State water quality board wants to cut back on inspections
Loretta Kalb
Sacramento Bee
10/18/2010
California water quality regulators are considering a policy change that would end testing and cleanup of several thousand underground storage tanks that have leaked gasoline and other petroleum products.
In a draft policy circulating for comment, the staff of the State Water Resources Control Board proposes to end groundwater monitoring, investigation and further costly cleanup at sites deemed "low risk" for spreading pollution.
By doing so, the agency is trying to free scarce funds for more pressing cleanup projects as part of a strategy the state water board authorized more than a year ago.
But some regional water quality regulators say the draft policy does not protect water quality, offers little scientific backing for deciding when to stop tracking cleanup cases, and is open to misinterpretation.
"Our big concern here is this policy doesn't appear to be based on a sound peer review or science," said Kevin Brown, engineering geologist for the Regional Water Quality Control Board in San Francisco. "It seems to remove professional judgment from decision-making for underground storage cases."
Nine engineering geologists at the San Francisco water board outlined their concerns in a Sept. 23 internal memo to the state, noting that the draft required "substantial revision" to be acceptable.
Right now, there are about 9,000 active tank cleanup cases around the state, including hundreds in the four-county Sacramento region. The vast majority of them are gas stations. Federal law requires that leaking gas tanks be cleaned up to protect the water supply.
Under the state's current rules, counties and regional water quality regulators decide if a contaminated site no longer poses a threat to human health and therefore monitoring should stop.
The proposed change would impose a more standardized approach. It calls for closing cases in which the threat of pollution is stable or diminishing and the underground contamination plume is no closer than 250 feet to the nearest drinking water well.
"Two hundred and fifty feet from a well is very close," said Ken Williams, an engineering geologist for the Regional Water Quality Control Board in Riverside. "I don't think very many people would feel good about that. I don't know where they came up with that number."
Critics also question whether it's wise to allow cancer-causing petroleum products to remain in the ground when drinking water wells might be drilled nearby in the future.
The state water board is under considerable financial pressure to get cases off its books.
Two decades ago, state legislation established a cleanup fund supported by a fee levied on every gallon of gas purchased in the state. That fee, paid by gas station owners and generally passed on to consumers, is currently 2 cents a gallon. The Legislature and governor raised it earlier this year.
The fund has distributed $2.7 billion since 1991. Locally, some $215 million has been spent to help clean up contamination from underground storage tanks in Sacramento, Placer, Yolo and El Dorado counties.
In the local area, 328 sites have active claims for funding. Another 424 cases that received funds have been completed.
The system worked until recently, according to state reports. But two years ago cash fell short, delaying payments, stalling many projects and precipitating a financial crisis for the fund, according to an audit that followed.
The 2010 audit conducted for the state water board found a lack of sound financial management practices, ineffective cost containment and failure to get project plans and cost estimates prior to cleanup.
Without action, up to $1.8 billion in cleanup costs will remain unfunded when the fund sunsets in 2016, warned the auditor, Sjoberg Evashenk Consulting Inc. of Sacramento.
There is wide recognition of the need for some reform. Statewide, more than 40 percent of claims for cleanup funds involve projects that have been in some stage of cleanup or monitoring for a decade or more. Critics of the current system say cases often languish on the books long after monitoring is no longer necessary.
"I do believe something should be done to help facilitate closure of a lot of these cases," said Bob Clark-Riddell, president of the cleanup firm Pangea Environmental Services in Oakland. But he, too, criticized the strategy proposed to carry that out.
"It seems like this whole process is not based on science," he said.
So far, the draft proposal has been circulated among the nine regional water quality control boards, industry consultants and stakeholders.
The draft is intended to generate feedback, said state water board spokesman William L. Rukeyser. The board has not set a date for when it intends to vote on the policy, but some industry experts say they've heard it will do so by the end of this year or early next year.
Rukeyser said he believes some of the resistance to the proposal comes from site cleanup companies fearful of seeing lucrative contracts end.
The aim is to close oversight of low-risk cases "so we can address the things that are currently problems," Rukeyser said. "There is no point in pouring money down a test well simply to keep on testing."
