground-water contamination at the end of 1979 and in early 1980, when it was first disclosed that dozens of San Gabriel Valley wells were contaminated with suspected cancer-causing chemicals, such as trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE). There was another burst of interest in 1985, he said, when the state Department of Health Services notified 5,300 homes and businesses in Hacienda Heights that their water was unfit to drink. The state withdrew the notice a few days later after reassessing the health hazard.

But Berlien said it has been difficult to sustain public interest in ground-water pollution because the contamination is scattered over a wide area, and water suppliers have managed to meet state and federal drinking water standards by drilling new wells and making other adjustments.

“People have always been told that their water is safe to drink,” Berlien said. “And that kind of confuses people, because they don’t know whether they have a problem or not.”

In addition, Berlien said, the Superfund project is moving so slowly that it seems pointless to hold community meetings when there is seldom anything new to report. The EPA has estimated that it will take decades to bring the contamination under control.

No Final Plan

Under its cooperative agreement with the EPA, the water district is supposed to help implement the community relations plan. Lacking a final plan, Berlien said, his office has simply been doing what it thinks “needs to be done.”

Berlien said he received the latest version of the community relations plan in February along with a note from CH2M Hill that said: “We’re planning to incorporate final changes, print up and bind copies and send them out to the repositories in the next two weeks or so.”

Berlien said: “I haven’t heard anything about it since then. What’s happened to it, I just don’t know.”

Berlien said the cooperative agreement originally was for 18 months, but it has been extended without changing the spending ceiling of $402,205.

Although the water district is a contractor with EPA, it also has been a strong critic of the cleanup effort.

At a congressional subcommittee hearing on the ground-water project conducted by U.S. Rep. Esteban Torres (D-La Puente) June 5 in Baldwin Park, Berlien complained that the EPA has failed to develop a comprehensive plan and that “water suppliers do not have a clear idea of where the cleanup project is headed.” He urged the EPA to provide more funding, hire more staff and open a local office.

Community Interest

The congressional hearing attracted 250 people, including representatives of the East Valleys Organization, a church-based group that has declared its intention to raise community concern about ground water to speed the cleanup.

Berlien said the creation of SWIG and the declaration by the East Valleys Organization are the first evidence of strong community concern about ground water since the brief surge of interest during the Hacienda Heights contamination scare in 1985. But whether that interest will be sustained, he said, remains to be seen, given the slow pace of the cleanup project.

The latest version of the community relations plan is based on community interviews conducted three to six years ago. But even then there was impatience with the rate of progress. The plan notes that “several people, including elected officials, have stated their frustration with the length of time it is taking to perform studies and take action to clean up the contamination.”