L.A. Settles Suit on Bay

The city of Los Angeles on Thursday announced settlement of a $100-million lawsuit filed by the state over sewage spills at the Hyperion treatment plant, bringing an end to a series of legal actions and setting in motion drastic new efforts to reverse environmental damage to Santa Monica Bay.

Under terms of the settlement, the state will drop its suit and the city will invest more than $100 million in improvements to its aging sewage facilities, in new water conservation and reclamation programs and in museum exhibits aimed at heightening public awareness of the causes of bay pollution and its possible remedies.

“Instead of having $100 million in fines go to the state treasury . . . it’s going into improving our sewage system,” said John Stodder, an environmental affairs aide to Mayor Tom Bradley.

“This is the way controversies between two government agencies should be handled,” Bradley said at a press conference Thursday. “Instead of fighting it out in the courts, we solved it at the bargaining table.”

Bradley called the settlement--unanimously approved by the City Council in a closed-door session Tuesday--a “historic agreement” and said Los Angeles is on the “cutting edge” of dealing with sewage problems. Virtually all of the costs will be borne by the city’s existing sewage surcharge tax imposed on all homeowners and commercial landlords, city officials said.

City and state officials and environmental activists said the programs established in the agreement will help return the bay to a condition not seen for decades.

Environmental experts agreed that the city has come a long way since 1987, when Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp filed the suit against the city, seeking penalties of up to $20 a gallon for two major spills that dumped a total of more than 5.4 million gallons of raw sewage into the bay.

Since the 1987 spills, the city was also forced to sign a consent decree with the Environmental Protection Agency, under which it agreed to improve the quality of the discharge from the Hyperion sewage treatment plant by 1998.

Dorothy Green, president of Heal the Bay, an environmental group, said the city “has taken the initiative and run with it” in the last two years.

But the agreement signed this week, Green said, is a “safeguard.” She noted that should administrations or attitudes change at City Hall, they will still be held accountable” for continued improvements to the sewage infrastructure.

Green said that some provisions in the agreement--such as programs to clean up Ballona Creek and halt polluted discharges from the Thorton Avenue drain pipe in Venice--”are more than we would have had the nerve to ask for.”

Clarke Drane, chairman of the state’s Regional Water Quality Control Board, said that the city would have been required to do some of the promised work under existing state and federal laws.

“But there’s a number of things we got them to do that they wouldn’t have to do otherwise,” he said.

Drane estimated--and city officials concurred--that at least $80 million will be spent on these additional programs.

Under the agreement, the city has established a water reclamation office, charged with finding ways to capture and reuse waste water.

The city also agreed to enter a voluntary EPA program next year in which it will help write new regulations for controlling storm water runoff, which carries road oil, pesticides and other pollutants into the bay.

Other programs under the agreement include a proposed $4-million “inflatable dam” to be installed in Ballona Creek to trap runoff water for treatment before it flows into the bay and a $7-million water treatment plant at the Los Angeles Zoo, where animal droppings are now routinely washed into the city’s storm drains.

Most of the work specified in the agreement involves mechanical improvements to the city’s sewage system. Some of it, such as electrical power upgrading at Hyperion, have already been completed. It was the electrical failure of pumps at Hyperion that led to the 1987 spills.

Under the agreement, the city must replace the pumping plant at Ballona Creek and upgrade as many as 27 generators at 19 pumping stations by 1993 and upgrade the control system at the Venice pumping plant by 1994.

Equally important are growth control measures. The agreement calls on the city to adopt a new “sewer allocation ordinance,” which uses the issuance of building permits as a means of controlling additional sewage flows to the Hyperion plant.

The city is also required to complete programs under its 1988 water conservation ordinance, which requires “low-flow” water fixtures. New homes and commercial buildings have had to install such fixtures for the past year. Starting in March, the city will begin handing out do-it-yourself kits door-to-door for installation in all existing homes.

In an effort to teach the need for continued vigilance, the city agreed to establish and maintain for five years an exhibit on bay pollution at the Museum of Science and Industry.