Monthly News Clippings

January 2010

OCSD Public Information Office Table of Contents

CONSTRUCTION…………………………………………………..…..….. PAGE 1

December 21, 2009 Sewage project to impact PCH for 2 years By: Jeff Overley Orange County Register

HUMAN INTEREST…………………………………………………..…..…PAGE 2

December 16, 2009 Desalination plant gets support of cities, water districts By: Jaimee Lynn Fletcher Orange County Register

December 23, 2009 Orange County Water District elects officers Press Release Orange County Water District

January 15, 2010 Adviser to enter water tiff By: Teri Sforza Orange County Register

January 20, 2010 U.S. Army Corps releases local dam water By: Barbara Giasone Orange County Register

January 2010 Seawater Desalination: the time is now By: Denis Bilodeau The Local News – Huntington Beach

HUMAN INTEREST CONT.………………………………………………….PAGE 13

January, 2010 Sick Bay By: Bill Sharpsteen Los Angeles Magazine

SEWER FEES…………………………………………………...... PAGE 20

December 11, 2009 La Habra Heights will try and comply with state housing rules By: Mike Spague Whittier Daily News

December 21, 2009 Orange County Register

December 21, 2009 12:54 PM

Sewage project to impact PCH for 2 years

By: JEFF OVERLEY THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

NEWPORT BEACH – The Orange County Sanitation District today started a project to replace a sewage pump station near the Balboa Bay Club and Resort, a project that will impact traffic for two years.

Crews will abandon a station at 1575 West Coast Highway and build a new station at 1800 West Coast Highway.

Two lanes of traffic will remain open in coming months, but parking along northbound lanes will be limited, as will left turns. Those traffic impacts will last through summer, and more will follow, as the project will take two years.

While many sewer lines rely on gravity, topography sometimes requires a pump station to propel waste. In this case, the sewage is headed to a treatment plant in Huntington Beach.

1 December 16, 2009 Orange County Register

Orange County Register Date:2009 Dec. 16 Section: Local; Page Number: Local 6

Desalination plant gets support of cities, water districts

By JAIMEE LYNN FLETCHER THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

HUNTINGTON BEACH Poseidon Resources has gained support from Orange County cities and water districts for its $350 million project that would convert sea water into drinking water to combat the drought affecting the county.

Seal Beach City Council members on Monday voted to join a list of 14 other agencies that have signed a letter of intent to use water from the proposed desalination plant at the AES power plant on Newland Street near Pacific Coast Highway.

The project would generate about 50 million gallons of drinkable water every day by tapping in to the 275 million gallons already flowing in to the AES plant to cool its equipment, officials say. Poseidon spokesman Brian Lochrie said the 50 million gallons are nearly spoken for with the cities and water districts who have signed letters of intent.

Some environmentalist groups have been fighting the project saying it would have harmful effects on the environment, use too much energy and cost taxpayers too much money. Poseidon officials say they have studied the impacts on the environment and have planned for ways to lessen any negative effects, such as setting aside 66 acres of new coastal habitat that would serve as breeding ground for fish.

The company is also working on another report of its environmental impacts to present to Huntington Beach in 2010, Lochrie said. The project needs to gain approvals from the State Lands Commission and the Coastal Commission before starting work to get the plant up and running. Lochrie said officials hope to go before both commissions by the end of 2010.

CONTACT THE WRITER: 7 1 4-796-7953

2 December 23, 2009 Orange County Water District

75 Years of Serving Orange County’s Groundwater Needs

ORANGE COUNTY WATER DISTRICT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Gina DePinto, (714) 378-3228, [email protected]

ORANGE COUNTY WATER DISTRICT ELECTS OFFICERS

FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif. (Dec.23, 2009) ––

The Orange County Water District (OCWD) Board of Directors announced that it has elected Kathryn ("Kay") Barr as President of the Board for the 2010 term. Director Barr, Division 1 representative, was first elected to the OCWD Board in 1979. Philip L. Anthony, Division 4 representative, was elected 1st Vice President and has served on the OCWD Board since 1981. Jan Debay, Division 7 representative, was elected 2nd Vice President and has served on the OCWD Board since 2001. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Biographies for each are attached to this press release.)

“I am honored to serve as President of the OCWD Board,” said Director Barr. “In 30 years I have seen many changes. Looking forward, there are new challenges the District will face, namely threatened imported water supplies and less reliable supplies from the upper Santa Ana Watershed. Average water supplies for Southern California do not meet average water demands. But I am confident that this District and its employees will continue to be innovative and meet the water needs of Orange County.”

When Director Barr was recognized this past October for 30 years of service, OCWD Immediate Past President Steve Sheldon stated, “Kay may be the first and certainly the longest standing female director of a water agency in California; maybe even the nation. She has played a significant role in shaping and ensuring Orange County’s water reliability, and continues to be an asset to the Board and residents of northern Orange County, supporting programs that garnered the District a reputation of innovation and leadership recognized around the world.”

OCWD’s Board is composed of 10 Directors – seven elected from cities throughout north and central Orange County, and three appointed to represent the cities of Anaheim, Fullerton and Santa Ana. The six other returning Directors for 2010 are Denis Bilodeau, Division 2 and a resident of Orange; Roger C. Yoh, Division 3 and a resident of Buena Park; Stephen R. Sheldon, Division 5 and a resident of Newport Beach; Claudia C. Alvarez, Division 8 and a resident of Santa Ana; Irv Pickler, Division 9 and a resident of Anaheim; and Don Bankhead, Division 10 and a resident of Fullerton.

