Get It Right the First Time

Those troublesome storm drains on the San Joaquin Hills toll road that are like Rube Goldberg contraptions are going to cost 15 times their installation price to fix. Talk about an incentive for getting it right the first time.

Caltrans recently estimated that it would cost at least $13.3 million to repair or replace 38 storm drain filters along the 20-mile highway. The agency conceded earlier this year that the filters were faulty and should never have been installed. Now it has the painful choice of either doing a complete repair, maintaining the faulty filters to the tune of $1 million a year, or paying hefty fines for not complying with a state cleanup order.

Caltrans has been responding to orders from the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, which in July told the state agency to draw up a schedule for fixing the drains.

To be clear, Caltrans didn’t create the problem; the largely unaccountable quasipublic tollway authority in Orange County that built the roads has responsibility for that. The state agency at least can be credited with trying seriously to address the problem, provided, of course, that the water board concludes that the plan will even work.

But that doesn’t eliminate the question of how this happened to a road that already was under intensive scrutiny in the planning stage. According to a study done by Caltrans, the technology that was used apparently was obsolete upon installation. So the drains have never functioned properly.

These drains involve a road that passes through several major watersheds that drain to the ocean. By the time the road that runs from Newport Beach to San Juan Capistrano opened in 1996, there already was a strong record of opposition to the project from environmentalists and the city of Laguna Beach. But instead of taking a cue from those concerns to better address runoff, a flawed drainage system was installed.

Now the state agency is looking at an elaborate and expensive repair plan--the installation of filters in three phases between now and 2004, and the need for more than 400 permits to address archeological and environmental concerns. What a mess.

These filters are important because they are designed to block pollutants in runoff from going into the canyons and later to beaches. Laguna Beach officials, long at war with the toll road, have been concerned for some time that runoff was reaching local waters. All of this comes amid concerns that the builders of the Foothill Transportation Corridor allowed polluted storm water to flow unimpeded into Orange County watersheds. The water board is investigating the complaint.

Although there are no comprehensive studies to show how much runoff from the highways is reaching local canyons and beaches, it is clear that somebody should have been paying more attention early on. In the end, failure to go with the best technology at first could turn into a case of being penny-wise and pound-foolish.