The Seaside Lagoon is once again in dire straits after the regulatory agency overseeing the facility’s water outflow quality indicated that it may impose new, more stringent standards and require the city to fund a new set of tests in order to continue operation.
The Los Angeles Regional Water Control Board this week told city staff that one of the conditions of continued operation of the facility would be a battery of tests and water quality studies that would cost the city an estimated $160,000 to $250,000. And at the end of the two-year testing period, the city would face not only tightened standards on Total Suspended Solids – the silt-like material that has been the source of conflict between the city and the LARWCB – but added standards on eight different kinds of metals.
Council members were incredulous.
“Now we are going to be required to do tests so we can turn ourselves in…We are going to spend $250,000 to prove ourselves wrong?” said Councilman Pat Aust.
The council last April voted to close the water function in the lagoon after the regulatory agency announced potential fines ranging from $21.2 billion to $150,000 for past exceedences of its standards. The water board in May relented and issued a Time Schedule Order that relaxed water standards for three years as the city explored ways to address the problems.
Two weeks ago the board announced that the city’s fines would only be $25,000. But at the same time they indicated that tighter standards were in the lagoon’s future – after the TSO expires in 2013 – as well as a new regime of expensive tests that would have to be implemented in the next three months.
Councilman Steve Diels said that LARWCB officials thought that they had greatly compromised.
“We have to get them to understand we can’t afford this,” Diels said. “If something does not change, we cannot afford to operate the lagoon. And we are going right back to where we were at the beginning of this season.”
The city maintains that the water that it puts back into the ocean is cleaner than the water brought in. In a regulatory struggle that has gone on for much of the past decade, city officials have long contended that the Seaside Lagoon is a unique facility that was being held to unfairly stringent standards. The lagoon, built along with the harbor in the early 1960s, uses ocean water that is taken in by the AES power plant. The city chlorinates the water after its use by the power plant for cooling purposes, and then returns the water de-chlorinated to the ocean.
Council members appear to be nearing the end of their patience.
“We were hoping last May when we got this Time Schedule Order, we were all whistling Dixie thinking we were going to have the lagoon open three or four seasons,” Councilman Bill Brand said. “But they threw a wrench into it…Everybody knows I love the Seaside Lagoon, but this is getting ridiculous.”
“I am afraid we are going to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars and be no further along than we are now,” said Councilman Matt Kilroy.
Aust said the city simply cannot keep paying for the changing standards of the water control board.
“We cannot keep hemorrhaging this money we don’t have to be chased around by the water control board for a recreational facility,” Aust said. “We can’t afford to do it, especially now.”
Former Councilman John Parsons said the regulatory agency appeared to be developing new standards by putting on a blindfold and throwing darts at a board.
“Unless they are going to back away to where the standards used to be….We just kind of have to call it quits,” he said. ER