NEWS RELEASE

3 ORANGE COUNTY WATER DISTRICT ELECTS OFFICERS

Due to the untimely death of OCWD Director Wes Bannister on Dec. 10, applications are currently being accepted to fill the vacancy in the office of Director for Division 6, which includes portions of Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach and Westminster. For application information, go to http://www.ocwd.com/fv-846.aspx.

The District is committed to enhancing Orange County’s groundwater quality and reliability in an environmentally friendly and economical manner. The following cities utilize the groundwater basin managed by OCWD: Anaheim, Buena Park, Costa Mesa, Cypress, Fountain Valley, Fullerton, Garden Grove, Huntington Beach, Irvine, La Palma, Los Alamitos, Newport Beach, Orange, Placentia, Santa Ana, Seal Beach, Stanton, Tustin, Villa Park, Westminster and Yorba Linda.

For more information about the Orange County Water District and its Board of Directors, call (714) 378-3200 or go to www.ocwd.com.

NOTE: See Attached Biographies, beginning next page Orange County’s Groundwater Authority | 18700 Ward Street, Fountain Valley, CA 92708 (714) 378-3200 | www.ocwd.com | gwrsystem.com

4 ORANGE COUNTY WATER DISTRICT OFFICERS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Kay Barr represents Division 1 that includes portions of Garden Grove, Stanton, Orange and Westminster. She has a background in public service, including serving on the City Council of Garden Grove from 1962 to 1970, and again from 1974 to 1978. She was Mayor Pro Tem from 1962 to 1969, and appointed Mayor in 1969. She has also served as a member and Chairman of Garden Grove's Redevelopment Agency. In addition, she has served as a member of the Orange County Vector Control District's Board of Trustees, and as a Director of Garden Grove Community Bank.

Professionally, Director Barr was employed as a sales representative with S & S Construction, owned her own business from 1967 to 1973, and has been involved in real estate sales for the past 19 years. Her community service includes the Garden Grove Chamber of Commerce, Artificial Kidney Foundation, Garden Grove Girls' Club, and Long Beach Community Hospital. She was named Garden Grove Woman of the Year in 1976 and Cypress College Community Leader of the Year in 1980.

Philip L. Anthony represents Division 4, which includes portions of Los Alamitos, Seal Beach, Stanton, Westminster, Buena Park, Cypress, Garden Grove, Huntington Beach and Stanton. Director Anthony has served on the OCWD Board of Directors since 1981, and is currently serving another four- year term to 2012. Director Anthony served as President of the board from 1992 to 1997. In addition to serving on the OCWD Board, Director Anthony serves as a Director of the National Water Research Institute (NWRI), Commissioner of the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority, Chair of the Groundwater Replenishment System Steering Committee and was formerly Chair of the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) Region 10. He also co-founded the Water Advisory Committee of Orange County (WACO), and is a founding member of OCWD’s Groundwater Guardian team.

Director Anthony began his work in public service with the Westminster City Council, where he served from 1962 to 1976; and was Mayor from 1972 to 1976. Director Anthony was on the Orange County Board of Supervisors from 1976 to 1981, as well as the boards of the Orange County Sanitation District, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, Southern California Association of Governments and the Orange County Local Agency Formation Commission. He has served on the Santa Ana River Flood Protection Agency from 1988 to the present. He is a real estate developer and President of Philip L. Anthony, Inc., practicing as an independent public affairs and management consultant.

Director Anthony was the recipient of the 2002 E. Benjamin Nelson Government Service Award given by the Groundwater Foundation. The prestigious national award honors and recognizes an elected or appointed public official who has significantly advanced environmental and groundwater stewardship. Director Anthony’s community service endeavors include serving as Board President for the Westminster Boys & Girls Club and Board Chairman for the Orange County Taxpayers Association. He is also a Kiwanis Club member.

5 ORANGE COUNTY WATER DISTRICT OFFICERS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Jan Debay represents Division 7, which includes Costa Mesa and portions of Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach, Irvine, Newport Beach and Westminster. Debay was appointed to the OCWD Board of Directors in February 2001 to fulfill the remaining term of a former director serving Division 7. In 2002, Debay was elected to serve on the board for a four-year term. Director Debay served as 1st Vice President of the Board for the 2006 term. She was re-elected to another four-year term in December 2006 (2006- 2010), and was elected to continue serving as 1st Vice President of the Board through 2007. Debay serves on several other water organization boards, including the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA), where she was elected to a two-year term (2004 to 2006) serving the Region 10 Board of Directors. She currently is serving a third two-tear term through 2010. Along with six others, she oversees Orange and counties for ACWA – a Sacramento-based water organization representing water agencies in California.

Director Debay served on the Board of NWRI from 1997 to 2000 and 2002 to 2006. During her tenure on the NWRI Board, she served one-year terms as Chair and Vice Chair. She also served as the President of the Water Advisory Committee of Orange County (WACO) in 2005-2006. Prior to serving on OCWD’s Board of Directors, Debay’s career in public service covered a broad spectrum of regional service.

Director Debay started her public service career with a five-year term as Planning Commissioner for the city of Newport Beach. In 1992, she was elected to Newport Beach City Council and served as Mayor for 1996–1997. Debay left the city council in December 2000 due to term limits. While serving on the Newport Beach City Council, Debay was appointed to the Executive Council of the Orange County League of Cities, where she served as 2nd Vice President, 1st Vice President and President, overseeing matters of concern to 33 cities and their governing city council members.

