Targeting a River’s Intractable Trash

In the first significant attempt to set a pollution limit for a local waterway, state officials have drafted a proposal to halt the flow of trash into the Los Angeles River and its tributaries over 10 years.

If the hotly contested plan is adopted by the Regional Water Quality Control Board on Thursday, cities in the river’s watershed would have to reduce the amount of litter coming out of their storm drains and channels by 10% every year, until the river system is entirely trash-free.

The measure would include tributaries such as the Arroyo Seco, the Tujunga Wash and the Rio Hondo, drawing in a vast swath of the county stretching from Long Beach to Arcadia to Agoura Hills.

Environmentalists are hailing the proposal as a long-overdue remedy for pollution that has made the watershed unsightly and a risk to aquatic life and human health.

“The point is we have an absolutely untenable problem right now,” said Mark Gold, executive director of Heal the Bay. “The question you have to ask yourself is: Do you find any level of trash acceptable?”

The measure is drawing harsh criticism from cities, which would be fined or sued if they could not control the plastic bags, cups and cigarette butts that get swept into the storm water system.

To meet the standard, they would have to beef up enforcement of litter laws, increase street sweeping and install equipment to trap the trash before it goes into the river and flows to the ocean.

City and county officials contend that the plan sets an unachievable goal that would cost hundreds of millions. Furthermore, it would make taxpayers liable to third-party lawsuits for even small amounts of litter drifting down the channel, according to Judith Wilson, director of Los Angeles’ Bureau of Sanitation.

“We’re for improving our waterways, but it has to be done with sound science and practical regulation,” Wilson said.

If the water board adopts the phased-in zero-tolerance standard for litter that is being recommended by its staff, Wilson said, the city will appeal the decision to the state Water Quality Control Board and possibly sue to overturn it.

Trash is the first in a long list of pollutants that regulators are beginning to attack in an attempt to curtail the urban runoff that ultimately fouls beaches, lagoons and coastal waters.

The only pollution limit so far adopted by the water board governed trash on a small stretch of the San Gabriel River in the Angeles National Forest.

Any standard for the Los Angeles River will directly target the waterway’s network of tributaries and the entire 51-mile course to Long Beach, where tons of trash drift into the harbor. Its effects will extend to every parking lot, street gutter and vacant lot where litter collects before rain water carries it to the ocean.

Many Fights Over Rules Predicted

The proposed measures are the result of a 2-year-old federal consent decree, which settled a lawsuit filed by two environmental groups--the Santa Monica BayKeeper and Heal the Bay--against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. For 20 years, the federal agency had failed to ensure that the waters were safe and clean, as mandated by federal law.

Based on the settlement, 91 similar standards for everything from heavy metals to bacteria to feces will be adopted for the river and other impaired watercourses in Los Angeles and Ventura counties by 2011.

“I expect we’ll have a battle for the next several years on every one of these,” said John Bishop, chief of the regional board section that is creating the pollution limits.

The regional water board estimates that the total cost for the trash limit could run anywhere from the low millions to $945 million if the cities put high-tech filter systems in all of their storm drains.

That limit for the Los Angeles River must be adopted by March. One for Ballona Creek and a chloride limit for Calleguas Creek in Ventura County will follow within months. Pathogen limits for the Los Angeles River, Malibu Creek and Santa Monica beaches will come later this year.

Other thresholds--called total maximum daily loads--have already been adopted throughout the state.

Trash, by its variable nature, is harder to measure than other contaminants such as fecal coliform. Scientists cannot just stroll out into the river and take a water sample to determine the level of trash.

Nor is there much information on how much trash swimmers and surfers--or fresh water and marine ecosystems--can endure before they are harmed. Many of the complaints about trash are aesthetic.

“There’s no data on trash,” said Leslie Mintz, attorney for Heal the Bay. “It’s always been the stepchild of pollution problems. Everyone knows it’s there, but nobody does anything about it.”

Yet even the cities acknowledge that it is a serious concern.

The high water mark of the Los Angeles River is often a thick line of plastic foam scraps and plastic bags. In the ocean, eddies of trash routinely drift through groups of surfers, whose leashes snag on the bags. Sea birds get strangled in six-pack rings and dolphins can die after eating plastic bags, environmental groups say.

