Big Bucks Support Befouling of Beach

You don’t need a graduate degree from Caltech to understand the concept.

Flick a cigarette butt into the street in Pomona, spill a few drops of motor oil into the gutter in Downey, or let Fifi do her business on the sidewalk in Van Nuys, and it all runs downhill before getting discharged, untreated, into the ocean.

Go for a swim, and you’re a human olive in a toxic cocktail. We also fish in this gunk and traipse through it when it washes up on the beach. Storm drain pollution isn’t new, but it’s such a menace that Southern California cities are finally being required to do something about it.

And they are. They’re hiring high-powered lawyers and lobbyists to fight the cleanup.

Five thousand dollars here, $10,000 there, $100,000 over there.

Good neighbor Lakewood is in on it, along with Downey, Bellflower, Signal Hill, Vernon, Covina, Pico Rivera, Cerritos, Arcadia, Paramount, South Pasadena, South Gate, Industry, Lawndale, Santa Fe Springs, Whittier, Norwalk, Santa Clarita and too many more to mention.

Pathogens, bacteria and viruses are floating along the beach, striking marine life and making humans ill. Santa Monica Bay looks like a public toilet after a storm, and these mostly inland cities are spending your tax dollars to keep things as they are.

Why should they care? Stuff runs downstream.

The Coalition for Practical Regulation, which represents 41 cities opposed to the regulations on storm runoff, has spent roughly $500,000 on consultants, legal appeals and the like.

“Over the last three years, the cities have probably spent between $1.5 million and $2 million,” says Dave Beckman of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Beckman, who likens these city officials to tobacco executives, said some are almost spending more to fight the new regulations than it would cost to implement them. But it got even kookier last week, when the cities called a news conference to announce the results of a study to determine the cost of pollution control.

Their price tag, based on estimates by engineers and economists at USC, is $283.9 billion.

A staggering amount, yes. Just one problem.

It’s entirely meaningless.

In what must have been a plot to scare the pants off taxpayers, the cities ordered up a study on the cost of building dozens of new treatment plants sophisticated enough to convert storm water to drinking water.

But neither the Environmental Protection Agency nor the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board is requiring any such thing. All they want the cities to do is build screens over catch basins, do more street sweeping, run public education campaigns and control industrial pollutants.

The agencies didn’t ask for a single new treatment plant, and yet the Coalition for Practical Regulation went out and bought a report that recommends as many as 130 of them.

“I just took one look at it and shook my head,” says Catherine Kuhlman, acting director of the EPA’s water division. “I think it’s part of a continuing campaign of fear.... They have chosen the most extreme view in order to alarm people.”

Said Beckman: “They might as well have estimated the cost of taking all the runoff in L.A. and blasting it into lunar orbit, for all the relevance this had to the cost of solving the problem.”

Besides that, the USC study didn’t come cheap.

Care to venture a guess?

Taxpayers got nicked six figures -- $102,000 to be exact.

The way these guys are throwing money around, I might open a consulting business myself. I don’t think you’ve got to be the brightest star in the sky to get work, either. I checked a Web site for one of the USC profs the coalition of cities hired, and the guy’s got a list of recent papers that includes this title:

“Why sprawl is good.”

For a hundred grand, I could probably come up with:

“Why beach pollution is good.”

City officials insist, naturally, that they’re terribly concerned about pollution. They say they are already taking measures to prevent it, and believe everyone has to do a better job of cleaning up our coastal waters.

In defending the USC study, Signal Hill City Manager Ken Farfsing told me the problem with the new requirements is that they aren’t specific as to remedy or cost.

“They’re open-ended,” Farfsing said, “and until they’re better funded, we don’t know how much we’re going to have to spend ultimately.”

That’s true, concedes the EPA’s Kuhlman, and she understands that cash-starved cities have legitimate budget concerns. But she said no city in the entire nation has been asked to build the kind of treatment plants the coalition studied.

They’re simply being asked to see how much pollution they can prevent with common-sense, general housekeeping-type measures. And some cities have made a big difference for as little as $3 per household. How much imagination does it take?

Ticket litterbugs.

Grab schoolchildren by the collar.

Crack down on auto shops and fast-food chains.

Arrest the clown who keeps dumping chemicals on his over-watered lawn.

Whatever the cost, we’ve got a moral responsibility. We could start by tossing a few of these weaselly bean counters into the surf after the next storm.

“They’re saying it’s going to cost thousands of jobs and millions of dollars,” says Fran

Diamond, chair of the L.A. Regional Water Quality Control Board. “In fact, it’s going to cost a lot of jobs and money if they don’t clean up our water. This is Southern California, and

tourism is essential to our economy.”

If money’s a problem, Diamond wants to know, how can the cities afford to “litigate everything we do?”

“We’re enforcing the federal Clean Water Act, and they just don’t want to do it. They don’t want any regulations. They say, ‘Oh, we’re all for it. Everybody’s an environmentalist.’ Then why don’t they spend that $102,000 on putting up trash catchers?” raged the regulator.

Good question.

The coastline is one of the few great public spaces we all share, whether we live in Pomona or Culver City. It’s our Central Park, only better, more immense, more fragile.

It’s yours, it’s mine, it is Southern California, and the cost of preserving it is nothing compared to the cost of compromising it.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.