In 1993, Debay was appointed to the Orange County Sanitation District (OCSD) Board of Directors. She was elected by her peers to serve as Chair of the Board from 1998 to 2000. During that time, Debay also served as a representative on the Joint Cooperative Committee for the Groundwater Replenishment System. Debay served on the Board of the Southern California Association of Governments, a six-county organization, where she represented Orange County. While on the Board, Debay served as Chairman of the Community, Housing and Economic Development Committee and as a member of the Executive Steering Committee.

6 January 15, 2010 Orange County Register

Publication: Freedom - Orange County Register; Date:2010 Jan. 15; Section: Local Central; Page Number: CE1

OC WATCHDOG

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK

Adviser to enter water tiff

South County parties who want to secede from the district will spend about $49,000 on a consultant.

The rebels in Orange County’s Water War, which threatens to cleave the county in two and cost more than $1 million, are hiring a consultant to prepare a “detachment application,” which could allow them to split from their northern neighbors and form their own water-importing authority.

The early phase of this consultant’s work will cost about $49,030, to be paid by the members of the Southern Confederacy – Laguna Beach, San Juan Capistrano and San Clemente, as well as the El Toro, Irvine Ranch, Moulton Niguel, Santa Margarita, South Coast and Trabuco Canyon water districts.

The Southerners are also buying “governmental affairs support” through Probolsky Research and Curt Pringle and Associates for $3,000 per month.

These preparations for a complicated – and expensive – divorce go forward even as protracted negotiations over saving the marriage continue, which doesn’t necessarily inspire confidence. (See the official back-and forth online.)

Breaking up the union that represents Orange County in Southern California’s Water World would not be easy or cheap. An election on secession from the water union would cost between $1 million and $1.5 million, says a report by the Orange County Local Agency Formation Commission, or LAFCO, which would have to approve a split.

And while the Southerners say the split would save their customers money and the Northerners say it would cost their customers money, the commission says it would likely be just the opposite: It would cost the breakaway Southerners more and save the Northerners money.

Is yet another multimillion-dollar water agency in Orange County, which is already crawling with them, really necessary?

7 The problem is the very strained relationship between the Municipal Water District of Orange County, or MWDOC, which buys expensive imported water from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California in Los Angeles, or MWD, and the South County cities and water districts, which buy that expensive imported water from the Municipal Water District and sell it to customers.

The Southerners say the Municipal Water District spends $6.2 million a year, when they’d like to see $4 million spent; is building up unnecessary cash reserves of $4.7 million even though it owns no complex infrastructure that would need repair or replacement; and duplicates their services, such as conservation and education programs.

As important, perhaps, is this: The Southerners want more power on the water board in Los Angeles.

Right now, the Municipal Water District has four seats on the Metropolitan Water District’s board. The Southerners are part of the Municipal Water District, but they have little say over who fills those seats, what agendas they pursue and how they vote.

Serving on the Metropolitan Water District’s board of directors is the political equivalent of snagging a seat in the Senate: It’s where the action is; it sets the agenda; it elicits respect and the clout and perks that go with it.

After all, the hydration of 19 million people in Southern California depends directly upon the work of the Metropolitan Water District.

STAYING TOGETHER

A large part of the Municipal Water District’s budget would disappear if the Southerners pulled out, so the district is trying to make nice.

In November, it drew up a seven-page proposal to address the Southerners’ concerns – marked “confidential,” which we have a major problem with. Are these not public agencies doing the public’s business?

That memo, which appears online, would:

Give the Southerners greater input into the Municipal Water District’s budget.

Offer “cafeteria options” so Southerners could buy the services they want and not pay for services they don’t want.

Lower Municipal Water District reserve levels to the $4 million-to-$5 million range.

Give the Southerners more say in who represents Orange County on the Metropolitan Water District board.

SOUTH RESPONDS

The Southerners replied to the Municipal Water District last month, politely applauding its effort but saying it falls short.

“(T)he proposed changes as outlined in many cases do not go far enough, and lack the 8 specificity necessary to bring a consensus plan forward,” their memo says. The Southerners still want the Municipal Water District to: Embrace specific budget caps and allow the cities and special districts an “advisory vote” on the budget.

Commit to far smaller reserves. Offering to cap reserves at $5 million when they’re currently below $5 million “appears to be somewhat of an artificial concession.”

Ease up on lobbying and public outreach. “We believe it is not appropriate for MWDOC to conduct public outreach in member agencies’ service areas without their express consent.”

“Provide significant client agency input to selection of a MWD Director.”

CARRYING A BIG STICK

So the sides continue to meet, even as consultant Rosenow Spevacek Group has submitted a proposal to prepare the Southerners’ “detachment application.”

As they’re carrying the big stick, the Southerners sound a (somewhat) hopeful note. Said Beth Beeman, spokeswoman for the Irvine Ranch Water District, in an e-mail:

“We have spoken to a consultant to provide a proposal to put together additional information and materials to:

“1. Provide an independent review of what the budget and staffing plan for a South County agency would look like; and

“2. Prepare an operating plan (three-year plan of service) of a South County agency and some of the other materials needed to support an application to LAFCO.

“To be clear, the consultant’s scope of work would not include finalization or submittal of a LAFCO application for detachment from MWDOC. The work that is being done is to evaluate the detachment option in more detail should negotiations with MWDOC breakdown and that option be considered further in the future. “The scope of work has not been finalized by the consultant and no contract has been executed. “Lastly, no decision has been made to file an application with LAFCO. We continue to be encouraged by the process and hope that we will find a mutually agreed upon solution.” Preparing for divorce while talking about saving the marriage leaves Northerners with a bitter taste in their mouths. Still, those of us who’ll end up footing the bills hope the two sides will find common ground – ground that will not saddle water users with bigger bills and that will not create a new layer of water bureaucracy.

