Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
April 30, 2007
4. Water Quality
By Mike Lee, staff writer
Two years after water regulators ordered a $96 million cleanup for
The San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board has made little visible progress toward backing up its initial order, which would require shipbuilders, the Navy, the city of
Roughly 60 acres of bay sediment south of the San Diego-Coronado Bridge have been contaminated by heavy metals and toxic chemicals from industrial activities and urban runoff. The water board seeks the cleanup to protect fish, and people who use the bay.
The targets of the order have contested it and said the best option is to not disturb the sediment. In contrast, environmentalists are pushing for even more cleanup work.
Some conservationists, legislators and state officials are frustrated by what state Sen. Christine Kehoe, D-San Diego, calls the “snail's pace.” The delay raises questions about whether the water board can effectively handle a cleanup initiative this big.
“It's extremely disappointing that this has dragged out this long,” Kehoe said. “Cleaning the bay has been under discussion for many, many years and we need to really start delivering some results to the public.”
At first, the board was going to vote on finalizing its plan in August 2005. Now, it doesn't expect to sign off on the cleanup order until mid-2008.
Several factors caused the postponement. The agency initially chose not to publish its scientific justification on grounds that the law doesn't require such a report. It reversed course after requests by the shipyards and environmentalists.
In addition, to comply with the state water board's “paperless” workplace initiative, the agency decided to digitize tens of thousands of paper files that support its case. Now the water board is swimming in a sea of paperwork related to its order.
Turning those files into electronic documents will cost as much as $152,000 and take about six more months.
In December, the State Lands Commission took the unusual step of publicly prodding the water board to quickly and fully clean up the bay. The commission deals with the use and pollution of state properties, including bays and tidelands.
“The commission was trying to be polite about this, but it aimed to indicate concern and show that we want to see this thing done,” said Paul D. Thayer, the commission's executive officer.
He said the commission might sue the bay polluters if the water board doesn't get the job done. Thayer declined to set a timeline for that action.
“We have confidence that the board will see this issue through,” he said. “It's just that there are other mechanisms out there if there should be some problem.”
In addition, the board has been slowed by the lack of statewide guidelines for sediment quality, which state water-quality officials intend to finalize early next year.
“There is no clock that drives this,” Robertus said. “We want to do it right. I don't want to have a long, protracted court battle that we end up losing.”
As for the two years that have elapsed since the board announced its order, Robertus said it's not unusual for the agency to publish preliminary findings so the public can have time to review them.
But Jack Minan, who was chairman of the water board when it announced the bay order, acknowledged that the agency's staff issued the mandate prematurely.
“The delay does seem too long and staff would have been better advised to complete the necessary work” before it made the order public, said Minan, a
He said one option is for the agency to dismiss its tentative order and make room for citizen lawsuits over the sediment pollution. Typically, judges will wait until an agency has finished deliberating an issue before they hear related litigation.
Minan said the best course now is for the board to complete its task.
“This is such an important issue of regulatory concern regionally, statewide and nationally that the administrative process ought to be allowed to work,” he said.
The water board didn't forecast such a lengthy procedure when it announced the cleanup mandate on April 29, 2005.
It took the unprecedented step of ordering eight parties to remove or cover 885,000 cubic yards of tainted sediment. That probably would mean dredging the bay's bottom and disrupting shipyard work at a substantial cost to the companies.
National Steel & Shipbuilding Co. – now General Dynamics NASSCO – and Southwest Marine, now known as BAE Systems San Diego Ship Repair, are among those on the hook for the bay cleanup. The other parties named in the order are Chevron, BP, the Navy, San Diego Gas & Electric Co., the city of
The case may have national repercussions: some of the country's largest shipbuilders are watching to see which requirements will prevail in
Last week, a NASSCO spokesman declined to comment on whether the company was pleased or frustrated by the time that has passed since the board's tentative mandate.
A year ago, however, its legal team sent a letter to the agency saying the delay was “evidence that the regional board staff did not have, and still does not have, a sound basis for issuance of the order.”
Meanwhile, environmentalists have been repeatedly discouraged by the water board's pace. At San Diego Coastkeeper, executive director Bruce Reznik has worked behind the scenes for months with politicians and other agencies to generate pressure for quicker action.
“I don't think a lot of the key decision-makers . . . realize how poorly this has been handled and I think when people do, they are going to be fairly outraged,” Reznik said. “It's an embarrasment.”
For the water board's staff, a major issue is the complexity and volume of the cleanup documents, which take up some 130 linear feet of shelf space.
The agency aims to make most of those documents available electronically as part of the state's “paperless office” initiative. But the project was delayed by about three months while officials finalized the state protocol.
Last year, the
David Barker, the engineer in charge of the documents at the local level, said he's confident that he has – or can quickly find – enough money to finish the job.
Roughly 25 percent of the related documents have been digitized. It's a time-intensive process that involves sorting through tens of thousands of pages and identifying the relevant pieces.
Barker said the board would release an updated cleanup order, a technical report to support its demands and the electronic document index so the public-comment period could start in November. The revised order would not be markedly different from the current version, he added.
When that package is made public, the real work begins: sorting out competing claims about who's responsible, deciding what kind of work should be done and determining how to divide the bill. #
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20070430-9999-1n30bay.html
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