Finally, the Finger Points at Cleanup : After years of charge and countercharge, a plan to heal Santa Monica Bay is reached

It is good news indeed that longstanding adversaries agree on a plan to clean up and protect Santa Monica Bay, one of the nation’s most troubled coastal resources. Now comes the hard part: finding the money to do the job, maintaining the corporate and institutional goodwill that generated this ambitious consensus plan and enlisting the cooperation of the residents and institutions in the 414-square-mile watershed that drains into the bay.

Stretching from Ventura County beaches to the Palos Verdes Peninsula, the Santa Monica Bay is one of the state’s most popular recreational resources. Its coastline, 50 miles long, annually attracts 4 million visitors, who come to swim, boat and surf.

However, those activities have become more hazardous of late as the water has become increasingly polluted. The bay faces almost every type of ecological threat, including water pollution and degradation of marine life and adjacent wetlands. Yet as it deteriorated in recent years, finger-pointing too often prevailed over consensus and cleanup.

This week, however, former adversaries including Heal the Bay, Chevron USA, Southern California Edison and local sewage treatment operators unveiled a $67-million plan to reverse the tide, as it were. The plan is the result of five years of effort encouraged by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; it recommends 73 steps or priorities for cleaning up the bay by 1999.

Many of those steps are obvious: upgrading sewage treatment facilities at local plants, diverting storm runoff into those plants, restoring the Ballona Wetlands and the Malibu Lagoon and developing an inspection system to find illegal sewage connections into storm drains. These involve institutional action. However, the brunt of cleanup will fall on the individuals who live in the bay’s vast watershed. The major bay pollutant is urban runoff, that toxic stew of motor oil, garden chemicals, grease and other urban trash that flows from our homes and businesses down gutters, into storm drains and out to sea. For that reason, small gestures, repeated on a grand scale, can make a very big difference. Small gestures like not throwing trash into the gutter or properly disposing of used motor oil, insecticide and paint rather than dumping them down the drain.

Public debate over the final shape of the plan will continue in the coming months. But the proposal looks promising and the path it outlines to a healthier bay is clear--a lot clearer than the water at Southern California’s shores.