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Lukewarm Hot Spots

Environmentalists vowed this May to fight to stop the State Water Board from scaling back its Bay Protection and Toxic Cleanup Program from a toxic hot spots ranking and clean-up program to a hot spot identification and monitoring program.

"Monitoring isn't good enough," says environmentalist Alvin Greenberg, who sits on the program's public advisory committee. "The program cries out for full implementation as our legislators first envisioned it."

Since the legislature created it in 1989, the program has failed to fulfill many of its mandates and meet its deadlines at the state level. It has still not produced an agreed-upon set of sediment quality objectives or ranking criteria for defining and prioritizing hot spots for clean up.

Criticisms of the program abound. Some accuse it of spending too much money on staff salaries and research and not enough on clean up. Others say the program and its advisory committee spent too much time bickering over how to characterize hot spots and assess relative risks. Fingers have been pointed in all directions - at dischargers on the committee for stalling agreement on the science, at the Governor for lack of interest in moving the program ahead, at environmentalists for being unwilling to compromise, at the State Board for program mismanagement.

"A charge was levied to investigate a problem and not a lot has been done," says Charles Batts of the Bay Area Dischargers Association. Fees on dischargers fund the program, but the shortfalls between projected and actual revenues have been a major problem. According to the Board's Gita Kapahi, "The law still requires us to do 100% of the program, but we only have 50% of the money."

"Both business and environmentalists agree we want to clean up hot spots," says the Bay Planning Coalition's Ellen Johnck, who also sits on the program's advisory committee. "The real crunch is how to do it in a cost effective way relative to the degree of environmental risk." Cost effective, at this point, seems to mean scaling back to a monitoring only program.

But environmentalists aren't planning to give in easy. Save the Bay, Greenberg and others want to strengthen not weaken the state's program. To do this, they say they may need to extend the January 1999 end date, find new program funds, and get more citizens onto the advisory committee. Funds could come from adding agriculture to the group of "dischargers" assessed fees.

One obstacle, disagreement over the state of the science, had a breakthrough this May. Though dischargers claimed the science was too cutting edge to go with at a November State Board hearing, a panel of well-known scientists endorsed the program's scientific approach and studies this May, according to Kapahi.

At the regional level, the S.F. Board is already using the science they've developed under the program to guide hot spot screening and clean up. Indeed the S.F. Board's Karen Taberski says she's tired of hearing so many criticisms when her region's program has made so much progress - providing seed money for the now successful Regional Monitoring Program, completing the first study of contaminants in Bay fish, identifying five reliable reference sites for ambient Bay conditions (cleanest we can expect), selecting a preferred combination of five toxicity tests for anyone sampling sediments, developing a statistical method and using it to screen over 100 potential toxic hot spots and develop clean up priorities.

Taberski says her region's Bay Protection effort has also been instrumental in coordinating sediment guidance for the clean up of numerous Department of Defense sites and other "hot spots" and cites the Central Valley Regional Board's work to pinpoint sources of pesticide toxicity in water and mercury accumulation in fish.

"Both regional boards have been busting themselves to identify sources of toxicity and place control measures on those sources, " she says. "Our region has hit everything the Bay Protection legislation requires." But where one region makes progress another does nothing, says Greenberg. "We still need some statewide accountability," he says.

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