State Panel Considers Coastal Runoff Ban

Environmentalists urged the state water board Wednesday to continue to ban so-called urban runoff into 34 of California’s most sensitive offshore areas.

Linda Sheehan, Pacific region director for the Center for Marine Conservation, said pollution-carrying runoff from storm drains, agricultural fields, marinas and city streets is the leading cause of coastal pollution.

“If you relax protection from the No. 1 source into these areas, you are dooming them to destruction,” she said.

Sheehan was one of the witnesses who testified at a state Water Resources Control Board hearing on potential amendments to the California Ocean Plan.

The plan, adopted in 1972, sets water quality objectives for the state’s coastal waters and is the basis for regulating discharges into those areas.

Sheehan and other environmentalists who testified at the board’s hearing Wednesday were responding to suggestions from its staff that the Ocean Plan was intended to ban industrial and waste discharges, not runoff from city streets, into so-called areas of special biological significance.

The issue was raised when a regional water quality control board in Southern California questioned whether runoff from an Irvine Co. construction site was covered by the ban.

The 34 offshore sites include waters off some of California’s most scenic coastal areas, including Bodega Bay, Point Reyes, the Farallon Islands, Redwood National Park and Point Lobos.

Edward Anton, the board’s acting executive director, said the Ocean Plan’s language seems to ban urban runoff into the sites.

But Anton also said he was on the board’s staff when the plan was adopted and he doubts that the board intended to include urban runoff in the ban.

But Leslie Mintz, an attorney for the Santa Monica environmental group Heal the Bay, said her organization has had “multiple conversations” with board staff members over the years and the staff members said they thought urban runoff was covered.

The board made no decisions Wednesday, but Anton said that at some point it will have to determine whether urban runoff is covered and, if it is, how to deal with it.

He said that five or six of the sensitive areas are adjacent to urban areas and “there must be some urban runoff” at those sites.

“Nobody has taken any action to cause them to be removed from those areas,” he said.

“When it really rains, it’s going to be very difficult to get it completely out of there,” he added.

Sheehan said the problem can be addressed by using storm water diversion systems or more simply by planting grass strips to strain street runoff before it reaches the ocean.