TERI SFORZA REGISTER COLUMNIST

9 January 20, 2009 Orange County Register

U.S. Army Corps releases local dam water

By BARBARA GIASONE

2010-01-20 09:40:41

FULLERTON — Flood-control workers at Brea, Fullerton and Prado dams released water from them this morning to prevent any danger of overflowing as more rains move into the region, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said.

"Usually, the basins behind the dams are empty, and if water gets to a certain height, it is sent over the spillway," said spokesman Greg Fuderer. "There is no danger to residents unless there is an exceptional deluge and the water couldn't be released fast enough."

At Fullerton Dam, 18 cubic feet per second was released; at Brea Dam, 46 cubic feet per second; and at Prado Dam, 2,390 cubic feet per second.

Fuderer said each dam's water capacity is measured in acre feet, which amounts to one acre of land under one foot of water.

Fullerton Dam can hold 764 acre feet; Brea, 3,880; and Prado, 174,000.

Fuderer recalled the 2005 deluge that sent water from Prado Dam gushing down the Santa Ana River as flood-control workers released 10,000 cubic feet per second.

"There were concerns then the embankment would wash away damaging the 30-inch pipeline that sends industrial waste and brine to the beach," Fuderer said.

10 January, 2009 The Local News

Seawater Desalination: The time is now

The Local News – Huntington Beach

Jan 1 – 15

By Denis Bilodeau, PE

President John F. Kennedy once said, “If we could ever competitively, at a cheap rate, get fresh water from salt water, that it would be in the long-range interests of humanity which would really dwarf any other scientific accomplishments."

That was 1962. Today, almost 50 years later, California is on the precipice of pioneering the Pacific Ocean as a critical element of its drinking water supply.

In response to climate change and regulatory droughts, there are over two dozen seawater desalination plants in various stages of development throughout California including several local projects planned for Long Beach, Dana Point and Huntington Beach. In San Diego County the largest and most technologically-advanced seawater desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere, capable of sustaining 300,000 residents, is now under construction.

Today, around the world there are over 8,000 seawater desalination plants using Reverse Osmosis (RO) to produce 10 billion gallons of drinking water. The technology is not new but it has been cost prohibitive in California where water historically has been relatively inexpensive. However, the supply of fresh drinking water in Southern California is increasingly more expensive and less reliable. As a result we are aggressively expanding conservation efforts and have invested in water recycling. Orange County boasts the internationally -renown Groundwater Replenishment (GWR) System, which treats wastewater for consumptive use. However, responsible water managers know that recycling and conservation alone will not be sufficient to meet the needs of our residents and businesses.

Enter the Pacific Ocean

The majority of Southern California’s water is imported from Northern California and the Colorado River. As the cost for imported water rises rapidly, the cost to desalinate seawater continues to drop. Just ten years ago, the cost to purify seawater was many magnitudes greater than the cost of imported water. So while the technology made it feasible, the cost did not. Today, while desalinating seawater is still slightly more expensive than imported water, it will not remain so for long.

More than a dozen Orange County public water agencies are aggressively pursuing seawater desalination to enhance water supply reliability and are entering into a public-private partnership with Poseidon Resources (also the developer of the Carlsbad desalination project) to receive water from their planned Huntington Beach desalination facility. The Huntington Beach project, capable of producing 50 million gallons of drinking water every day, is scheduled to be the first large-scale desalination project to come online in Orange County. 11

Responsible public water districts recognize the volatile nature related to the ever rising cost of imported water and look forward to the stability and reliability of desalinated water, which is why the plan would be to lock in the water rates for the desalinated water with a 30-year contract. By locking in these rates over 30 years, ratepayers won’t have to play Russian-roulette with imported water costs, which can spike at any time if a new endangered fish is found up near Sacramento. I agree with the editorial that the public water agencies shouldn’t pay a dime unless Poseidon provides the water at the quantity, quality and price specified in the contracts.

Water is the most basic element of life and the pursuit to secure a reliable supply is necessary to protect California’s future. Seawater desalination will not solve our state water crisis. But along with conservation and water recycling, it will be a small part of the solution that will help us manage our situation in a more responsible way.

Denis Bilodeau, PE serves as a Director on the Board of the Orange County Water District and as an Orange City Councilman.

12 January, 2009 Los Angeles Magazine

Everything that is flushed down the toilet has to go somewhere, and in L.A.’s case, that would be the ocean. For decades the city was barely treating the stuff it pumped into the Pacific, which helped make our coastal waters some of the dirtiest in the nation. Then Howard Bennett, a teacher from Culver City High, took up the cause By Bill Sharpsteen

Los Angeles magazine, January 2010

Howard Bennett was in love with the ocean. He swam in the Pacific every day wearing nothing but a Speedo, even in winter, when the water temperature dipped to 57 degrees. He had to swim each morning. He symbolically washed off the stress he had accumulated teaching English at Culver City High by stroking away in the dark ocean. He needed to be enveloped in that chilling water for the half-mile swim just beyond the surf line. Bennett couldn’t imagine a day without it.

In 1961, he and his wife, Bente, bought a boxy two-story duplex on Playa del Rey beach, where they rented out the first floor and kept the second-floor view of the surf for themselves. Having Santa Monica Bay as their backyard was a grand thing. The sea was so powerful, it belittled anyone who thought of it as their own, but after a few years of being on the beach, Bennett felt as though he had an intimate relationship with the bay.

