Stiffer Rules on Tainted Water Sought

California’s new plan for limiting toxic pollutants in rivers, bays and other waterways has “gaping loopholes” and should be rescinded, a coalition of environmental groups charged in a lawsuit filed against the state water board.

The long-awaited plan, adopted two months ago, provides instructions for how the state will regulate industries and public sewage-treatment plants that discharge 126 toxic compounds, including mercury, dioxins and pesticides. The safety of some of California’s most important waters, including San Francisco Bay, Malibu Creek and San Diego Bay, is at issue.

In the lawsuit, filed Tuesday evening, six environmental groups asked a Superior Court judge to rule that the State Water Resources Control Board’s plan is unlawful.

State water officials were not yet familiar with the details of the lawsuit Wednesday. But they said their plan emerged from an extensive review and debate that lasted five years and that aims to impose statewide uniformity on the regulation of polluters.

“We were very careful to ensure this policy met all the state and federal laws and regulations related to water quality,” said Gail Linck, chief of the state board’s freshwater standards unit.

The plan is one of the few major water-quality initiatives put in place so far during the Davis administration. But the three board members who voted for it are appointees of former Gov. Pete Wilson, while the sole vote against it was cast by the board’s only appointee of Gov. Gray Davis. Environmentalists have criticized Davis for not replacing the Wilson appointees with his own.

Since 1972, the federal Clean Water Act and state law have required waters to be safe for aquatic life and human uses such as swimming and fishing. But more than 500 bays, lakes, stretches of rivers and other bodies of water in California are still considered impaired by pollutants from urban and farm runoff, industries and sewage treatment plants.

Industrial and sewage-treatment effluents have been regulated by state and federal officials for two decades. But for years California has struggled with setting uniform numerical limits for the major toxic pollutants found in them.

In 1991, the state adopted the California Toxics Rule to address pollution in waterways, but industries sued, and a state court threw the rule out, leaving California without standards for most toxic compounds in bodies of water.

Last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stepped in and set limits for California. The new state plan tells water officials how to translate those standards into enforceable limits on individual companies, sewage plants and power plants.

Linck said the plan will ensure that the EPA standards are met by adding restrictions on some toxic pollutants to the existing permits issued to industries and sewage plants.

But Rebecca Bernard, an attorney for the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, which sued on behalf of the six groups, said the plan undermines the federal standards by allowing deadlines for achieving them of up to 20 years hence in some cases. She said the plan also fails to consider some toxic compounds and allows case-by-case exceptions for polluters.

“This plan was supposed to deal with some of the most dangerous pollutants we know about,” she said. “Instead, what we’re seeing is a lot of loopholes and delays and ways of getting around the requirements.”

Stan Martinson, chief of the water board’s water-quality division, called the time frames for meeting the standards reasonable.

“We had a considerable amount of public input on that in our development process, and our board approved this,” he said.

The plan adopted by the board was the last of four major revisions recommended by a task force of representatives from industry, sewage-treatment agencies, fish and wildlife agencies, environmental organizations and public health groups.

Mark Gold, director of Heal the Bay, one of the groups that filed suit, said some of the Southern California waters most harmed by toxic pollutants are the Los Angeles River, San Gabriel River, San Pedro Bay, Malibu Creek, San Diego Bay, Santa Ana River and Ventura River.

The plan could “have huge impacts,” he said, on whether many of those waterways ever achieve the federally mandated goal of protecting people and aquatic life that use them.

One of the plan’s worst failings, Gold said, is that it allows “mixing zones”--the areas where effluents enter bodies of water--to be exempt from the standards. Water quality officials say mixing zones are not indicative of overall pollution levels because any pollution they contain is quickly diluted downstream.

But Gold argued that “you could have areas that are toxic to aquatic life and that would be acceptable under the plan. This obviously is not going to ensure that our water quality is protected.”