The litter problem in the Los Angeles area takes a toll on tourism at the county’s beaches as well--an industry that generates $2 billion a year, according to Heal the Bay. And the burgeoning movement to create park space on the Los Angeles River will certainly be hampered if the main attraction is filled with garbage, environmentalists say.

“All the politicians are touting that we need to make the river part of the community and not just a conveyance for waste water,” said Steve Fleischli, executive director of the Santa Monica BayKeeper. “Trash is the most obvious thing that needs to be removed to make that connection to the river.”

The staff of the regional water board sees trash more as a policy issue than a scientific one. And because littering is illegal, there simply can be no other standard but zero, they say.

“This is one of those intrinsic issues, that you know trash is wrong and it shouldn’t be in the water,” said Dennis Dickerson, executive officer of the regional board.

Dickerson said his staff polled various cities to see how many littering tickets they issue. “There were just a handful of tickets in all the cities,” he said.

The regional board said it is setting the trash limit first because it is something the public can see and relate to, and the issue would not get bogged down in arcane scientific debate.

Because no one knows how much trash is flowing into the river system, the first two years of the program would require monitoring to determine the baseline level for trash.

The yearly reductions would be measured from that baseline. The first 10% reduction would come at the end of 2004 with the goal of zero trash by 2014, board staff members said.

They are expecting a contentious public hearing in Los Angeles on Thursday, when the board takes up the issue for a vote at the Metropolitan Water District building.

Goal of Zero Trash Called Impossible

Some sanitation agencies say they would not contest the enforced reductions, but say the ultimate goal of zero is impossible. Unfortunately, that has forced cities and the county to fight the proposal and prepare to litigate, said Don Wolfe, assistant director of the county Department of Public Works.

“Everybody’s energies are fighting the zero [standard] and they’re not focusing on the trash problem,” said Wolfe. “And that takes away from the whole point.”

Wolfe said he would agree to the 10% reductions for five years, followed by a reassessment and maybe another schedule of reductions.

But some of the 53 cities in the watershed say the whole idea of enforced standards is misguided. Don Farfsing, city manager for Signal Hill, said the regional board should simply require them to implement certain measures to reduce trash, but not set the limits.

He said the money spent monitoring trash to see if cities are meeting their goals would be better spent collecting the refuse.

Wilson, of Los Angeles’ sanitation department, said the federal consent decree needs to be amended.

When that accord was being worked out, a coalition of Southern California treatment agencies, of which Wilson is vice chairwoman, intervened to get the cities involved in the process.

The same group, called the Southern California Alliance for Public Treatment Works, has sued over pollution standards in Northern California and the state’s list of impaired waterways, to which the pollution limits apply.

Trash Filters Seen as Costly

Wilson said the cost to install major trash filters at the storm drain outlets can range from $135,000 to $350,000 each and would number in the hundreds in Los Angeles. A letter sent to the EPA and signed by Mayor Richard Riordan stated that the total implementation of all the standards could ultimately cost the city as much as $1.48 billion.

Wilson said the limit is illegal because it is not based on necessary scientific studies. “If they illegally adopt this [limit] without doing the required work . . . they’re inviting litigation,” she said.

In response, Bishop said that under the federal Clean Water Act, the regional board must consider only what is best for the waterway, and that anything less stringent cannot be legally justified. He said the board got the same adverse reaction to a measure passed last year that required new developments to curb runoff from their properties.

“The folks fighting this are the same people who have been fighting everything,” he said.

Fleischli, of the BayKeeper, noted that the Clean Water Act required that such limits be set by 1979. Yet 20 years later, the EPA had not set a single one for the 156 polluted bodies of water in the two counties, prompting the BayKeeper and Heal the Bay to sue.

Still, he said, the notion that cities are going to be sued for a single cigarette butt is wrong and is being used to obscure the legal reality that the river must be cleaned.

“Now we’re focusing on what the waterway needs,” said Fleischli. “This is implementing what we were supposed to have done 30 years ago.”

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Cleaning Up a River

A proposal to eliminate trash in the Los Angeles River and its many tributaries would affect 53 cities and unincorporated county land. The Los Angeles River watershed in the urban part of the county:

Source: Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board