Environmentalists Say Clean Water Act Revisions Threaten Bay, Wetlands

Environmentalists say years of progress in cleaning up Santa Monica Bay could be reversed and Ballona Wetlands could be jeopardized. But proponents argue that rigid and complex laws that hurt industry and may even hinder anti-pollution efforts will be simplified.

Virtually everyone agrees that the sweeping rewrite of the 1972 Clean Water Act passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last week could have a lasting impact on local industry and the environment.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Bud Shuster (R-Penn.), would, among other things, relax some standards for treatment of ocean-bound sewage and sharply scale back protection of wetlands across the country. The legislation, which passed the House on a 240-185 vote Tuesday, now moves to the Senate, where some of its provisions will likely be modified or removed. President Clinton has promised to veto the bill in its current form.

Environmentalists attacked the bill, arguing it would relax environmental standards governing the Hyperion Treatment Plant in Playa del Rey, which is still in the midst of a $1.6-billion expansion to facilitate advanced treatment of sewage. They say the legislation would also remove restrictions on development of the Ballona Wetlands, a 200-acre saltwater marsh near Marina del Rey.

“The [congressional] members who voted for the dirty water act should be ashamed because of the enormous impact this is going to have on coastal tourism, coastal industry and the natural resources used by hundreds of millions of people around the country,” said Mark Gold, executive director of Heal the Bay, a Santa Monica-based environmental group.

Yet industry sources argued that the bill was designed to update existing federal law, which is too inflexible and overly focused on minor pollutants.

“The overall bill will lead to common-sense solutions to problems in water quality,” said Matthew Weinstock, spokesman for the Chemical Manufacturers Assn., a Washington, D.C.-based trade association.

“It provides some flexibility . . . so that [manufacturing] facilities will be granted room to implement or add new technologies that might even reduce pollution. We won’t have to spend all our time jumping through a whole host of bureaucratic procedures just to comply with the law.”

The debate takes on a special urgency at Hyperion, which receives 330 million gallons of raw sewage per day and is the largest of four treatment plants operated by the city of Los Angeles.

Environmentalists fought for years to get the facility to stop pumping sludge off-shore and to upgrade its treatment of ocean-bound sewage. In recent years the city of Los Angeles has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to enable Hyperion to provide advanced treatment of all waste water by 1998, in compliance with federal law.

Scientists say that the effort to date has improved water quality in the bay, giving a boost to marine life, but they disagree over how much farther the city should go.

The House bill includes an amendment, drafted by Rep. Steve Horn (R-Long Beach), that would give Los Angeles a waiver from the federal treatment standards.

But environmentalists say they expect the city to fulfill its commitment to advanced treatment at Hyperion, at least in the near term. They worry, however, that the Horn provision allows the city to back away from the costly, intensive treatment of sewage in the future, a move that could encourage other communities to follow suit.

“I don’t think the city [of Los Angeles] will back away from” its commitment to advanced treatment, said Bob Sulnick, executive director of the American Oceans Campaign, a nonprofit advocacy group. “But, on the other hand, Mayor [Richard] Riordan is not on the record as being environmentally sensitive.”

Sulnick was less sanguine about the prospects for Ballona Wetlands, which he said would receive far less protection under the bill.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Rolling Hills), whose district includes both Hyperion and Ballona, voted against the House bill on the grounds that it will reverse progress in cleaning up the bay. But she said she believes that the protection and restoration of Ballona Wetlands will proceed under an agreement between environmental groups and the developer of the massive Playa Vista project.

“I don’t think [the developer] has any instinct to change the deal,” Harman said in an interview. “What I’ve been working on is to speed the restoration.”

One irony of the current debate is that the Clean Water Act has been hailed by both environmentalists and anti-regulatory groups as an exceptionally well-crafted piece of environmental legislation; virtually everyone agrees that the law has helped clean up the nation’s coastal and inland waters.

“The Clean Water Act was the gem,” Harman said.