Auditor Assails Long Beach on Policing Hazardous Materials

Long Beach is doing a poor job of policing companies that handle hazardous materials and is itself a major violator of some environmental regulations, according to a city auditor’s report released Friday.

During a six-month review of Long Beach’s hazardous materials programs, City Auditor Robert E. Fronke found that lax enforcement of environmental regulations was commonplace.

More than four years after adopting an ordinance requiring businesses to install equipment to monitor underground storage tanks for leaks, more than 600 of the 1,600 tanks in the city have not been inspected, according to the audit. The city has yet to prosecute any violators and has only installed monitoring equipment for about one-third of the 109 underground tanks it owns.

What is more, the city Department of Health and Human Services appears to have done a haphazard job of ensuring cleanup of contaminated soil sites.

“Progress has been excruciatingly slow, primarily because of a lack of resources,” Fronke said of the city’s efforts to enforce hazardous-substance regulations. “The program to control toxic waste in the city of Long Beach has a long way to go and it’s going to cost a lot of money to comply with the law,” he said in an interview.

City Manager James Hankla defended the city’s environmental programs, saying that this year’s budget contains money to hire additional environmental staff, that it knew what problems it was confronting, and that it knew what it wanted to do about them.

“I disagree with the city auditor,” Hankla said. “We are making very, very great strides in that area and will continue to improve.”

The underground storage tanks, scattered all over the city, primarily contain oil and gasoline. While Fronke said he knew of no immediate environmental threats, he acknowledged that “we really don’t know” if the unmonitored tanks are causing ground-water pollution problems.

Most of the city’s hazardous material regulations were mandated by the state, which in 1983 adopted the tank-testing requirements. But inspections have been spotty throughout the state. A year ago, a Times survey indicated that only about one-half of the estimated 142,000 underground storage tanks in California had been checked.

Fronke conducted the audit as a follow-up to another he undertook two years ago, when he found shortcomings in the city’s efforts to identify local companies that produce toxic waste.

More than 18 months after state law required businesses that manufacture or use hazardous substances to submit chemical inventories and emergency plans to the local fire department, Fronke found that about one-quarter of the Long Beach companies affected by that law have not done so. And only about 40% of the companies that did prepare an inventory have also submitted emergency plans.