Results still pending

Barbara Diamond

Five years of costly study on how to restore health to polluted Aliso

Creek has yielded little results,

“We spent over $1 1/2 million and hundreds of hours studying the

creek, and just as everyone feared, the study went into a filing

cabinet someplace,” Councilman Wayne Baglin said.

About 40 stakeholders -- including county, cities and water

district officials -- participated in the study begun in the late

1990s by the Army Corps of Engineers. Many of the stakeholders have

never seen a final report on the study, which just seemed to

disappear off the public radar screen. Only two minor projects went

into the implementation pipeline.

City Manager Ken Frank, whose fingerprints are everywhere, doesn’t

remember seeing a final report on the study. Assistant City Manager

John Pietig, whose focus has been water quality since he was hired,

never even heard of the study.

South Orange County Wastewater Authority General Manager David

Caretto has a draft copy, but environmentalist Rick Wilson said to

his knowledge a final report does not exist.

If it does, Baglin hasn’t seen it.

“I was involved since 1993 or ’94 when [supervisor Thomas Riley]

first became interested and then passed it on to Marian Bergeson to

get the Army Corps of Engineers into it,” Baglin said.

Baglin, a former chair of the state Regional Water Quality

Boardhas focused on water quality issues while in and out of city

office for the past decade. He participated in the stakeholder

meetings.

“I was very upbeat at the beginning of the study,” Baglin said.

“But as we got close to the end, I saw it wasn’t going to fly. It was

very sad.

The South Orange County Wastewater Authority was a stakeholder.

Caretto has a telephone book-sized document titled Watershed

Management Plan, dated September 2001 and stamped “Draft.”

“However, the corps is now recommending something different on how

to protect the creek than what went into the report,” Caretto said.

He is of the opinion that inefficiency and lack of staff

continuity sabotaged -- albeit unintentionally -- the implementation

of the study. Lack of funds hasn’t helped.

“I am really discouraged with the process,” he said.

However, diversion of the pollution spewed into the creek by a

pipe in Laguna Niguel -- called a Band-Aid by Baglin -- and a project

near the wastewater authority’s plant in South Laguna are the only

two proposals that survived the study to date.

The corps will put up 65% of the costs to repair the abutments of

a concrete bridge that spans the creek, stabilize the creek at that

location and create a fish path in the area, with the hope that trout

will return.

The project, which was opposed by the California Coastal

Commission staff, but approved 11 to 1, is waiting on two permits.

“Our little project doesn’t deal with the creek’s problems of

erosion or pollution on the beach,” he said.

Lack of funding from the stakeholders compounds the problems,

Caretto said.

The county is aggressively seeking grants that would allow

implementation of some proposed projects, Caretto said.

Although representatives of cost-sharing stakeholder’s are no

longer meeting, nongovernmental groups such as Friends of Aliso Creek

are struggling to keep the process alive.

“By the time the stakeholders meetings ended, attendance was down,

participants were frustrated,” Wilson said.

The problems are daunting, he said. The solutions -- costing

millions -- probably are beyond the financial capabilities of a

volunteer group.

“The corps was supposed to spend $11 million, but it got up to

more than $20 million because of special interest projects that were

added,” Baglin said. “We ended up with a horrible bureaucratic

hassle.”