Message to Water Board: Seize the Day

Today, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board is expected to make one of the most important decisions in its 50-year history, and its most significant decision ever, on the issue of polluted urban runoff. Is the board serious about creating a more livable Los Angeles by taking steps toward solving the region’s urban runoff problem, now regarded as one of the nation’s worst? The board is about to provide the answer.

The board, whose members are appointed by Gov. Gray Davis, will vote on an important new approach that goes to the heart of the urban runoff problem. Experts agree that polluted runoff, which in Los Angeles is often acutely toxic and loaded with pathogens that make people sick, is tied to the ever-increasing hardscape that comes with urban development. In short, more pavement equals more pollution. Because most of the region’s watersheds are paved over, and because the water board until now has refused to take any meaningful action to solve the problem, the runoff problem in L.A. is especially severe.

The proposal before the board is based on one developed by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Los Angeles County to address the “pavement equals pollution” reality. By requiring large new developments, such as shopping centers, to install devices that clean up polluted runoff, the proposal targets the largest new sources of water pollution. Low-tech, inexpensive and highly effective, the devices required by the plan have a proven track record across the nation. If the board gives the go-ahead, then large new development projects in Los Angeles would have to take reasonable steps to actually clean up polluted runoff--just as their counterparts already do in cities as diverse as Denver, Austin and Portland, Ore.

Although Los Angeles County showed leadership by implementing the plan on its own last year, the proposal predictably has triggered an avalanche of opposition from many city governments that have not followed the county’s lead. Yet the lack of factual and technical objections to the plan provides some optimism that, for the first time, the water board actually may be about to do something significant to help solve the polluted runoff problem. That would mean old polluting habits would have to change.

There is cause for concern, however. Perhaps recognizing that the plan has a real chance of passing, many cities and some developers succeeded recently in convincing the board’s executive officer to add a multitude of eleventh-hour loopholes to the proposal. These exemptions, inserted over the objections of environmentalists and the federal Environmental Protection Agency, would rob the proposal of most of its effectiveness. By choosing to make Swiss cheese out of a proposal that might actually improve water quality, the board would revert to its old approach of appeasing virtually any objection by entrenched development interests, no matter how baseless.

By removing the exemptions and then approving the plan, however, the water board can send one of the most important messages in its history: its intention to tackle our region’s most serious water pollution problem. By seizing the moment, the board can take a decisive step toward cleaner beaches and a more livable Los Angeles.

If it backs down, the future for water quality in Los Angeles looks ominous indeed.