Residents Split Over New Water Filtration Plants

A five-year attempt to clean up tap water in homes from South Los Angeles to Pacific Palisades has hit a bottleneck in the Santa Monica Mountains, where hillside residents leery of massive new filtration plants have splintered into bickering factions.

Accusations of hysteria, snobbery and even treachery have virtually shut down the Department of Water and Power’s effort to comply with federal and state drinking water rules. Unless the dispute is resolved soon, water held in open mountain reservoirs won’t conform to national standards of purity for several more years.

“The decision-making process appears to have run amok,” said Barbara Fine, a leader of a powerful homeowners coalition, the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns.

The story begins in three of the city’s most attractive spots--the tree-lined Hollywood, Encino and Lower Stone Canyon reservoirs--and is stalled at the foot of a decrepit landfill.

Five years ago, the federal Environmental Protection Agency ruled that deer, coyotes and birds roaming the hillsides around those reservoirs might contaminate rainwater runoff with stomach-cramping microorganisms. In response, the state Department of Health Services ordered water districts to either divert the runoff into storm drains, cover the reservoirs or filter the water.

In Los Angeles, DWP engineers proposed plunking metal lids over some and filtering water at others. But they underestimated public affection for the man-made lakes. Under threat of a lawsuit by citizens and pressured by the City Council, the department in 1990 submitted to mediation with reservoir-area residents over the project, which is estimated to cost up to $500 million.

At Lake Hollywood, the process worked smoothly. Nearly 1,000 hours of talks between the DWP and volunteers on a mediation panel led to an innovative solution that might actually save the area from a home development project that residents feared even more than a filtration plant.

Two mediation panels that include residents near the Stone Canyon and Encino reservoirs also reached what seemed to be an ideal compromise. After five tiresome years of secret deliberations over chemicals, scenic views, noise levels and construction methods, each panel ultimately recommended building a single six-acre plant serving both reservoirs, to be located halfway between Bel-Air and Encino at the mouth of the old Mission Canyon garbage dump in the Sepulveda Pass.

But as soon as their plan leaked out, the genteel process deteriorated into name-calling.

No one had informed residents of the tiny, wealthy Mountaingate, Bel-Air Knolls or Bel-Air Crest communities, whose ridgeline homes lie less than a mile from the county-owned landfill. Nearly a dozen schools, museums and religious institutions also lie within two miles of the old garbage-truck weigh station where the plant would be. Angry, alarmed and lacking much of the technical knowledge gleaned from hours of filtration-plant study, many of the area’s leaders formed a coalition to denounce the mediation panels’ selection.

“We think that there are political reasons why our area was chosen to get it in the head,” said Ernest Frankel, a novelist and retired Marine Corps colonel.

Frankel has spearheaded the Mountaingate resistance with political firepower of his own, recruiting Councilman Marvin Braude to his cause. Armed with a memo from City Atty. James K. Hahn concluding that a 38-year-old conditional-use permit prohibits turning the scarred landfill complex into anything but a park, the coalition has brought the DWP’s proposed study of Mission Canyon to a halt.

“The risk of a lawsuit is so great that it seems unwise to pursue until all the legal issues are resolved,” Braude said.

Why the fuss over a facility aimed at keeping potentially lethal giardia and cryptosporidium from water that reaches households across the Los Angeles Basin? After all, two years ago, a cryptosporidium outbreak in the Milwaukee water system killed 112 people and caused up to 400,000 cases of diarrhea. Children, the elderly and AIDS and cancer patients are considered the most vulnerable to the waterborne pathogens.

Mountain community leaders say they dread four years of invasion by heavy construction trucks along their narrow roads. Mountaingate residents further insist that methane gas emanating from the old landfill could interact with chlorine gas or sodium hypochlorite liquid stored at the filtration plant to create a deadly toxic cloud in the event of an accident. And they consider the extensive mountain tunneling required to connect Stone Canyon, Encino and Mission Canyon to be a wasteful boondoggle.

“They should be rational and put it somewhere that it doesn’t violate zoning rules, cause a safety hazard or impact thousands of schoolchildren,” Frankel said. “There’s no way to get out of here if you have a disaster.”

Nonsense, say advocates of the Mission Canyon proposal.

“It’s hysteria-mongering by selfish people who have egos attached to that area,” said Michael d’Angelo, a physician who lives in Glenridge, another tony neighborhood on the eastern edge of the Stone Canyon Reservoir above Bel-Air.

“They think it’s Krakatoa West waiting to happen, and that’s just a lie.”

James M. Brust, a retired aerospace industry executive in Encino who helped choose the Mission Canyon site, likewise expresses frustration at the way the Mountaingate crowd and Braude have elbowed into the selection process.

“We figured that if the good Lord had looked for an ideal site, this was it,” said Brust, with an engineer’s zeal for facts. “There isn’t one iota of evidence that methane is a problem there. Why not allow an environmental impact report to determine if any safety issues really exist?”

The DWP agrees that Mission Canyon offers many advantages, including a faster construction schedule. Department officials say they would rather their construction trucks drive on four-lane Sepulveda Boulevard than through residential neighborhoods and serpentine Mulholland Drive. The department also maintains that the lower long-term cost of building and maintaining a single plant balances the extra immediate expense of digging eight miles of tunnels connecting the reservoirs on either side.

Before Mountaingate residents and Braude raised their objections, DWP lawyers had reached a tentative accord with county Sanitation District staff to lease the site. Now, because of Braude’s intervention, the department can’t even enter the canyon to study it.

The impasse has exasperated D’Angelo and Brust.