On March 28, 1985, Bennett took his swimsuit from the nightstand and pulled it over his slender legs. After so many years of swimming, there was little fat on Bennett’s nearly six-foot frame. In a business suit standing before his literature classes, he looked older, a curmudgeon with thinning hair, but on the beach he seemed half his 55 years, a wiry jock still feeling his youth. It was the kind of early-spring morning when the air was colder than the water, so he jogged across the sand to get into the ocean as soon as he could. As Bennett approached the shoreline, he saw an old man at the edge of the surf sitting on a stool with a lit Sterno can and a fishing pole.

“Don’t go in water! No swim! Very bad for you! Poison!” the man shouted in broken English, waving a copy of the .

Maybe Bennett should have asked what the man meant. But he had only 20 minutes for his swim, and to his knowledge the bay—its 55 miles of shoreline used by 45 million people a year—was too huge for even a city the size of Los Angeles to pollute. However, that’s exactly what had happened.

The fisherman was referring to a newspaper article that quoted a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency oceanographer saying, “Nowhere on Earth is as heavily contaminated with DDT and PCB’s as Southern California.” The DDT, an insecticide banned in 1972, covered more than six square miles of the bay’s floor (and still does) and was manufactured by the Montrose Chemical Corporation. For decades Montrose had been allowed to flush DDT waste from its Torrance operation into the Los Angeles County sewer system. From there the chemical went into Santa Monica Bay, contaminating marine life and making sport fish such as white croaker potentially

13 cancerous entrées. It also affected the brown pelican, which ate the fish that ate the bottom- feeding fish that swallowed the DDT. The chemical made the birds’ eggshells so brittle that they would break before hatching, and the birds nearly died out.

But the more visceral issue for humans was the water pollution caused by the Hyperion Treatment Plant in Playa del Rey. The original facility, established in 1894, dumped raw sewage into the bay until 1925, when a plant was built to lightly treat the waste before it entered the surf. By 1950, the city had expanded Hyperion to process sewage with what’s known as primary and secondary treatment. In the first stage, the wastewater from sinks, drains, and toilets entered large tanks, where the grease and oils that floated to the top and the heavy solids that sank to the bottom— known as sludge—were separated from the rest of the effluent. Then the wastewater went on to secondary treatment, in which microbes fed on the bacteria until the effluent was considered clean enough for disposal into the sea through a five-mile pipe that stretched along the bay. As the city grew, Hyperion couldn’t keep up with the increased volume of sewage unless the plant skipped putting a portion of it through secondary treatment. So after separating the wastewater, it had begun dumping the sludge into a different pipe that led seven miles to a large underwater canyon. By 1985, the plant was so busy, and experiencing so many mechanical failures, that only 25 percent of the sewage received full secondary treatment.

Trouble was, none of this was legal. The 1972 Clean Water Act mandated that all sewage go through secondary treatment and that sludge must be disposed where it couldn’t harm the environment. However, the act had later been amended with an obscure waiver known as Section 301(h) that allowed coastal cities to provide only primary treatment if they could prove their effluent wasn’t damaging marine life. (Because the waiver didn’t apply to sludge, the EPA was already in the process of suing the city to stop dumping that portion of the sewage into the ocean.) The waiver’s authors followed the axiom espoused by sanitation engineers that “dilution is the solution to pollution.” This was precisely the case being made by L.A. sanitation engineers, who maintained that the primary-treated wastewater coming from Hyperion was so diluted once it hit the ocean, it was harmless to Santa Monica Bay’s wildlife. With the waiver Los Angeles wouldn’t have to spend millions upgrading Hyperion so that the plant could provide full secondary treatment, and the city wanted it badly. By the time Howard Bennett was being warned away from the water, L.A.’s application for the waiver was about to be approved.

Bennett may have ignored the fisherman, but when he returned home from work that afternoon, he phoned the only person he knew with a scientific background—a full-time marine biologist and part- time lifeguard named Rim Fay—to explain what, if anything, was wrong with the bay. Fay told him about the tumors and fin rot he had found in fish living where the wastewater drained into the ocean water and how, where the sludge was dumped, nearly all marine life had been snuffed out. In his deep growl the biologist said that despite evidence that dilution was not the solution, the EPA had tentatively approved the waiver and the state’s Regional Water Quality Control Board was about to do the same. Why? Because only a handful of people had attended the water board’s meeting four days prior to speak out against the waiver, which wasn’t enough to convince the board that there was anything wrong with dumping partially treated sewage into the bay.

Fay implied that the board had prevented public protest by burying the meeting announcement, which was legally required, deep within the newspaper. “We have to force the EPA and water board to hold another hearing,” Bennett told him with the kind of logic that comes from fresh-faced naïveté.

14 “There’s nothing you can do about it!” Fay said.

“They have to hold another hearing,” Bennett repeated. “We’re going to change this. We’ll make them do it.”

It was a pivotal moment for environmentalists in Los Angeles. Almost immediately Bennett formed the Coalition to Stop Dumping Sewage into the Ocean. He called every organization that might be interested and asked to include them on the nascent coalition’s letterhead, figuring that such a list would help him look more menacing to government officials than would one angry man.

