Construction Begins on DWP’s $57-Million Sun Valley Facility

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power officially began construction Monday of a $57-million facility in Sun Valley that will house a new water-quality laboratory, computer center and office building.

DWP officials and Councilman Ernani Bernardi praised the new James H. Anthony Center at a groundbreaking ceremony as an answer to the department’s need for expansion.

“The rapid growth of the city and accompanying need for water and power services has dictated the need for additional space,” said Rick J. Caruso, president of the Board of Water and Power Commissioners.

The site in the northeastern San Fernando Valley “will be closer for a lot of the employees who work for the department,” he added.

About 1,400 DWP employees who work at the department’s General Office Building in downtown Los Angeles will transfer to the Sun Valley facility, which is expected to be finished by November, 1991.

The offices of finance and accounting, customer service, meter reading and billing operations, as well as the water-quality lab, will operate out of the new center.

Robery Y. Yoshimura, assistant engineer in charge of the water-quality division, said new technology and recent changes in government regulations concerning water quality mandated the expansion of the DWP’s water-quality laboratory.

“There are a lot more computerized and electronic instruments that are available to do chemical analysis that we didn’t have before,” Yoshimura said. “One of the problems with the old lab” in the department’s downtown building, “was the lack of space and the inability to grow,” he said.

Under the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1986, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has come up with new regulations concerning organic compounds that were not regulated in the past, Yoshimura said.

Over the next few years, these regulations will begin to go into effect and will require the DWP to perform more chemical and biological testing of the water. Testing for the entire city will be done at the Sun Valley center.

The center will sit on a 35-acre plot of city-owned land bounded by Arleta Avenue to the north, Roscoe Boulevard to the south and the Hollywood Freeway to the west. It will also include a fitness center and a day-care center for the children of DWP employees. Officials dedicated the facility to James H. Anthony, former director of the DWP’s Intermountain Power Project. Anthony died of cancer in 1989.