City Agency Is Awash in Change

The first hint of rain was in the air when I walked over to City Hall on Wednesday.

My native Californian instincts told me that the moist air and dark clouds wouldn’t bring enough rain to end the drought. Far from it. Still, the weather was appropriate for my mission, checking out a city water conservation plan to save some of the more than 60 million gallons of water that now pour into the ocean each day.

It’s reclaimed water--water that’s gone through two or three stages of treatment at the sewage plant to make it safe enough for irrigating parks, golf courses and cemeteries. That, in fact, is what Long Beach does with its reclaimed water.

Even before the current drought, environmentalists considered water reclamation an important, although partial, answer to the permanent water shortage that faces the Southland. The day is past when L.A. can think of the rest of the state as a water farm for Angelenos.

Water reclamation is expensive. You need another set of pipes so reused water doesn’t get mixed up with the kind you drink. But the cost of imported water is going up as it grows more scarce. Environmentalists say that new reclamation facilities are cheaper--and more politically acceptable--than new dams.

What’s surprising is that this cutting edge idea is being promoted most enthusiastically in Los Angeles by a city agency famous for being a relic of the political past, the Board of Public Works.

The board offices have a museum-like quality. The five full-time board members, who are paid $70,658 a year, work in small offices along a hallway decorated with an elaborate early 20th-Century street light from Ventura Boulevard. You can almost imagine some oldtime pol standing under the light, passing out cigars. The board meeting room has an equally antique look, with rich dark wood and a fancy ceiling. Movie directors use it for courtroom scenes.

The board itself always has had a strong flavor of old-fashioned City Hall politics.

Members deal in contracts, the traditional currency of City Hall. Hundreds of millions of dollars in road, sewer, park and other city construction contracts are awarded every year. Board members also supervise the departments that run sewage disposal, garbage collection and similar municipal services. Board members are appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the City Council. Connections aren’t the only qualification for the job, but they’re one of the most important.

Periodic disclosures of possible shady dealings by a few board members have prompted demands from council members that the board be abolished. But the mayor, Bradley and others before him, always resists giving up such valuable patronage.

Five years ago, purely by chance, this old city agency became an instrument of change.

Heal the Bay, an environmental organization, had been criticizing the city over Santa Monica Bay pollution from the city’s Hyperion sewage plant. Heal the Bay chief Dorothy Green and attorney Felicia Marcus were giving the Bradley Administration a legal battering and it was hurting the mayor politically.

The president of the Public Works Board at the time, Maureen Kindel, the mayor’s chief political fund-raiser, invited Green, Marcus and others to talk. But after initiating the talks, Kindel quit the board for wholly unrelated reasons and joined a lobbying firm.

She was replaced by an ambitious politician, Kathleen Brown, and this was a stroke of fortune for those who would move the city toward water reclamation.

Green wanted Los Angeles to expand efforts to use reclaimed water from Hyperion and other sewage plants. Brown was on the lookout for hot issues. She was already thinking of running for state treasurer, a job she ultimately won in November. Advocacy of water reclamation would help her with environmentalists--and would help the city.

Mayor Bradley went along. So did the Department of Water and Power and the City Council. The Board of Public Works, now on the cutting edge, was put in charge of a new Office of Water Reclamation.

On Wednesday, Dr. Bahman Sheikh, who heads the office, told the board that an ordinance was being prepared requiring new office buildings to have dual pipe systems for reclaimed water. Reclaimed water would flush toilets. Eventually, he said, more than 100 million gallons of reclaimed water could supplement the city’s daily water supply.

That’s a healthy percentage of the 800 million gallons Los Angeles now consumes each day. As with the current rainstorm, it couldn’t cure a drought--but it sure would help.