Topics / ENVIRONMENT : West Covina to Be Part of Water Forum

San Gabriel Valley residents concerned about local drinking water can ask questions of national and local ground water experts next week during a town hall meeting at the West Covina council chambers.

Sponsored by the League of Women Voters, Wednesday’s event, “Ground Water Protection: Looking at Solutions,” is part of a national teleconference to be broadcast live via satellite from Washington.

Experts in the fields of environmental research, urban planning, public policy and community relations will discuss national ground water issues. They also will field questions from participants calling in from West Covina and more than 100 other town hall meetings that day at city halls and college campuses nationwide. Dialogue among callers and the experts will be telecast during the conference.

Immediately after the national conference, which will run from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., there will be an hourlong live presentation in the West Covina Council Chambers on contamination and cleanup of the San Gabriel Valley water basin.

The San Gabriel Valley’s huge aquifer is one of the nation’s more contaminated. Household, farming and industrial chemicals have crept for decades into the aquifer and rendered it a Superfund site. That aquifer supplies water to more than a million people in the region.

Participants will listen to, and ask questions of, representatives of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board and the San Gabriel Basin Water Quality Authority.

Expected topics of discussion: Is the San Gabriel Valley’s ground water supply still being contaminated? Who should pay for cleanup of a problem that hundreds of businesses contributed to? What are other communities doing to protect their ground water?

The local presentation is sponsored by the East San Gabriel Valley League of Women Voters, a citizens organization called the Superfund Working Information Group, West Covina and that city’s public-access channel 56, which will make the entire conference, including the local presentation, available to other cable stations in the area for rebroadcast.