Study Finds Lax Enforcement at Sewage Plants

Lax state enforcement has resulted in nearly 150 violations of the Clean Water Act by Orange County’s four sewage treatment plants in the last four years, a public-interest group said Thursday.

The California Public Research Interest Group also found that regional water boards, which are responsible for enforcement, rarely fine polluters and that the fines are so minuscule they don’t act as deterrents.

The results fall “far short” of the goals of the Clean Water Act, said Nels Bjorkquist, campaign director of the Orange County CALPIRG. Congress passed the law in 1973, and the study was conducted to coincide with its upcoming 25th anniversary.

State officials challenged the report’s findings because they say it doesn’t accurately reflect current enforcement efforts. In October 1996, the state toughened standards boards use to determine how much they would fine violators, said Fran Vitulli, a spokeswoman for the state Water Resources Control Board. She also said her agency recently was given legislative approval to hire 18 enforcement officers who will be scattered throughout the state.

Kurt Berchtold, assistant executive officer of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board-Santa Ana region, said the board doesn’t fine facilities in the county every time there is a violation.

“We take an appropriate action every time that there is a violation when we think there is intent or negligence on the part of the discharge,” Berchtold said.

The study found 4,492 violations of the Clean Water Act among the state’s 230 largest dischargers from July 1992 to June 1996, according to CALPIRG’s review of state records. Violations included illegal discharge, not treating toxic waste before sending it to sewage plants and not complying with deadlines. Most of the largest polluters were sewage treatment plants, including the Sanitation Districts of Orange County plants in Fountain Valley and Huntington Beach, Aliso Water Management in San Juan Capistrano and the Southeast Regional Reclamation Agency in Dana Point.

Treatment plants process toxic chemicals and other waste discharged by industrial companies.

Aliso and Southeast Regional were cited for violations in every quarter of the four-year study period, according to the report. Officials at the plants could not be reached for comment. The County Sanitation Districts were cited once for illegal effluent discharge because of a malfunction at a pumping station, said Michelle Tuchman, the agency’s director of communications.

Orange County’s 143 violations were the third-highest in the state. About half the violations were found in San Diego County, and Los Angeles County was cited 171 times.

The CALPIRG study also found that a third of the state’s largest dischargers were cited for violations at least once, and one of every 12 was cited every quarter.

The public-interest research group is calling for mandatory minimum penalties for violators. The report also calls for tightening loopholes in federal and state law that allow companies to avoid limits on the number of toxic chemicals and the amounts they can discharge into sewage treatment plants.