New Tax Urged to Fund Water Cleanup Board

EL MONTE —  A group of water officials have conceded for the first time that cleanup of ground-water pollution in the San Gabriel Valley will require local funding through new taxes or surcharges on water bills.

Attorney Arthur G. Kidman, representing a committee of local water suppliers and producers, proposed creation of a San Gabriel Valley Ground Water Quality Authority at a state Water Resources Control Board hearing in El Monte Tuesday. Under the proposal, the board’s activities would be partially financed through new taxes.

Kidman acknowledged that the proposal is controversial, particularly the provision for local funding. But he said a committee of the San Gabriel Valley Watermaster, a board that represents water suppliers and producers, has concluded that widespread pollution of ground water in the main San Gabriel basin cannot be overcome without raising money locally to supplement state and federal efforts.

Ultimate Remedy

John Wise, deputy regional administrator of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, earlier told the state board: “The San Gabriel Valley presents an environmental management problem of extraordinary scope and extraordinary complexity. We have not seen anything like it in this country, not to mention California.

“It may involve decades of time and hundreds of millions of dollars to ultimately remediate this contamination and to restore the integrity of the ground-water basin.

“It is certainly much larger than the ability of any one party, whether state or federal, to handle this alone. It is clearly going to require a collaborative effort on a vast scale over a long period of time.”

Organic Pollutants

Thomas Stetson, engineer for several water agencies, told the board that 116 of the 392 wells in the San Gabriel Valley are contaminated with volatile organic compounds, such as trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE). He said 44 wells have been closed. The remainder either have contaminant levels within state and federal limits or the water is blended or treated to meet drinking water requirements.

The contamination was discovered in 1979 and the problem has been on the EPA Superfund cleanup list since 1984.

Although she was detained in Sacramento by legislative business, Assemblywoman Sally Tanner (D-El Monte) sent an aide to deliver a statement to the board complaining that there has been “incredibly little progress” in cleaning up the pollution.

She noted in her statement that because ground-water contamination “is not really something you can see, touch or smell, San Gabriel Valley residents have not, for the most part, been up in arms about this problem.” As a result, she said, it has been easy for the state and federal governments to put the problem on the back burner and spend money elsewhere.

Wise conceded that it has taken the EPA a long time to attack the problem, but he characterized the process as “prudent planning.”

“We have to avoid the pressure to frantically throw a lot of money at the wrong problem; something to create an appearance of action,” he said.

Too Many Meetings

Board member Diane Ruiz said she agrees, that “we shouldn’t be running off to do something imprudent,” but added: “The biggest problem I see going on here is that we have a lot of technical people (from different agencies) with the finest engineering and technical credentials who spend all their time going to meetings and facilitating further meetings. And very little actually going on in the ground.”

Kidman said the proposal to create a ground-water quality authority is partly a response to the difficulties arising from the number of state, federal and local agencies that have responsibilities for dealing with aspects of ground-water contamination.

“The problem here is that there are too many cooks in the kitchen,” Kidman said, “and no one of them is in charge. A head cook needs to be appointed and given enough authority to assist the other cooks so that everyone does a better job.”

Kidman said the new agency would not take over or consolidate authority held by others, but would coordinate, supplement and focus efforts on the San Gabriel Valley.

Legislation Needed

Establishment of the authority would require state legislation, Kidman said. The agency would be governed by a board that could include appointees from the state Department of Health Services, County Board of Supervisors, Regional Water Quality Control Board and local water districts and organizations.

The EPA has urged establishment of such an agency to manage treatment systems and other facilities that are built to remove pollutants. The EPA will pay 90% of the cost of building and operating treatment plants for 10 years, but the state must pay the remaining 10% and the EPA intends to turn over management to another agency at the end of 10 years.

In a written report submitted to the state board, Kidman said: “The key to all this is to find an adequate source or sources for reliable funding. The weakness in the current ground-water quality regime is that too few resources are spread across too wide an area in order for the needs of the San Gabriel Valley to be adequately addressed.”

Identification Difficult

Kidman noted that Tanner, Rep. David Dreier (R-La Verne) and others have been adamantly opposed to putting the cost of cleanup of ground-water pollution on water customers because they did not cause the pollution. He said everyone agrees that polluters who allowed contaminants to seep into ground water should be tracked down and forced to contribute to the cleanup cost.

But there are dozens of abandoned landfills and thousands of businesses that have used and stored TCE, PCE and other solvents over the years and could be sources of the contamination, he said. The difficulty of proving liability is so great, Kidman said, that “the effort to identify responsible parties to provide a significant portion of the needed funding appears doomed.”

Therefore, he said, other funding sources should be explored, such as taxes on landfills and on companies that use hazardous chemicals, assessments on property and a surcharge on water bills.

W. Don Maughn, chairman of the State Water Resources Control Board, which conducted the El Monte hearing to gather information on what steps should be taken to protect San Gabriel Valley ground water, said the conclusion he reached after listening to testimony from federal, state and local agencies is that “the problem is funding.”

He said the cleanup cost, estimated at up to $800 million, is so large that no single level of government can handle it.

Speeding Work

Paula Bisson, EPA section chief in charge of state Superfund programs, said the EPA has asked state and local agencies to take on certain tasks so that work can be speeded.

For example, she said, the EPA is negotiating a cooperative agreement that will give the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board about $1 million to find pollution sources. But, she said, the $1 million will pay only for the search for sources, and will not pay the cost of overseeing cleanup work when, for example, the search uncovers a leaking chemical storage tank.

Bisson said she has no estimate of the cleanup oversight cost, but it would be the state’s responsibility.

In addition, Bisson said, there is one major problem that is outside the scope of the federal Superfund effort. In addition to solvents, many wells in the San Gabriel Valley have been contaminated with nitrates that may have seeped into ground water from fertilizer and septic tanks.

Harmful to Infants

Nitrates, unlike solvents, are not suspected carcinogens, but can be harmful to infants. Bisson said the EPA will remove nitrates in areas that are also contaminated with solvents, but state and local agencies should initiate nitrate-removal programs elsewhere.

Despite nitrates and solvents in ground water, the water that is being delivered to residents continues to meet state and federal drinking-water requirements, EPA officials stressed.

But officials of local water companies said that it is becoming increasingly difficult and costly to work around the problem by drilling new wells or deepening old wells in order to find purer water.