Board OKs Long Beach Water Plan

Ending a long-running fight with the city of Long Beach over treatment of polluted storm water, members of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board on Wednesday approved a far-reaching plan that could become a model for other cities in the county.

The five board members unanimously approved the complex plan after a three-hour hearing in Pasadena. The vote sets the stage for settlement of a rancorous lawsuit that began three years ago when Long Beach challenged a storm water treatment program required under the Clean Water Act and accepted by 84 other cities in the county.

Under the new plan, Long Beach agreed to come up with a program to stop illegal discharges of pollutants into the storm drain system and set up monitoring stations to test levels of oil and grease, bacteria and fecal matter, hydrocarbons and various toxic chemicals that pour into storm drains and then into local waters, like Alamitos Bay, during storms.

The plan takes effect immediately, although some elements will be phased in over several years.

Long Beach and water board officials hailed the plan as a milestone, but environmentalists said during the hearing that it left open how new real estate developments will be treated.

Environmentalists, who participated in negotiations that led to the agreement, wanted the water board to require Long Beach to impose covenants on new real estate projects that would require developers to set up a system to catch runoff and treat it on-site when storms drop 0.75 of an inch of rain or more.

The idea is to clean up the water or let it settle through porous ground coverings before it became a problem later in the runoff system. But it is widely acknowledged that such systems would add new costs to developments.

The water board left that issue open after Long Beach Public Works Director Ray Holland complained that the city would be at a competitive disadvantage if other cities in Los Angeles County competing for new developments did not have the same restrictions.

A political donnybrook is expected when the water board begins negotiating with the county’s cities, including Long Beach, over requirements on new developments in September.

Mark Gold of Heal the Bay, one of the negotiators, said he plans to appeal the regional board’s decision to the state water board because it failed to address the issue of new developments.

Alex Helperin, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the agreement “very significant” because it represented the first individual agreement with a city on storm water treatment.