Seaside Lagoon’s future looking safer
The Seaside Lagoon will remain open for the upcoming summer season. Photo
Redondo Beach City Council Tuesday night unanimously approved a plan in which city staff and the regulatory agency that oversees the Seaside Lagoon will work together to find the sources of the water quality problems that have dogged the facility’s ocean outflow.
The “special study work plan” is immediately significant in that it formally ensures that the lagoon will be open for business as usual for the upcoming summer season. More broadly, the plan opens a new, more collaborative chapter in the six year conflict between the city and the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board.
Redondo Beach has twice, in as many years, been on the brink of closing the lagoon as it has struggled to meet shifting LARWQCB discharge and testing requirements. The regulatory agency last year threatened more than $21 billion in fines for water quality violations under the Clean Water Act, but eventually issued only $51,000 in fines and issued a new permit intended to keep the lagoon open through 2013. But as part of that agreement, the city was required to undergo a new testing regime, one that became more expensive when the LARWQCB added an array of metals last fall.
The council drew a line in the sand at that additional cost, which was about $50,000. The city has long contended that water pumped out of the lagoon – which first cools the AES power plant, then is chlorinated for swimming and de-chlorinated before discharge – is cleaner than the water pumped in from the ocean. In January, the council engaged in some brinkmanship with the water board, threatening to fill the lagoon with sand if a compromise could not be reached.
It worked. Samuel Unger, the new LARWQCB executive director, agreed to give the city another year to find a solution. On March 24, Mayor Mike Gin, Councilman Steve Diels, Assemblywoman Betsy Butler, city staff and representatives from the environmental group Heal the Bay – which has backed the city in the conflict – met with the regulatory agency and brokered an agreement in which LARWQCB will pay for water tests this summer in an effort to reach a long-term solution.
Councilman Bill Brand admitted Tuesday he’d only reluctantly gone along with the council’s course of action in January and said he’d learned a lesson.
“We did save $50,000, and the lagoon is going to stay open,” Brand said.
Councilman Matt Kilroy said that he hoped this success put to rest the notion that the council had a “Machiavellian plan to close the seaside lagoon” that some community members had suspected.
“Obviously, that is not true,” Kilroy said. “We are doing everything we can to keep it open. It looks like this gives us at least a couple more years.”
Diels said he’d also learned a few political lessons from the experience.
“One lesson for me is [the importance] of finding people who care and can actually do something about the problem,” Diels said. “Assemblywoman Butler was instrumental, and having a new director of the Regional Water Quality Control Board who actually gets it – we actually have the ear of the LARWQCB, and we are working together as opposed to just doing what they tell us to do.” ER