“Braude is acting like a bully, and the DWP is acting like a thrashed child,” said D’Angelo, despairing that years of careful study by mediation panels are about to go down the drain.

Exercising City Council authority over the issue, Braude recently asked the DWP to prepare a new list of alternatives for one or more filtration plants. Four are in the San Fernando Valley: One in Van Nuys at Oxnard Street and Sepulveda Boulevard, one in Encino at Magnolia Boulevard and Hayvenhurst Avenue, one in the Sepulveda Basin near Burbank and Balboa boulevards, and one in Sherman Oaks behind Fire Station 88 near the San Diego Freeway at Sepulveda Boulevard.

Homeowners near the Van Nuys site, considered the most attractive to the DWP and mediation panels, have not welcomed the attention.

“If they think it’s politically correct to shove a plant down in Van Nuys because we’ll scream less, then they better think again,” said Don Shultz, president of the Van Nuys Homeowners Assn. “It doesn’t make any sense to move the plant farther away from the bodies of water.”

To be sure, the high cost of pumping water from the city’s primary filtration plant in Sylmar south to the reservoirs, then back to the Valley floor, then south again over the mountains to the Los Angeles Basin is a major barrier to the Valley plan. Building the plant in the Valley could increase costs by 20%, the DWP says.

Another Valley-based alternative--bypassing the reservoirs entirely by expanding the Sylmar plant and digging a vast new network of tunnels to feed more water to the basin--is likewise considered too costly.

The dearth of politically easy choices has prompted City Councilman Michael Feuer, whose district encompasses both mountain and Valley neighborhoods, to endorse none of the plans. Instead, Feuer has asked his staff to seek “new technological alternatives” to filtration.

For one interesting alternative, he need look no farther than Lake Hollywood. A mediation panel there came up with the idea of bypassing the open reservoir by building four, 15-million-gallon underground storage tanks alongside it. In the future, filtered water rushing down from Sylmar to DWP customers would be supplemented in peak periods from these tanks rather than from the 1.3-billion-gallon Hollywood Reservoir. The Hollywood Reservoir would stand by in emergency reserve; a new micro-filtration plant at its base would cleanse the water when needed.

The tanks would be fed by a new, eight-mile pipeline to be tunneled circuitously through Los Angeles from the Upper Stone Canyon Reservoir, which does not fall under the state surface-water treatment guidelines because it is surrounded by concrete culverts instead of hills.

But even that creative plan has detractors. Environmentalists complain that the 800,000 cubic yards of dirt to be unearthed for the tanks will be spread in canyons around the lake, ruining the natural shape of the land. Area residents fire back that the DWP will at least have to buy land for the site from a real estate investment group that has long tried to build a more devastating, canyon-leveling development of homes.

The complicated, $150-million proposal will be submitted for approval next month, the first of the Santa Monica Mountains filtration plants to reach the Board of Water and Power Commissioners.

Rather than being encouraged, skeptics of the entire mediation process say the residents who participated became an expensive part of the problem instead of the solution. The DWP has so far paid at least $410,000 to the Woodland Hills-based Mediation Institute for its negotiation consultants. Included in that amount: $25,000 for the three mediation panels, to spend on independent technical consultants.

“These people have become enamored with the process and co-opted by the DWP,” said Alan Kishbaugh, a veteran environmentalist and former president of the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns. “They’re talking about going into pristine open spaces and chewing them up for tunneling and industrial uses. They’re further urbanizing the Santa Monica Mountains, and that’s a very bad, irreversible idea.”

Feuer says he considers the amount spent on mediation to be “an outrageous sum of money.” And Braude fears that the mediation panels were “misguided” if they imagined they could “unilaterally” decide on a site.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and some area residents wonder whether filtration plants are even worth building.

The DWP itself reports that Los Angeles County has not suffered a waterborne illness outbreak in this century, and a recent county Department of Health Services bulletin on cryptosporidium concludes that the county’s water is “safe for everyone to drink, including those with immune suppression.”

In Milwaukee, the 1992 cryptosporidium outbreak was blamed primarily on human error at a filtration plant where river water wasn’t adequately cleansed of contamination from cattle upstream.

“For the money these plants will cost, you could give every household in Los Angeles a filter for their water faucets instead,” said Yaroslavsky, whose district would contain one or two new plants.

That appears to be wishful thinking, however. State and federal law originally required the DWP to start filtering the reservoirs’ water by 1993, but the department received an extension and now must meet a rolling schedule from 1998 to 2002. Lawmakers have rebuffed frequent recent appeals to repeal the rules.

Stephen A. Ott, the DWP’s Stone Canyon-Encino project manager, believes filtration is an important goal despite community concerns.

“Regulators want us to prevent a problem for once, and not react afterward,” he said.

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Mountain Reservoirs

The state has ordered the Department of Water and Power to filter water at its open reservoirs. The DWP, homeowners and politicians are debating whether one, two or three plants should be built. One contenious plan calls for a single plant at Mission Canyon to serve both the Encino and Stone Canyon reservoirs.

Encino Reservoir

Capacity: 3.2 billion gallons

Service area: Southern San Fernando Valley hillsides

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Upper Stone Canyon Reservoir

Capacity: 138 million gallons

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Lower Stone Canyon Reservoir

Capacity: 3.4 billion gallons

Service Area: Westwood to Pacific Palisades, and south to LAX

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Upper Hollywood Reservoir

Capacity: 64 million gallons

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Lower Hollywood Reservoir

Capacity: 1.3 billion gallons

Service Area: Hollywood to Central Los Angeles