LA River Pollution Rules Out

By Harry Saltzgaver
Executive Editor

An Orange County Superior Court judge has overturned water quality regulations forcing upstream cities to clean up storm water and urban runoff flowing into the Los Angeles River.

In February 2006, 18 cities joined in a group called Coalition for Practical Regulation (CPR) and sued the State and Regional Water Quality Control boards, saying that regulations on storm water quality (instituted in 2001) were unrealistic and not based on current science. Those regulations required cities, counties and other agencies with control over storm water discharge into the Los Angeles River to reduce pollutants by 10% every year until there was zero pollution discharge.

Long Beach declined to join the suit, and supported the regulations as the only way to eliminate the trash building up on the city’s beaches and the increasingly poor water quality along the coast. The city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County also stayed out of the coalition, reaching their own operating agreement with the Water Quality Control Board.

But Judge Thierry Colaw ruled earlier this month that the board had ignored legitimate study requests from the suing cities, and had established no basis for applying stringent water quality standards to storm water and runoff over which the cities had little control. Further, the judge said that the Total Masimum Daily Load (TMDL) of zero was unreasonable.

Attorneys still are studying the ruling to decide what comes next. It appears now that new regulations will need to be decided upon, and that process likely will include a cost-benefit analysis, according to Tom Leary, stormwater program officer for Long Beach.

“You have to look at it on parallel tracks,” Leary said. “We need to make sure we get the biggest bang for our buck, and we have to have good science to back that up.

“But regardless of what I’ve said, the fact is, we’re (Long Beach) still getting slammed. Because it’s been dry and people haven’t seen the mounds of debris on the beach, they think the programs have been working. But it’s really just because it’s been dry. And all the slobber, the bacteria and the pollutants that hurt our water quality, still is coming down.”

Dry winters in 2005-06 and 2006-07 saw trash picked up on Long Beach beaches drop below 2,000 tons a year. But rainfall was back to normal this year, and city crews had picked up 3,840 tons of trash from July 1, 2007, to March 1 this year.

Worse, Leary said, are pollutants ranging from metals to toxins to bacteria. Those pollutants typically are concentrated in dry years into low-flow urban runoff, which typically goes from storm drains untreated directly into the river. That is the primary reason for the consistently bad Heal The Bay grades given Long Beach shore water quality.

Officials in the cities that formed CPR are concerned about water quality too, according to Signal Hill Councilman Larry Forester, who was Signal Hill’s mayor when the lawsuit was filed. The issue was more one of fairness, he said.

“We hope that the judge’s decision will encourage the water boards to initiate a sincere dialog with all the cities,” Forester wrote in a release. “We want to work with the boards on reasonable standards that will result in more efficient and cost-effective ways to improve surface water quality in the region.”

Leary said he thought the goal of zero emissions scared city attorneys and others into action. Even though people knew a true zero emission solution was unattainable, that’s what the law called for — and what people could sue about, Leary said.

Under the old regulations, cities were to show a 40% reduction in discharges by this fall. While the ruling would appear to negate that requirement, the city and county of Los Angeles, as well as Long Beach, appear to be close to that goal.

“We need to do some good science on this,” Leary said. “The problem is, no one is flush with cash to go do the necessary studies. The regulatory agencies and the environmental communities have to work together and get this done.”