Deadline on Santa Monica Bay Pollution Is Extended

After nine years of sometimes stormy litigation over the pollution it dumps in the ocean, the City of Los Angeles received a measure of vindication Thursday from an old adversary.

“I’m satisfied now the City of Los Angeles is acting in good faith,” federal Appeals Court Judge Harry Pregerson said as he signed an order giving the city another 11 years--until the end of 1998--to stop polluting Santa Monica Bay.

In 1980, when Pregerson was a District Court judge, he issued the order that compelled the city to stop dumping sludge, or concentrated sewage, in the ocean within five years. The city was never able to meet that deadline, or another that--under the 1972 Clean Water Act--required sewer water to be more fully treated. Many critics have blamed the failure on incompetent city officials.

But on Thursday, Pregerson accepted in the main a new schedule that presumes the city is telling the truth when it claims that the bay waters cannot be cleaned up any sooner.

Rejecting a plea by environmental groups that he name an outside expert to keep tabs on the city, Pregerson said: “If I felt the need of an independent monitor and expert, I wouldn’t hesitate. But I don’t feel the need.”

The new schedule for cleaning up the bay is contained in a consent decree negotiated between the city and attorneys for the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the state’s Regional Water Quality Control Board, the two agencies charged with enforcing pollution standards in the Pacific off the shores of Los Angeles County.

The decree, formally approved by Pregerson on Thursday, gives the city until the end of this year to stop dumping sludge in the bay, and carries with it the unwritten understanding that the city was not at fault for missing the earlier “sludge-out” deadlines, EPA attorney James Dragna said.

Now, however, the end of sludge dumping will be mandatory even if the city’s new Hyperion Energy Recovery System, which is designed to burn the sludge, is not finished in time on the coastal dunes near Los Angeles International Airport.

Construction of the new plant, which hopes to make use of an untested method of processing such large amounts of sludge, has been troubled by delays. Responding to a question from Pregerson, City Engineer Robert S. Horii said Thursday: “Let me say, I think it will work. . . . Whether it will work when we say it will, I’m not sure at this time.” If it cannot be burned, the sludge will be trucked to inland landfills, city officials said.

By 1992, the city must also substantially improve the quality of the treated waste water it pumps into the sea, under the consent decree. By the end of 1998, all the waste water pumped in the ocean must undergo full “secondary” treatment to remove most solid material and bacteria. This deadline, determined by the Clean Water Act, was originally missed in 1977, Dragna said Thursday, and was later extended to the end of 1988.

As part of the new consent decree, the city agreed to pay a $625,000 penalty for missing the secondary treatment deadline. Justice Department officials describe it as one of the largest penalties ever collected for violations of the Clean Water Act.

Pregerson’s acceptance of the city’s hardship claim was not total. At his urging, the city and the EPA agreed to a request from environmental groups that progress reports be filed every three months and that a court hearing on the status of the city’s efforts be held twice a year.

“That’s a mechanism for bringing pressure to bear” on the city, Pregerson said.