Bennett typed a three-page manifesto that was at times more screeching indignation than reasoned argument. “The general public,” he wrote, “was cheated by making it almost impossible for the public to attend the critical joint hearing on March 25. It was deprived of its right to know! The hearing was sparsely attended—only 5 people showed up to testify. It wasn’t lack of interest. It was lack of notification.... Even a condemned murderer is given more time to prepare his appeal.” Bennett concluded, “We feel the entire problem literally stinks to high heaven. The Santa Monica Bay is being used as the toilet bowl for millions of people. It has some of the worst pollution in the world. Why must our children be forced to swim and play in it this summer?”

Bennett booked a room at the Los Angeles Press Club where, for several hundred dollars of his own money, he rented a space large enough for reporters and cameras, plus a breakfast buffet. On April 4 at ten o’clock, Bennett faced reporters from two television stations, two news syndicates, and a news radio station. Wearing a blue windbreaker over a yellow T-shirt, he sat at a long table on a small stage with three easels behind him holding posters of trash on the beach. They didn’t have much to do with sewage, but they helped add to Bennett’s bleak message.

“Let’s talk about the problem,” he said. “The fish are dying, and the sand crabs have almost disappeared. Because of ocean sewage dumping, most of the Santa Monica Bay’s kelp beds are gone. The perch didn’t spawn this year. And the pismo clams that used to be pearly white”—he paused for effect while his eyes scanned the room, and then he snapped—“have black shells now. And the lifeguards have gotten cancer from dumped toxics. The ocean is now a critical mess filled with a stinking mass!”

Following Bennett’s accusations, local television stations contacted Harry Sizemore, the Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation’s assistant director, for comment. Surrounded by sloshing sewage at the Hyperion Treatment Plant, Sizemore put in the city’s pitch for saving money, similar to what he had told the water board on March 25. “If we went to full secondary,” he said, “we would have to spend another $150 million for capital construction, and our operational costs would go up another $15 million a year.” Sizemore appeared surprised anyone would even raise the subject.

If nothing else, Bennett had made a city official squirm. But he had a different goal: “We want another, publicized public hearing,” he told the reporters at the press conference. “We want one more chance. Just one more chance to have the public testify on this particular issue.” Only a week after first learning about Santa Monica Bay’s troubles, Howard Bennett had the city listening to his plea.

The city’s sanitation engineers may have proclaimed that dilution was the solution, but in order to qualify for the waiver, they needed to prove they weren’t polluting the bay. They turned to an agency called the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project (otherwise known as “Squirp”), 15 which managed a collection of scientists who studied the effects of wastewater and discharges on marine life. Hired by Los Angeles, SCCWRP produced dozens of reports that all said the same thing: Pollution from Hyperion had harmed the environment.

Unfortunately, few saw the damning data. That’s because SCCWRP’s director, Willard Bascom—who believed his group would be let go by the city if it didn’t get the waiver—obfuscated the facts. Bascom wrote the reports’ summaries, which was all most people read. In them he replaced volatile words with vague, less troubling terms. When his scientists referred to the nearly lifeless area around the seven-mile pipe’s outfall as a “dead zone,” he altered the wording to “degraded zone.” When the scientists called another area that encompassed a good chunk of Santa Monica Bay “degraded,” Bascom opted for the fuzzy word “changed.” He pushed the notion that sewage was good for the fish, a nutritional extra. His arguments were heard inside City Hall as the voice of knowledge and authority, whereas Fay and other environmentalists had no influence.

Bascom must have been disappointed when the EPA sent Bennett a letter that agreed to his request for a second hearing. The new activist realized this opportunity required bringing a throng so large, the water board and the EPA wouldn’t approve the waiver application for fear of a citizen revolt. In what’s been considered his most brilliant strategy, Bennett recruited students from Culver City High School. Most of the kids visited the nearby beach, and many were surfers who blanched at the idea of sliding under a wave’s curl loaded with what Bennett had them believing was raw sewage. Even if none of them said a word, the youthful crowd alone might intimidate the Regional Water Quality Control Board with a powerful message: Don’t irritate future voters.

On May 13 Bennett, dressed in a dark suit, drove with Bente to the downtown hearing in their secondhand Chevy Impala and walked into the state building’s room 1138, a drab auditorium with theater-style seating for the public. Bennett sat in the front row, while Bente found a place in the back, away from the spotlight about to hit her husband. The audience of students, their parents, environmentalists, and officials from the city and county filled the chamber, overflowing into the hallway. More important, 48 people signed up to testify, nearly all of them against the waiver.

Following 42 minutes of testimony from city officials and others in favor of the waiver, Bennett got his chance to spit out the sort of flamethrower rhetoric he had perfected over the past several weeks: “Because of sewage dumping,” he said, “...our fish have been poisoned so that we’re told not to eat them now. I don’t mean to be strong and emotional, but frankly, anyone who doesn’t think we have a problem is either nearsighted, blind, or unfortunately, on some days, has lost their sense of smell.”

This was pure Howard Bennett, distilling the topic to the kind of gut-level imagery people easily grasped. Though he may have exaggerated details—the bay was dirty but not awash in sewage— Bennett knew that his ultimate audience was the water board’s six members. He said, as if warning them, “I have not come here alone today.” The crowd interrupted him with applause that lasted 30 seconds. “As a teacher at Culver City High School, the students wanted to be here...they want to see this permit denied and be able to swim, fish, and surf safely in the waters of Santa Monica Bay.”

