L.A. Offers to Repair Damage to Owens Lake

In its first official bid to repair environmental damage from California’s most famous water war, the city of Los Angeles on Wednesday offered $60 million to quell the giant dust storms that have been rising off Owens Lake since it was pumped dry 70 years ago.

The city’s peace offering, which follows a year of legal wrangling, would provide only a fraction of the money--and water--that local officials say is necessary to stabilize the 110-square-mile dry lake and control the source of the nation’s most severe dust pollution.

But if the offer sounds stingy to people in the Owens Valley, it represents an about-face by Los Angeles officials, who last year were dismissing the impact of the pollution as “minor.”

Los Angeles officials now are saying they will do a good deal more, if necessary, to ensure that clean air standards are met in the Owens Valley--even if meeting those standards by the 2006 federal deadline winds up costing well above the $60 million.

“This is a down payment, not the end,” said Chris O’Donnell, a consultant representing Mayor Richard Riordan in the Owens Lake negotiations. “In the end, the cost could be $50 or $100 million more.”

Wednesday’s offer is designed to inflict as little pain as possible on the residents of Los Angeles, gambling on the availability of a cheap underground water supply that the city would pump up onto the dry lake bed.

But even paying for the first phase could affect the city’s beleaguered Department of Water and Power, leading to more staff cutbacks and possibly water rate increases, a DWP official said.

“It will have an impact on our program, and it could mean jobs,” said Jerry Gewe, who is representing the department in the negotiations. “We are hopeful we can do the job without a rate increase. But we aren’t making any guarantees.”

The roots of the dispute go back to the deal that sucked the lake dry to provide water for a burgeoning Los Angeles, 200 miles away. When Los Angeles chief engineer William Mulholland turned on his famous aqueduct nearly a century ago, he began pulling water out of the river that fed the lake and diverted it south. By the mid-1920s, one of the largest natural lakes in California was a wasteland.

The water transformed the sleepy San Fernando Valley into a suburban metropolis. Without the water, however, the Owens Lake area became a dust bowl. Through the years, it has been the source of epic storms that have sent salty, lung-clogging powder over about 40,000 people from Lone Pine on the north to Ridgecrest on the south.

Many residents of its sparsely populated communities remain bitter about what happened and have been seeking reparations for years.

Under the Los Angeles offer, beginning next year, the city would treat nine square miles of the lake bed by pumping up to 20,000 acre-feet of water onto it every year, planting salt grass and laying gravel to tamp down the dust. Eventually, O’Donnell said, the city will probably need to treat 25 square miles. But the final strategy would depend on the findings of a scientific review that would be conducted in 2001.

“The modeling we have done shows that the first phase alone could reduce pollution by 50% to 75%,” O’Donnell said.

The city’s offer represents a response to Owens Valley’s more ambitious plan unveiled last year. It called for Los Angeles to stabilize 35 square miles of the lake and to provide 51,000 acre-feet of water a year, enough to support the annual needs of an entire Los Angeles City Council district.

Despite the comparative modesty of the city’s offer, Owens Valley officials reacted Wednesday with guarded optimism.

“This sounds better,” said Ellen Hardebeck, director of the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District, which is scheduled to vote next week on whether to accept the city’s offer. Hardebeck warned that the district’s board will not accept the plan unless members are convinced that it commits Los Angeles to bring Owens Valley into compliance with federal Clean Air Act standards for dust emissions.

“There can be no escape clauses,” Hardebeck said, “like blaming some of the pollution on natural causes or saying they only have to pay for so-called ‘reasonable control measures,’ even if they aren’t enough to meet air quality standards.”

O’Donnell, Riordan’s negotiator, acknowledged Wednesday that the city has helped rekindle some of the old animosity over the Owens Valley water.

“The city didn’t have its act together for a long time,” he said. “It didn’t have a concrete proposal on the table until now and, at first, it tended to discount the potential health effects of the pollution. You could see why the people up there didn’t trust us.

“The city is now saying this is a health problem and we are responsible for cleaning it up,” O’Donnell said.

Riordan called the offer a fair one. “Although the costs are significant,” he said, “I am hopeful that this agreement will be approved so that lengthy and costly litigation can be avoided and we can get to the business of cleaning up the air.”

Los Angeles and Owens Valley officials still do not agree entirely on the best ways to stabilize the lake bed.

In the past, city officials rejected the Owens Valley prescription for treating 35 square miles of the lake because they didn’t think the methods--shallow flooding, re-vegetation and gravel--would work.

There were other objections. The mayor’s office estimated that replacing 51,000 acre-feet of water would cost $23 million a year, causing water rates to rise 9%.

Moreover, officials said voter approval would be necessary because such a plan would require Los Angeles to relinquish some of its rights to some of the adjacent Sierra Nevada water that used to feed the Owens Valley lake.

The city’s new plan calls for experimenting with a variety of approaches to treat the lake, but on a more limited scale than Owens Valley officials wanted, then evaluating the progress after three or four years.

But even under its own plan, the city would have to come up with a lot of water, something officials say still may not be possible without a referendum.

Gewe, the DWP representative, hopes that new sources of water can be found--from an aquifer beneath Owens Valley and from willing sellers elsewhere in the state.

Analysis shows that the aquifer holds 10,000 to 15,000 acre-feet of water, Gewe said, that can be pumped if it doesn’t dry up springs that nourish the abundant wildlife habitat south of the lake.

If it can’t be pumped and the city can’t buy what it needs, the day may come when Los Angeles has to reduce the amount of water that first began sluicing down the aqueduct from the Owens Valley 84 years ago.

“It would have an impact on the city’s water supply,” Gewe said. “But we don’t have certain knowledge that we can carry out this plan without an impact on us.”