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View Winners → Monrovia City Council Updates on Various Projects
Monrovia Weekly Mar 02, 2016
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Enhanced Watershed Management Program will minimize pollutants going into the storm water system. – Courtesy Photo
By Susan Motander
Tuesday’s Monrovia City Council meeting consisted of a series of updates on several projects with which the city is involved. The updates ranged from the status of Monrovia Renewal, the infrastructure repair and replacement program for the city’s water lines, sewer system, and streets to its Legacy project which is striving to maintain, scan, digitalize and organize the photos, documents, and oral histories of the city’s rich history.
Perhaps the most disturbing update dealt with the so-called MS4 Permit. The full name of the permit is the Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System Permit (hence the MS4 designation). The permit was approved for the County of Los Angeles in November of 2012 and began effective in December of that year. Until recently the city had been able to show a good faith effort to comply with the terms of the contract as mandated by the Los Angeles Water Quality Board. This effort included mainly education efforts and implementing best management practices to prevent and minimize pollutant going into the storm water system.
The city also needed to find a way to cut back on certain pollutants going into the storm water system. The permit mandated an enforcement of storm water pollution limits through the establishment of Total Maximums Daily Loads (TMDL) of 33 specific pollutants.
Rather than trying to comply on our own, the City of Monrovia entered into a sort of partnership with five other local cities and the county and the county flood control district to create an Enhanced Watershed Management Program (EWMP – pronounced E-whimp).
City Manager Oliver Chi described the EWMP created by consultants for this group (that includes our neighboring cities of Duarte and Arcadia as well as Bradbury) as “a 1,000 page document.” He went on to describe what the plan would cost in total for the entire group ($1.4 billion) and what Monrovia’s share of that would be. The $231.1 million dollar price tag for Monrovia’s share of the initial improvements mandated. This works out to about $1,334 per parcel in Monrovia, but as Mayor Tom Adams noted, not everyone will be able to pay this. He pointed out that this would raise the cost for others and that it might be closed to $1,500 per parcel.
Even if the city could afford the mandated improvements, there is also the maintenance of the improvements. The cost on this would be approximately $2.2 million per year. To put this into perspective, the entire city budget is just over $60 million per year. As Chi said “No one disputes that we need clean water, but this is unrealistic.”
According to Councilmember Gloria Crudgington, who has been involved in the San Gabriel Valley Council of Governments subcommittee on water quality related, facetiously “some genius” on the Water Quality Board’s staff said it in order to be in compliance with the terms of the mandate, the cost would be only $54 per person. Chi said the EWMP was required to show the true cost of the program.
Craig Steele, city attorney, said that in conversation with an attorney for one of the environmental groups backing the mandate, the attorney scoffingly referred to the complaints as whining and said: “So what, you have to fire a cop.” To which comment, Crudgington retorted, “We are going to have to fire a whole police department.”
Crudgington also wondered why Monrovia has a greater need for water mitigation than other communities and was told that we had a great deal of water flowing down from the National Forest. She wondered why the federal government was not “chipping in.” At that point Adams replied, with a smirk, “Some things just flow downhill.”
Chi said that the only hope that this mandate would not bankrupt cities throughout the state was a massive effort to lobby out legislators. Adams reminded him that the citizens of Monrovia had inundated the CEO of Trader Joe’s with “10,000 postcards” (the actual number was 15,000), saying the citizens could do something of the same kind with this issue.
