Cities Stall Plan to Clean Up Bay

A group of anonymous bureaucrats has been meeting in an anonymous building a few miles east of downtown Los Angeles for months, arguing the finer points of urban hygiene: Is it all right to hose down a sidewalk? How clean should a parking lot be? Can a busboy wash off food-caked restaurant floor mats in a back alley?

The answers to those questions, trifling in isolation, may provide the keys to cleaning up Santa Monica Bay, according to city, county and state officials who have been holding the protracted but unpublicized sessions.

Many of the answers are now cast in a comprehensive, 90-page plan aimed at cleaning up the millions of businesses, roadways and construction zones that drain debris into the ocean along the Los Angeles County coast.

But the debate over how to clean up the region’s urban runoff, and thus the ocean, is far from over. Many of the 85 cities being asked to support the draft proposal argue that it is too stringent, too expensive and too reliant on faith, rather than scientific fact.

In the struggle to reach consensus, the plan for a cleaner ocean has been postponed, perhaps indefinitely. The proposed date for adopting the plan was pushed back again this month. It will be a year overdue by the time it is supposed to come before regulators for a vote this summer, with some cities asking for even more delays.

Environmentalists, who are also in the thick of the negotiations, are accusing some of the cities--including beachfront communities such as El Segundo and Redondo Beach--of backsliding on their commitment to the environment.

“If this [plan] or something a lot like it does not go forward, then all the long planning to clean up Santa Monica Bay is a travesty,” said Mark Gold, executive director of the environmental group Heal the Bay. “We can never achieve the goal of restoring the bay without a significant storm water management plan like this one.”

Urban runoff is considered the primary source of pollution in Santa Monica Bay, which is plagued by unacceptable levels of lead, other metals and, at times, human waste.

The cleanup plan, known as a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit, is required under the federal Clean Water Act. It requires most cities in urban areas to adopt regulations that limit runoff pollution.

In the Los Angeles area, the permit must be approved by a division of the state water agency. The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, consisting of Gov. Pete Wilson’s appointees, is scheduled to vote on the plan July 15.

The state officials are proceeding cautiously in hopes of reaching a compromise with the county and 85 cities. The cities will be in the vanguard of enforcing the clean water measures, and state officials know that without their cooperation the permit will be a hollow document.

But officials in at least a dozen small cities say their concerns aren’t being addressed. “There is no scientific basis for a lot of this stuff,” said Desi Alvarez, public works director in Redondo Beach. “It is going to cost us a lot of money. And I don’t think a lot of these things are going to help at all.”

Some regulators say the long struggle for compromise will soon have to end so that pollution controls can move ahead.

“There will never be complete consensus with 85 cities and the county,” said Catherine Kuhlman, the Environmental Protection Agency official who is shepherding the permit. “People are having to reach into their pocketbooks to protect the environment and that is always pretty controversial. They just need to get on with it.”

The Los Angeles County debate is a reflection of a national trend toward more intense criticism of environmental regulations. The House of Representatives, in fact, voted last year to abandon significant portions of the federal Clean Water Act. But that action was not approved by the Senate, leaving in place rigorous storm water regulations.

The federal Clean Water Act had already eliminated much of the blatant dumping of sewage and toxic waste into the nation’s waterways by 1987, when Congress expanded the law to tackle more insidious forms of pollution--the witches brew of contaminants draining from millions of acres of farmland, thousands of miles of highways and from America’s collective backyard.

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It is these so-called “non-point” sources of pollution that are the principal target of the Los Angeles County permit, which will replace a skeletal set of regulations approved by water officials in 1990.

The new proposal directs more personnel to the enforcement of storm water regulations that have gone woefully unattended by state officials. There is a lone employee, for example, currently in charge of monitoring thousands of companies whose properties drain into Los Angeles-area watersheds.

The proposed permit would shift that and many other responsibilities from the state to 85 cities and the county. They would be expected to adopt local ordinances to comply with the permit and to conduct educational programs, inspect businesses and keep voluminous records.

