Spills Are Lesson in Accountability

Candor and public accountability are valued commodities in government today, in part because they are not always in evidence. Local government has a special obligation, as Huntington Beach recently found out.

Five city officials who usually are taken up with the nuts and bolts of public works infrastructure instead found themselves facing subpoenas to testify before the Orange County Grand Jury. Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas is looking into the spillage of millions of gallons of raw sewage that flowed from cracked and broken pipes underneath the city and, specifically, whether those discharges were reported correctly to the state.

Attending to the leaks has not been the city’s only damage-control project of late. Officials acknowledged last month that they originally had not complied with the letter of the law in reporting the leaks. They have maintained that there never was a health threat to the city and that the problems of the old sewer system were well-known.

But already the political aspect of the problem has given this the dimensions of a scandal. New Councilwoman Debbie Cook has wasted no time asking why city workers took three years to begin repair on leaks that took place during the 1990s.

Moreover, the city has had to readdress a separate public-relations problem arising from its highly publicized beach closures two years ago. It conducted thorough inspections after the fact. Now it has had to revisit the issue and assert that there was no relationship between the leaking pipes and the beach closures.

It’s not clear what the city originally did about the leaking pipes. The state says it only recently found out about them, but the city’s former public works director says the city’s problems weren’t kept secret but were unaddressed only because the city was strapped for cash as a result of losing about $3 million in the 1994 county bankruptcy. If she’s right, then this is some previously unaccounted-for fallout from former Treasurer-Tax Collector Robert L. Citron’s wrong-way bets on interest rates for the county investment pool.

The city now has been ordered by the Regional Water Quality Control Board to find and clean up the lingering mess from the spills. It surely can expect closer monitoring from the state in the future.

What lesson should be taken from this? Huntington Beach as a coastal community has a special responsibility both to its own residents and to the thousands from around Southern California who visit its shoreline.