County to Expand Street Sweeping

When the street sweepers finally roll into Gloria Lopez’s Colonia Independencia neighborhood, she will be one happy woman.

For many years--too long for the 71-year-old community leader to count--she and her neighbors in the unincorporated area near Anaheim have asked the county for street-sweeping services. But the answer was always “No.”

That is, until last week, when supervisors reversed themselves and voted to set aside $474,237 to start cleaning residential streets in the county’s unincorporated areas, starting July 1.

The impetus for the change in the county’s policy wasn’t just the need for cleaner roadways. The supervisors said they could no longer ignore the health and environmental concerns: Filthy streets are believed to contribute to problems like asthma in children and lead to urban-runoff pollution.

Whatever the supervisors’ reasons, Lopez and thousands of other Orange County residents are pleased that their communities will finally get the attention they want.

“We’ve been asking and wanting it for years,” Lopez said. “But it never materialized. When it does come, the people are going to be really pleased.”

Since the 1970s, it was county policy to sweep only major thoroughfares. Under the new program, high-tech street sweepers will suck up and dispose of dirt and trash in front of nearly 85,000 homes in more than 70 unincorporated “islands,” or pockets of land under county control.

The areas range from tiny, low-income neighborhoods like Colonia to upscale communities with their own identities, such as Orange Park Acres and Sunset Beach.

Supervisor Cynthia Coad said she decided to join Supervisor Jim Silva in the push for street sweeping after seeing studies that show street grime contains germs, dust, metal residue, pesticides and other pollutants “that affect our health” and travel down storm drains to the ocean.

The findings are especially significant in view of recent health studies showing that Orange County children have a higher asthma rate than the national average, Coad said.

“The county researched [street sweeping] and saw it was a far bigger picture than just sweeping streets,” she said. “They needed a different mind-set and, in fact, a policy change.”

A director of the regional South Coast Air Quality Management District, Coad also called for new studies to determine the health impact of dust and other contaminants that settle on county streets.

Street sweeping was already on a proposed list of goals created in 1992 to limit contaminants going down storm drains, in compliance with the federal Clean Water Act. But significant costs, especially after the 1994 bankruptcy, kept the program on the shelf, county officials said.

After heavy rains, Southern California beaches, especially those in Los Angeles County, are often closed because of high bacteria counts. Even on dry summer days, ocean water near rivers and channels contains disease-carrying germs and toxic compounds.

Last summer, 4.2 miles of oceanfront in Huntington Beach were closed for nearly two months because of bacteria from a mysterious source.

Since 1986, the federal Clean Water Act has prohibited anything but rainwater from flowing into storm drains. Municipalities are required to clean up runoff to “the maximum extent practicable,” and business compliance is required.

County officials said they had developed a plan to comply with the act that deals with urban runoff and includes litter control, recycling and educational awareness in addition to street sweeping and other programs. But the plan only included street sweeping in incorporated cities. Then came the recent staff report recommending that the county revise its current policy.

Until recently, experts viewed street sweeping as ineffective. But improvements in the design of street sweepers have helped change that perception, said Thomas L. Newman, a project manager for HydroQual Inc., a New Jersey-based environmental engineering and science firm.

A 1994 New York City study found that street sweeping is costly but does keep trash from entering waterways and beaches, Newman said.

No hard studies exist on street-sweeping programs’ ability to reduce carcinogens. The success of programs is dependent on the weather, number of sweepings, type of machines and other factors, he said.

An expanded street-sweeping program is not a panacea, warned Chad Nelsen of the San Clemente-based Surfrider Foundation, which promotes water safety. “It’s a good step and certainly something that needs to be done, but there are multiple steps to be taken to deal with urban runoff,” he said.

Nelsen called for greater improvement and replacement of antiquated sewer pipes and facilities and stronger penalties for upstream polluters, including cities.

But Coad believes it’s a victory, albeit a small one, for cleaner neighborhoods and storm drains. She, like Lopez, lives in an unincorporated neighborhood in West Anaheim.

“You want to know something? The debris from my neighborhood goes into the nearby channel, and guess where that goes: into Huntington Beach. This is the beginning of a county focus on health issues and a big step toward fighting urban runoff,” she said.