The public testimony lasted more than five hours. The event was a success as far as Bennett was concerned, and the crowd (including the shouting teenagers) was impressive. But according to Robert Ghirelli, the board’s executive officer at the time, none of it managed to squelch the waiver application. 16 Among those at the hearing was Dorothy Green, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the League of Conservation Voters, a group that endorsed political candidates based on their environmental views. Before Bennett asked her whether the league wanted to join the coalition, she hadn’t heard of the 301(h) waiver or Bennett or, for that matter, the extent of the bay’s pollution. At 56, Green was a prim, slender woman. She had been drawn to environmental issues in the early 1970s, channeling most of her energy into California’s perennial water-use controversies. The topic consumed her like no other, and while the waiver was barely related to her passion, she took on the fight almost as fervently as Bennett did. Though Green had misgivings about Bennett’s outspokenness, she quickly became the coalition’s most active participant, holding strategy meetings with league members and Bennett in her Westwood home. She and her husband, Jack, even joined Bennett when he and 175 followers wrapped a mile-long brown ribbon around City Hall to symbolize the sewage pipe that led from Hyperion into the ocean.

So when Bente began complaining to her husband that his monomaniacal pursuit of the waiver denial was hurting their marriage, Bennett handed off running the coalition to Green. “When I get on something,” he says, “I don’t know day from night. I’ll get up at two o’clock in the morning and write notes. Forgetting it’s no life for me, it’s no life for Bente. It’s no life for the family. And I was probably driving everybody crazy who knew me.” By taking over the coalition, Green had a chance to shift from Bennett’s confrontational style and follow a more diplomatic path, working with the decision makers, not against them. She figured the most effective strategy was to inform the public of the pollution issue. “The only way to build an organization or build the ability to change anything is to engage a lot of people,” she would later say. “They have to be educated somehow. And so that was really the big secret in getting [the organization] off the ground and running from the very beginning.”

Before that education could begin, the group’s members decided they no longer wanted to trip over the name “Coalition to Stop Dumping Sewage into the Ocean” every time they brought up the subject; they needed a moniker that was publicity friendly and easy to remember without being too confrontational—and without the word sewage. Someone suggested “Save the Bay,” but that was the name of a similar group in . In fact, they nixed every suggestion, including “Heal the Bay.” In a time when the self-involved New Age was running its course, the name sounded as if they might try cleaning up the ocean with crystals. But after they couldn’t come up with anything better, the group relented to the inevitable: Heal the Bay was born.

Sewage was —and is, of course—the most basic of a society’s challenges. In 1985, Los Angeles was producing enough sewage in one day to create the state’s tenth-largest river. Unfortunately, that river didn’t always stay inside the pipes, which had been built in the early 20th century for a much smaller population. In a 14-day period starting July 12 of that year, a so-called overflow box located along the concrete-lined Ballona Creek gurgled forth a total of 85,000 gallons of raw sewage on four different occasions. Incredibly, the box was designed to do just that. Built decades ago at the end of Jackson Avenue in Culver City to handle moments when volume exceeded the sewers’ capacity, a lid atop the box would pop open and allow the overflow to pour out (instead of blowing a hole in the sewer pipes). A crew was then dispatched to the site to shovel chlorine on the mess.

The publicity over the spills quickly reached the Regional Water Quality Control Board, which in early August fined the city $30,050 for violating its wastewater discharge permit. The permit actually allowed spills during the wet season when heavy rainstorms could overload the system. The fines in question, however, were for what’s called dry-season spills, which were prohibited. They also marked the first time the city had been pinched for one of its many sewage spills over the years. The 17 spills changed the board’s thinking. “How could you grant a waiver to the city when they couldn’t handle their sewage system?” asks former executive officer Ghirelli.

There were other revelations as well. A SCCWRP marine biologist named David Brown didn’t like how his boss, Bascom, had manipulated his and other scientists’ research to support the waiver when in fact it did the opposite. A week after the second waiver hearing, Brown outed Bascom in a letter to Assemblyman Tom Hayden. He wrote, “Presentations like Mr. Bascom’s leave everyone confused.” Brown then destroyed Bascom’s contentions, point by point, that the bay’s marine life was happy and well fed by the sewage pouring out five miles offshore. Hayden promptly sent the missive to the press.

The spills and the Bascom scandal had a cumulative effect on decision makers. On September 30 the EPA’s regional administrator sent a letter to Mayor Tom Bradley telling him, “Due to new information available since the tentative decision was issued on November 30, 1981, and technical deficiencies in the tentative decision document, it is our decision to re-evaluate the City’s section 301(h) application for the Hyperion Treatment Plant.” Two months later the Regional Water Quality Control Board held its final public meeting on the waiver and, based on the EPA’s misgivings, officially denied the waiver. As a result, Los Angeles was forced to abide by the Clean Water Act and rebuild Hyperion so that it could provide full secondary treatment. Howard Bennett had won.

With so much fallout from Brown’s complaints, Willard Bascom was soon forced to take an early retirement, but Brown didn’t come out unscathed, either: Coworkers accused him of becoming a whistle-blower for the publicity, not for reasons of truth, and within two years of his public debut, he felt compelled to quit SCCWRP. “Because I was accused of being a publicity seeker,” he says, “I got defensive and withdrew to show I wasn’t a publicity seeker, and just completely shut down.” The next year he left marine biology altogether and went to work in the immunology department of the City of Hope hospital in Duarte.

On May 19, 1989, Heal the Bay presented Bennett with a plaque featuring its now-familiar fish-bone logo and the inscription In gratitude to Howard Bennett who started it all. Bennett sees the inscription as acknowledgment that his original coalition was the precursor to Heal the Bay, one of the most visible environmental groups in Southern California. On the other hand, the conspicuous vagueness of the inscription highlights Bennett’s complicated relationship with Heal the Bay. “The role that Howard fulfilled is alerting people to the problem,” Dorothy Green would later say. “That’s important. But he was not at all influential, bottom line.”

