What Is to be Done?
(Part three of a three-part series).
The cost of meeting the requirements of the Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (M4S) Permit, issued by our local Regional Water Quality Control Board (RWQCB), is staggering: at least $20 billion for Los Angeles County and approximately $6 billion for the San Gabriel Valley. And there is very little help for these communities.
Perhaps equally as staggering, is the fact that the communities that rest against the foothills bear a heavier burden than those further away. The greatest costs are for the cities that fall against the foothills because the federal government has exempted itself from the regulations that apply to others. However, it does not exempt the communities below its watershed area from cleaning the water that flows towards them from federal lands.
As Monrovia Mayor Tom Adam wryly remarked in discussing this topic, “We know what flows downhill.” And the feds do not need to clean what flows from them. But the communities into which that water flows must clean the water before it flows out of their areas. Therefore their costs are greater. For example, the individual communities with the greatest costs in the San Gabriel Valley are the City of Industry at $476.26 million and Arcadia with $407.98 million, for those two communities have extensive water flow from federal land.
The time frame set for compliance is not in decades, but rather in years. The Rio Hondo/San Gabriel River Group, which includes Arcadia, Monrovia, Duarte, Bradbury, and Sierra Madre, has an Enhanced Water Management Plan (E-WMP) that calls for completion in only 12 years, at a cost of almost $1.5 million. The East San Gabriel River Water Management Plan (WMP) has a shorter time frame, just 10 years and with a huge price tag of almost $6.5 million (no surprise it encompasses the foothill communities of Claremont, La Verne, Pomona, and San Dimas).
The San Gabriel Valley Council of Governments (SGV COG) has a water committee that has been looking at this issue for some time. At the meeting held in Monrovia a few weeks ago, representatives of that committee urged a three-pronged approach to the problem: educating the public, advocating for policy change, and working towards compliance.
The SGV COG held a workshop in Monrovia to explain the situation to elected officials and staff members of local governments. While it was open to anyone, very few representatives attended (Monrovia being the exception, which was well represented with several staff members and two council members, along with a handful of local residents).
The SGV COG has also advocated that cites work towards compliance. It was their suggestion that ignoring the problem (the proverbial elephant in the room) would not make it go away and could potentially make the cost even greater. Fines from the RWQCB can climb as high as $10,000 per day, per violation and up to $25,000 per day if the courts impose the penalties.
If these fines were not enough, it was also pointed out that lawsuits by non-governmental agencies had resulted in some staggering costs. Between 2003 and 2013 there were 16 lawsuits throughout the state of California brought against local agencies by non-governmental entities (such as environmental groups), 12 of which have already been concluded.
These settlements have resulted in $19.2 million in penalty costs, $3.5 million in attorney fees for those who brought the suits (cost that must be paid to the plaintiffs by the local agencies, not to mention the costs to the local agencies of defending against the suits), and $209,000 in additional monitoring costs.
For example, the City of Malibu settled with the Santa Monica Bay Keeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council. In this settlement, Malibu paid $6.6 million, of which $5.6 million was for infrastructure upgrades (repairing their systems), $750,000 in legal fees, and $250,000 for an “ocean health assessment.”
But what can be done? Perhaps Bruce Lathrop, the Mayor Pro Tem of Bradbury (a city of approximately 1,000 residents that are facing an estimated compliance cost of a staggering $67.05 million) put it best when he said,” the regulators are just following the law, but it is a bad law and we need to change it.”
The presentation from the COG pointed out that it is unrealistic to expect to complete $6 billion worth of stormwater improvements in the San Gabriel Valley in the time allotted (most by 2028 – just 12 years away). The COG maintains that it is also unrealistic to expect property owners to approve the significantly-increased taxes needed to fund these projects.
It was their contention that the more realist approach was a combination of lobbying efforts. The groups to lobby would be the RWQCB, the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB), along with state and federal representatives, particularly local congressional representatives.
