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Inside the Agencies

Dioxin Dealings

"A permit to pollute" is what environmentalist Greg Karras called a settlement worked out between Tosco, a Martinez oil refinery that has been discharging more of the deadly pollutant dioxin than allowed, and the staff of the S.F. Regional Board, the agency charged with enforcing the standard. But the staff-brokered agreement was rejected by the seven-member board this July. The agreement would have set an interim effluent limit for the dioxin, allowed five years for compliance, capped violation fines at $50,000 and potentially shielded Tosco from citizen lawsuits.

"The Board correctly told companies that they can't go in and cut deals with agencies while trying to cut the public out of the process," says BayKeeper's Michael Lozeau.

The S.F. Board will revisit Tosco's permit at its September meeting, likely requiring the refinery to quickly comply with its permit conditions. But tracking down and closing off the contaminant's source may be difficult. Tosco has already tried pretreatment at certain processing units. When water leaves the wastewater treatment system, there's no detectable level of dioxin, according to Tosco's Jim Simmons. The water then flows through an open canal before being piped to a Bay outfall. "Somewhere between the system and the pipe, something's coming in that adds dioxin," he says. That something could be releases from catch basins and lagoons or contaminated sediments in the canal itself. But Simmons thinks the largest source may turn out to be stormwater, which collects from the 2,200-acre refinery site and mingles with other water in the canal.

The S.F. Board's Lila Tang says her agency plans to ask all refineries to test their stormwater for dioxin sometime next year. "We're the pioneer here," says Simmons. "Other manufacturers haven't undertaken the kinds of tests we have. Once they do, we all may find out dioxin's a much greater issue than we thought. Then we as a society must decide what to do about it."

Contact: Greg Karras (415)243-8373, Jim Simmons (510)602-4370;Lila Tang(510)286-0911

H2O Quality Plan Attracts Suitor

A lawsuit contesting the state's new Water Quality Control Plan for the Delta was filed this June by the water agencies on San Joaquin River tributaries. The plaintiffs are unhappy about elements of the plan limiting use of the river's flows in critical fish migration periods - elements lifted straight out of the widely accepted December 15 Bay-Delta Accord - and the new spring flow standards for the San Joaquin, which they call "arbitrary, capricious and without support in the administrative record." The plaintiffs also argue that the new state plan should have endorsed a long-proposed fish barrier at the mouth of the Old River. Asked for his informal response to the suit, the state's Jerry Johns pointed out that the administrative record does contain support for the San Joaquin measures in U.S. Fish & Wildlife's Biological Opinion on what it will take to protect the endangered Delta smelt. The opinion contains the same flow standard as that adopted in the new state plan and expresses reservations about the barrier, which it says could help migrating fish like salmon but might hurt resident fish like smelt.

Contact: Jerry Johns (916)657-1981 or Joel Moskowitz (plaintiffs' lawyer) (213)229-7673

Emerging Pesticide Regs

Numerical objectives will be set for five widely used rice farm pesticides by the end of the year if the Central Valley Regional Board and the City of Sacramento have their way. The city sued the Board five years ago over a 1990 Basin Plan amendment, which the city felt didn't go far enough in terms of exploring options for preventing upstream pesticide pollution to the Sacramento River, one of the city's primary water sources. Pursuant to the lawsuit settlement, Board staff are now drafting a new amendment that would change pesticide regulation from a set of performance goals linked to a reduction timetable to numerical objectives for the amount of each pesticide that can be present in the river and other waterways. "We'll be reevaluating our whole approach to controlling pesticide discharges to surface waters," says the Board's Rudy Schnagl.

Contact: Rudy Schnagl (916)255-3101

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