If adopted in its current form, the permit would require cities and the county to:

* Inspect thousands of businesses to ensure that they are conforming with all storm water regulations. The heaviest industrial companies would be inspected annually, auto repair shops three times in five years and gas stations and restaurants twice in five years.

* Launch a public education campaign.

* Create a system for finding and eliminating illicit storm drain hookups from factories, businesses and sewers.

* Outlaw the washing of streets and sidewalks or, alternatively, create regulations that limit the pollutants flushed into the storm drains by such hose downs. (The regulations would forbid untreated wash waters from gas stations and auto repair shops from flowing into the storm drains.)

* Require regular sweeping to remove debris from parking lots of more than 25 spaces.

As for that restaurant busboy, the permit specifies “proper” disposal of the food waste, meaning it should be washed down a kitchen drain, to be delivered to a sewage treatment plant, not a storm drain that flows to the ocean.

Los Angeles County is expected to create model programs that will be adopted by the cities. It has also pledged a substantial expansion of its research into the sources of the pollution and its effects on Santa Monica Bay.

By late next year, the county will approximately double its sampling of storm drain pollution. It will also begin sampling rainwater as it drains off gas stations, restaurants and other locations, to determine which remedial measures are working best. And it will contribute to a multiyear study of where pollution is deposited in the ocean and how it affects sea life.

Even environmentalists such as Gold concede that the program will impose a vast array of new responsibilities on local government. In the city of Los Angeles, officials estimate that they will have to perform 60,000 inspections over the five-year life of the permit at a cost of about $1.7 million a year.

Still, the city and county of Los Angeles have given qualified support to the proposal.

It is in El Segundo, Whittier, Burbank and at least 10 other communities that criticism about the draft permit is most acute.

“The state doesn’t want to do all this regulation, but they are trying to tell us to do their job,” John Wisz, an engineer for the city of Carson, said in a typical complaint. “There is no proof a lot of these measures will work at all. And they are very expensive. The cities just don’t have the money to do them.”

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Wisz estimates that the city would have to spend $150,000 for two employees to run a storm water program. Can the city afford it? “No way,” Wisz said. “We are just breaking even after years in the red.”

A law firm representing Carson and eight other communities challenges the very underpinnings of the permit, arguing that the state is improperly attempting to pass on its obligations, particularly the inspection of potential polluters. The critics also question the scientific findings that buttress the permit. They have filed a public records request for the studies that back the regulations.

“Do you really think that restaurants are a significant cause of pollution in Santa Monica Bay?” asks Redondo Beach’s Alvarez. “No way. . . . Yet we are going to have to go out and investigate all these restaurants to see that they are not dumping anything in the storm drains, just because they’re washing out a few floor mats.”

In frustration that their concerns were not being heeded, Alvarez and representatives for Burbank and a group of other cities walked out of a negotiating session in the fall. Some of the cities have talked about breaking with the rest of the county to devise a storm water program of their own. Privately, they expect to get a better hearing when the discussion of the program shifts to Wilson’s appointees on the regional water board.

Environmentalists argue that they have already made plenty of compromises in the negotiations. They have agreed, for example, that the thousands of inspections can, instead, be more like educational visits--a change that will substantially reduce the amount of time officials have to spend on the road. Negotiators are also trying to reach an agreement that would allow current employees to do the work. County health inspectors who already visit restaurants, for example, might add a few minutes to each stop to talk about storm water pollution.

But much more dilution of the permit will be damaging to the quality of Santa Monica Bay, argues Gail Ruderman Feuer, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She said the hidden nature of much of the negotiations has kept the pressure off city officials, particularly in coastal communities such as El Segundo and Redondo Beach, where interest in cleaning the bay is intense.

The environmental group has already succeeded in getting the attention of several communities--filing lawsuits that forced El Segundo, Beverly Hills and Hermosa Beach to more closely control what flows into their storm drains.

The council’s record in forcing cities into costly storm water programs has cowed many other cities into silence in the current negotiations, Wisz says. “A lot of us on this side of the table consider ourselves environmentalists too,” Wisz said. “But we have to balance our time, money and resources on a variety of things. We cannot be zealots.”