Water Filtration Project Bottled Up by Hillside Residents’ Fight : Public utilities: Opposition has stymied the DWP’s plan for a plant that would ensure purity of supplies in two reservoirs. Efforts to comply with a state order have dragged out over five years.

A five-year attempt to clean up tap water in homes from South Los Angeles to Pacific Palisades has hit a bottleneck in the Santa Monica Mountains, where hillside residents leery of massive new filtration plants have splintered into bitterly bickering factions.

Accusations of hysteria, snobbery and even treachery have virtually shut down the Department of Water and Power’s effort to comply with federal and state drinking-water rules. Unless the conflict is resolved soon, water held in open mountain reservoirs won’t conform to national standards of purity for several more years.

“The decision-making process appears to have run amok,” said Barbara Fine, a leader of a powerful homeowners’ coalition, the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns.

The story begins in three of the city’s most attractive spots--the tree-lined Hollywood, Stone Canyon and Encino reservoirs--and ends at the foot of a decrepit landfill.

Five years ago, the federal Environmental Protection Agency ruled that deer, coyotes and birds roaming the hillsides around those reservoirs might contaminate rainwater runoff with stomach-cramping microorganisms. In response, the state Department of Health Services ordered water districts to either divert the runoff into storm drains, cover the reservoirs or filter the water.

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In Los Angeles, DWP engineers proposed plunking metal lids over some and filtering water at others. But they underestimated public affection for the man-made lakes. Under threat of lawsuit by citizens and pressured by the City Council, the department in 1990 agreed to mediation with reservoir-area residents over the project, which is estimated to cost up to $500 million.

At Lake Hollywood, the process worked smoothly. Nearly 1,000 hours of talks between the DWP and volunteers led to an innovative solution that might actually spare the area from a home development project that residents feared even more than a filtration plant.

Residents near the Stone Canyon and Encino reservoirs also reached what seemed to be an ideal compromise. After five tiresome years of secret deliberations over chemicals, noise levels and construction methods, they recommended building a single plant serving both reservoirs, to be located halfway between Bel-Air and Encino at the mouth of the old Mission Canyon garbage dump in the Sepulveda Pass.

But as soon as word of their plan leaked out, the genteel process deteriorated into name-calling.

No one had informed residents of the tiny, wealthy Mountaingate, Bel-Air Knolls or Bel-Air Crest communities, whose ridgeline homes lie less than a mile from the county-owned landfill. Nearly a dozen schools, museums and religious institutions also lie within two miles of the old garbage truck weigh station where the plant would repose. Angry--and lacking much of the technical knowledge gleaned from hours of filtration plant study--many of the area’s leaders formed a coalition to denounce the mediation panels’ selection.

“We think that there are political reasons why our area was chosen to get it in the head,” said Ernest Frankel, a novelist and retired Marine Corps colonel.

Frankel has spearheaded the Mountaingate resistance with political firepower of his own, recruiting Councilman Marvin Braude to his cause. Armed with a memo from City Atty. James K. Hahn concluding that a 38-year-old conditional-use permit prohibits turning the scarred landfill complex into anything but a park, the coalition has brought the DWP’s proposed study of Mission Canyon to a halt.

“The risk of a lawsuit is so great that it seems unwise to pursue until all the legal issues are resolved,” said Braude.

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Why the fuss over a facility aimed at keeping potentially lethal giardia and cryptosporidium from water that reaches households across the Los Angeles Basin? After all, two years ago, a cryptosporidium outbreak in the Milwaukee water system killed 112 people and caused up to 400,000 cases of diarrhea. Children, the elderly and AIDS and cancer patients are considered the most vulnerable to the waterborne pathogens.

Mountain community leaders all dread four years of invasion by heavy construction trucks along their narrow roads. Mountaingate residents further insist that methane gas emanating from the old landfill could interact with chlorine gas or sodium hypochloride liquid stored at the filtration plant to create a deadly toxic cloud in the event of an accident.

“They should be rational and put it somewhere that it doesn’t violate zoning rules, cause a safety hazard or impact thousands of schoolchildren,” Frankel said. “There’s no way to get out of here if you have a disaster.”

Nonsense, say advocates of the Mission Canyon proposal.

“It’s hysteria-mongering by selfish people who have egos attached to that area,” said Michael d’Angelo, a physician who lives in Glenridge, a tony neighborhood on the eastern edge of the Stone Canyon Reservoir above Bel-Air.

James M. Brust, a retired aerospace industry executive in Encino who helped choose the Mission Canyon site, likewise expresses frustration at the way the Mountaingate crowd and Braude have elbowed into the selection process.

“We figured that if the good Lord had looked for an ideal site, this was it,” said Brust, with an engineer’s zeal for facts.

The DWP agrees that Mission Canyon offers many advantages, including a faster construction schedule. Department officials say they would prefer that their construction trucks drive on four-lane Sepulveda Boulevard rather than through residential neighborhoods and serpentine Mulholland Drive.

Before Mountaingate residents and Braude raised their objections, DWP lawyers had reached a tentative accord with county sanitation taff to lease the site. Now, because of Braude’s intervention, the department can’t even enter the canyon to study it.

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Exercising City Council authority over the issue, Braude recently asked the DWP to prepare a new list of alternatives for one or more filtration plants. But homeowners near one site in Van Nuys have not welcomed the attention.

“If they think it’s politically correct to shove a plant down in Van Nuys because we’ll scream less, then they better think again,” said Don Shultz, president of the Van Nuys Homeowners Assn.

To be sure, the high cost of pumping water from the city’s primary filtration plant in Sylmar south to the reservoirs, then back to the Valley floor, then south again over the mountains to the Los Angeles Basin is a major barrier to the Valley plan.

The dearth of politically easy choices has prompted City Councilman Michael Feuer, whose district encompasses both mountain and Valley neighborhoods, to ask his staff to seek “new technological alternatives” to filtration.

For one interesting alternative, he need look no farther than Lake Hollywood. A mediation panel there came up with the idea of bypassing the open reservoir by building four, 15-million-gallon underground storage tanks alongside it. The lake would remain filled and have its own filtration plant to be used in reserve.

But even that plan has detractors. Environmentalists complain that the 800,000 cubic yards of dirt to be unearthed for the tanks will be spread in canyons around the lake, ruining the natural shape of the land.

The complicated, $150-million proposal will be submitted for approval next month, the first of the Santa Monica Mountains filtration plants to reach the Board of Water and Power Commissioners.

Rather than being encouraged, skeptics of the entire mediation process say the residents who participated became an expensive part of the problem instead of the solution: The DWP has so far paid at least $410,000 to the Woodland Hills-based Mediation Institute for its negotiation consultants.