$500-Million Water Proposal Has Nothing but Friends

A familiar sight returned to Long Beach Harbor this week with the season’s first rains: rivers of trash, flushed out of the storm drains and culverts of Los Angeles and its suburbs into the Pacific Ocean.

Some is still bobbing in the water just yards off shore. By the end of the rainy season next spring, some 4,500 tons of trash will have washed up on the shore around Long Beach.

On Nov. 2, Los Angeles voters will be asked to approve a $500-million bond to help reduce the flow of pollutants by upgrading the city’s storm-water system. The cost for a homeowner with a house assessed at $350,000 has been estimated at about $56 a year.

In a metropolis that has struggled for decades to come to terms with the environmental consequences of growth, the bond is in some ways just the latest effort to find money to pay the bills.

But Proposition O, which needs a two-thirds majority to pass, may also represent a milestone for the city of Los Angeles, say many public officials and environmental leaders.

Placed on the ballot by a unanimous City Council earlier this year, the measure is backed by every elected official in Los Angeles city government as well as by leading business groups and labor unions.

It has no organized opposition. Even Kris Vosburgh, executive director of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., which opposes a county sales tax hike to pay for more law enforcement officers, said the bond is “not unreasonable.”

The campaign for the measure has raised more than $720,000, some from big developers and city contractors.

“It’s really a sign of a new environmental leadership in the city,” said Tracy Egoscue, executive director of Santa Monica Baykeeper, one of several environmental groups that have been fighting for years to clean up the coastal waters around Los Angeles.

With storm-water runoff the leading cause of coastal pollution -- and a frequent cause of beach closures -- local communities face new requirements to curb trash, oil, harmful microbes and other pollutants in waterways.

Los Angeles has elected to tackle the problem with a massive infrastructure program that will include such projects as the installation of new screens on drains to keep trash out of the Los Angeles River and Ballona Creek and the development of more green space to naturally filter runoff.

Los Angeles has invested before in cleaning its polluted air and water. The Hyperion sewage treatment plant, which was renovated at a cost of $1.6 billion in the 1990s to reduce wastewater discharges into Santa Monica Bay, is among the most advanced in the world.

And new initiatives, including cleaner-burning buses, have helped to improve air quality around Los Angeles.

But storm water has historically attracted less attention from local officials, environmentalists say.

David Beckman, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Fund in Los Angeles, said other metropolitan areas around the country are years ahead of the Los Angeles region in cutting pollution that flows into storm drains and then into the sea.

“Southern California has a world-famous smog problem,” Beckman said.

“It’s taken a lot of aggressive advocacy to bring the water issue to the fore,” he added.

Until recently, the city of Los Angeles and surrounding communities resisted efforts by state regulators and others to force local government to do more to control storm-water runoff, which sends not only trash into the bays but also bacteria, which pose health risks to swimmers, surfers and other beachgoers.

Three years ago, when the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board imposed new requirements on local governments, Los Angeles was among a group of cities that fought the regulations.

But environmentalists and others said they see among city leaders a new appreciation for the need to address storm-water pollution.

“I think before this was seen as something for bureaucrats and engineers to deal with. But a lot of us came to City Hall campaigning on environmental issues,” said Councilman Eric Garcetti, who led the push for the new storm-water program. “I grew up knowing there were days when I couldn’t go to the beach because it was too polluted.”

Clean water has become a visceral issue for many Angelenos, Garcetti said. It is also an economic one. Beaches generate billions of tourist dollars for Southern California each year.

George Kieffer, chairman of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, who cosigned the ballot argument in favor of Proposition O, said elected officials seem less wary of asking voters to pay for much-needed public works than they were in the immediate aftermath of the tax revolt of the late 1970s.

“There is a fundamental recognition on the part of city, county and state leaders that we’ve delayed infrastructure improvements for years,” Kieffer said.

“I think people recognize that this is the right thing to do and it is something that voters will support,” he added.

Although a coalition of area cities continues to fight the new rules, complaining that they impose mandates to reduce pollution that they cannot afford, the city of Los Angeles has dropped its opposition.

In August, after years of fighting a lawsuit by Santa Monica Baykeeper, the city also agreed to replace at least 488 miles of sewer lines to prevent sewage spills into the storm drains. The city is contemplating raising sewer fees to help pay for those improvements.

With its decision to put Proposition O on the November ballot, the City Council has set Los Angeles on course to become a model for the region, according to state water officials.

“A lot of the rest of the region is watching to see how this works,” said Jonathan Bishop, executive officer of the Regional Water Quality Control Board. “They are letting Los Angeles test the waters.”

No other community in the region has proposed as ambitious an approach, Bishop said.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Proposition O

The $500-million bond would fund projects to remove trash from the Los Angeles River and Ballona Creek as well as to reduce bacteria and other pollutants flowing into coastal waters. Among the projects planned:

Installation of catch basin inserts and screens to capture trash before it enters the river and creek.

* Construction of new basins and other structures to catch and treat polluted storm water.

* Development of new parks around the river, creek and other areas to naturally filter storm-water runoff.