Costly ‘Savings’ by the D.A.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office was one of the first in the nation to open an environmental crimes division. Now, 20 years later, Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley has shut it down, a happy development for would-be polluters. He says the county can no longer afford a division dedicated to prosecuting polluters.

The real question is whether this capital of smog, sprawl and schools built on abandoned oil fields can afford “savings” of this sort.

In its 1980s heyday, the environmental crimes unit had eight full-time attorneys. Previous budget cuts whittled the number to four. Now, under the Cooley plan, a single prosecutor in another division is assigned to environmental cases.

That’s one lawyer to deal with prosecuting oil spills, smog test fraud, illegally dumped chemicals, leaking gasoline storage tanks and developers who bulldoze endangered species and fragile watersheds in a county of 9.9 million people and 4,084 square miles. If he needs help, Cooley says he can turn to prosecutors from other divisions.

Environmental law is notoriously complex. One of the reasons for a specialized division is to develop expertise on such challenges as tracking down the source of toxins dumped years earlier. Novices who don’t understand the laws, much less the science, tend to give up too soon. Polluters know that and too often figure that even if they get caught, no one will make criminal charges stick.

A specialized environmental division signaled that the county was serious about prosecuting polluters. Closing it sends the opposite message. It can be countered by how the district attorney’s office continues to prosecute environmental crimes. But Cooley’s record so far raises suspicion among his critics that more than budget problems are involved.

Even before closing the unit, he scuttled its criminal investigation of the Santa Clarita Valley’s massive Newhall Ranch project, despite evidence that the developers had concealed the existence of endangered wildflowers by destroying them. Cooley transferred a prosecution-minded deputy district attorney to a dusty library job.

The county is facing an enormous budget shortfall. No one doubts the demand on scarce resources in, for example, the efforts to arraign child molesters and lock up violent gangbangers. But environmental crimes have victims, even if the cancers and other illnesses caused by polluted air and water are slow to appear and if the extinction of species goes little noticed. Cooley has hard work ahead to convince not just the polluters but those who live with the pollution that prosecuting environmental crimes is a priority in his office.