Water Woes Don’t Stop at City Line

Recreational water quality has received significant attention in past months. Caltrans and others were directed to “cease and desist” runoff near new development at Crystal Cove because the adjacent shoreline is a protected area. Preliminary studies have pointed toward a waste-water outfall as a possible source of 1999’s Huntington Beach ocean closures. And Laguna Niguel was ordered to “clean up and abate” residential runoff draining into Aliso Creek.

Tougher enforcement is a double-edged sword. Today, coastal and inland cities are involved in relatively delicate voluntary partnerships called watershed studies. Enforcement actions--if not applied fairly--can chill those partnerships.

A good watershed study looks at a single creek, bay, or river from top to bottom. It measures water quality at every major step and storm drain. Once the study identifies a contaminated area, it proposes projects and funds to eliminate the problem. Some in the environmental community say they’re stall tactics that shield cities from paying for fast solutions.

I disagree. Three strong studies with 14 cities are underway in Orange County today--Aliso Creek, the Newport Bay Watershed and San Juan Creek. Improvement projects for these three watersheds may exceed $60 million. A fourth study is planned for western Orange County.

It’s somewhat easy for a coastal city to budget resources for these pricey efforts. Our residents keep the pressure on us. Newport Beach will spend close to $500,000 this year alone on water quality. But it’s different in inland cities.

Picture the inland city council, appropriately concerned about keeping beaches open since everyone likes a trip to the ocean, but faced with in-town needs like a new senior center.

Consider the case of Laguna Niguel. The city voluntarily participated in the Aliso Creek study funded by a state grant. The study planned to identify water quality problems and then prioritize and fund projects that made sense on a watershed-wide basis.

Regulators used preliminary data from the voluntary study to order Laguna Niguel to immediately eliminate bacteria found in residential runoff from a storm drain that serves about 1,400 homes.

Residential runoff is the water that takes lawn pesticides or car wash soap down the gutter, gathering cigarette butts, animal waste, and oil along the way. This runoff is arguably a legal discharge when it’s on your property, since laws regulating runoff typically allow you to wash your car at home or to over-water your lawn.

But the runoff becomes regulated and a possibly illegal discharge once it hits the gutter. Then it becomes your city’s problem.

Runoff is regulated by a special permit that tells cities to educate residents about the ills of runoff, to cite contractors that produce excess runoff, and to direct the use of “best management practices” to reduce these flows. The system is reasonable, but even a quick look around my coastal hometown finds flowing gutters and contaminated runoff.

It may have been this frustration that caused regulators to apply the Laguna Niguel order. Whether or not the order was appropriate, it’s had a secondary effect. Cities have watched Laguna Niguel dutifully embark upon a costly monitoring, resident education and treatment program for one pipe. The $250,000 cost (to date) of the order--combined with the fact that Laguna Niguel itself found the bacteria problem during the voluntary study--seems to have dampened the enthusiasm of cities to join similar watershed efforts.

That’s the problem for coastal cities. Our voluntary attempts at keeping inland cities at the water quality table are in jeopardy. If cities won’t look for water quality problems, who will? Regulators are stretched thin as it is.

This is why a city-based coastal coalition asked state Sen. Ross Johnson (R-Irvine) to carry legislation intended to encourage cities to keep looking voluntarily for contaminated runoff as long as there’s an effective plan that fixes what cities themselves find.

This bill was derided in the environmental community as “giving polluters three years to keep polluting.” That accusation isn’t intellectually honest. Without voluntary testing, contaminated runoff will exist but not be identified. Most importantly, the big, bad polluters temporarily protected by the legislation are you and me. Abatement orders against residential runoff will turn people who intuitively support clean water into its enemies.

Orders aren’t the only tools available to address runoff. Federal law’s underused “total maximum daily load” process is a good alternative. It is a limit on a contaminant plus a plan to achieve the limit within a certain time. Newport Bay has three in place.

It would be ideal to have clean water now. But it takes you and me a long time and a lot of education to change our behavior. Unfortunately, clean water soon may be the best we can get.