EDITORIAL: Council wise to study the dredge issue

Once again the watchdogs have dug up a juicy bone that will now be gnawed upon and picked clean.

It all started about a month ago when Roger Butow and Clean Water Now! got a call from a couple in Emerald Bay who were wondering why barges were passing through their ocean view. Being an ex-Marine, Butow went out and looked for himself and ferreted out the little-noticed and long-since approved Newport Harbor dredging project, which began in April 2006, and is supposed to wind up by January.

Turns out those barges are dumping sediment scraped up from the bottom of Newport’s Back Bay into a deep ocean canyon that lies off of Crystal Cove, some four miles out to sea.

The dredging project will be a great boon to the Back Bay and the wildlife it supports. But the downside is a lot of sediment that can’t be utilized on land will wind up in the ocean.

Digging further into the dredging project, Butow dredged up the fact that the dump site into which the sediment is being poured has been approved as a “permanent” dump site for such stuff from around the area.

What most Lagunans didn’t know until now is that there have been not one but two Environmental Protection Agency-approved dump sites 4 to 5 miles off the protected waters of Crystal Cove and upstream from Laguna Beach for about 25 years.

Orange County waters were apparently considered the best place to dump dredging from the harbors of Los Angeles and Long Beach. For its part, Newport is using another dump site, dubbed LA-3, which was moved closer to Laguna and farther from Newport before the dredging project started.

What so angered Butow was that he, and many other Lagunans, didn’t know about the dump site. It’s probably not the fault of the federal and local officials, who by all accounts followed the appropriate process for approval. The California Coastal Commission, in fact, held a hearing on the LA-3 dump site June 9, 2005. But that was one week after the Bluebird Canyon landslide, and city officials and community members in Laguna Beach had a crisis on their hands. It’s no wonder nobody noticed the obscurely-titled “Consistency Determination by Environmental Protection Agency to designate LA-3 as permanent dredge disposal site” off of Orange County. Now that everyone knows, the City Council is planning to dredge up all the facts about the dump site.

Whether anything can, or should, be done to stop the offshore dumping, as demanded by some, is another question. While toxins are believe to be present in the goo, the EPA believes it’s better to dump there than elsewhere. The EPA also argues that, since the site has been used for so many years without apparent harm to the marine environment, why not continue?

But that was before the dump site came into the view of Butow. Now the muck has been stirred up and opinions could change.

We think the council did the right thing in not jumping to conclusions, instead forming a subcommittee to study the issue. We look forward to whatever light they can bring to this mucky subject.