The late 2009 version of the Heal the Bay Web site didn’t make a single mention of Bennett and credited the movement to a “handful of people, led by Dorothy Green….” Because Bennett largely disappeared from the fight after the Regional Water Quality Control Board nixed the 301(h) waiver, Green, who died in 2008, believed she was justified in erasing him from the official story. “If we were going to win,” she said in a Daily Breeze article, “somebody had to be around and see how it was going to be implemented and enforced. There was no staying power with Howard. He can’t be responsible to other people.”

Bennett doesn’t deny the fleeting nature of his involvement, but he also won’t be denied his role in cleaning up the bay. He sees this as a story about how a schoolteacher took on the city, state, and federal government and got them to stop polluting the bay. He never did quit swimming in the ocean, and on the occasional weekends when Heal the Bay organizes beach cleanups, he watches

18 people picking up litter from the beach in front of his Playa del Rey home and claims this as one of his legacies.

The new facility at Hyperion was completed in 1998. With full secondary treatment in place and the dumping of sludge having ceased, the number and abundance of species around both the seven- and five-mile-long outfall pipes have increased. According to Mas Dojiri, who manages Los Angeles’s environmental monitoring division, even the delicate brittle star, which biologists look to as an indicator species because of its aversion to the organic-rich pollutants found in primary-treated sewage, is showing up in small numbers again near the five-mile outfall.

These days Heal the Bay is concentrating less on sewage and more on the problem of urban runoff— the slurry of trash, oil, pesticides, heavy metals, solvents, and other toxins that wash down storm drains into Santa Monica Bay. The group likes to say that the job is only half done, but the matter is complicated by so many factors that Dojiri isn’t willing to quantify how far along the bay is toward being “healed.” “We really need to focus on storm water,” he says, “not just for bacteria but for metals and organics and [other pollutants].”

With that in mind, Heal the Bay worked with the City of Santa Monica to pass an ordinance in 1991 to treat or filter storm water. Another project built by the county captures runoff from creeks coming out of the Hollywood Hills in a series of cisterns, where the water is filtered. From there the water goes to spreading grounds, where it seeps into the earth and recharges the aquifer that supplies the city’s well water. In addition, Los Angeles has installed devices that direct runoff to Hyperion in dry weather. When the volume passes a certain point during a storm, however, gates automatically reroute the water to the ocean.

There also remains the issue of “legacy pollutants”—the DDT, PCBs, and other organic compounds coating a 6.6-square-mile area in the bay. The toxicants still show up in concentrations high enough to affect wildlife—and people. Anglers are advised not to eat the bottom-feeding white croaker and to limit their meals of rockfish and kelp bass to once a week. In other words, while turning off the spigot that gushed sludge and primary-treated sewage has had a major effect on the bay’s marine environment, no one really knows how much more must be done.

19 December 11, 2009 Whittier Daily News

La Habra Heights will try and comply with state housing rules on affordable housing

Whittier Daily News By Mike Sprague Staff Writer

Posted: 12/11/2009 10:30:23 PM PST

LA HABRA HEIGHTS - City officials have decided it's better to try and comply with state housing rules than fight them.

As a result, City Manager Shauna Clark is expected to submit a plan to the state calling for multiple-family and affordable housing on a vacant 12.5-acre property owned by Los Angeles County east of Harbor Boulevard and just north of the Fullerton Road intersection.

The site is not currently connected to a sewer line. The cost to connect to the Orange County Sanitation District line is estimated at $594,000.

The state will have 60 days to either accept the plan or send back more comments. La Habra Heights also would still have to approve the plan.

State rules mandate the city provide for 223 new housing units, including 85 for people with low and very low incomes and another 48 for moderate-income residents.

But La Habra Heights' general plan now only allows one unit per acre.

Thus, the state rules have generated opposition from council members and residents.

Councilman Layne Baroldi, who supports Clark's decision, said Friday he believes the city couldn't win a legal fight.

"I think (legal) counsel was very clear with the advice that such a fight would not be prudent," Baroldi said. "It could expose the city to tremendous costs and a moratorium on new construction and remodels."

20 "Our whole zoning is different than any other city in the greater Los Angeles area," said La Habra Heights activist George Edwards.

"We grow trees, not apartment buildings and condos," Edwards said. "We want to preserve one-acre zoning and our low-density lifestyle."

The state mandates also could put the council members in political jeopardy, Clark said.

"I understand the pressure the council is under," Clark said. To put something in place for low-income housing could mean not a single of them could get re- elected."

To meet the state housing goals, Beth Stochl, a city consultant, initially proposed the city rezone the four-acre Heights Christian Preschool, 1225 N. Hacienda Road, for multifamily housing and provide amnesty for illegal second units on single-family properties.

After a joint City Council and Planning Commission meeting Tuesday, the members present - there was no City Council quorum because only Baroldi and Councilman Carl Westerhoff were present - recommended rezoning the Harbor Boulevard property instead of the school.

Stochl told the council the Harbor Boulevard property is large enough to allow the city to meet all of its housing obligations without making it easier for second units to exist.

Mayor Howard Vipperman, who was sick on Tuesday, said Friday he's OK with the decision to submit the plan.

"I don't like (the state housing rules) in the least, but given the fact that we must do something, it's a good choice," he said.

Vipperman said he also plans to contest the law requiring La Habra Heights to have multifamily housing.

21