The number was, and is, eye-opening: $10.8 billion.
That’s an estimate issued by city leaders in San Bernardino County for how much their taxpayers might have to pay, over the next two decades, to meet possible new standards for cleaning the water that flows out of their streets and yards and farms and into the culverts, creeks and tributaries connected to the Santa Ana River Watershed, a stretch that includes much of San Bernardino, Orange and Riverside counties.
Leaders from 17 cities and agencies in San Bernardino County made that $10.8 billion claim during a public hearing in September, in Cypress, that involved representatives from all three counties. Their estimate was part of a broader negotiation over the details of the region’s next MS4 permit, a federally mandated document that will set limits on how much pollution can legally flow into local waters and, by extension, the ocean.
The San Bernardino County contingent based the number on an economic impact report they commissioned to figure out the costs for improving the systems they already use to clean or divert everything that flows into the water table, from storm runoff to the suds generated at do-it-yourself car washes.
The report’s authors (from Los Angeles-based Beacon Economics) suggested that the proposed new rules could be catastrophic for their clients, forcing some cities to prioritize groundwater cleanup over everything from cops to parks to basic services.
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“If agencies attempt to pay for their fair shares of the numeric limit compliance/regional (wastewater management plan) over the next five years, in most cases, they will have no general funds left over for other public expenditures.”
San Bernardino County officials insisted they want to improve, not tamp down, water quality rules. And they note that the most dire effects of the proposed new rules aren’t set in stone. Instead, they say, city finances could be squeezed in the future only if the currently proposed MS4 kicks in, something that’s still far from being finalized.
“Everyone desires improved stormwater quality, but these proposed rules will result in increased costs to taxpayers by pulling from the general fund of San Bernardino County and 16 local cities,” said Curt Hagman, a supervisor in San Bernardino County at the time of the meeting. The proposed rules, he added, would drive up costs for everything from roads to new homes.
But some who live closer to the coast – where taxpayers might have to pay to clean their own pollution and any pollution that flows downstream – argue that $10.8 billion is less about real-life forecasting than it is about illustrating how water regulations could have real-life effects on residents and businesses.
“Everybody understands this isn’t easy,” said Garry Brown, founder of Orange County Coastkeeper, a Costa Mesa-based environmental group that had a role in writing the region’s existing MS4 permits and is engaged in the current negotiations.
“But you have to be able to track (pollution) and enforce the rules,” he added. “It’s the law.”
Whether San Bernardino County’s $10.8 billion estimate is or isn’t inflated, the number also highlights a basic truth about keeping clean water in Southern California.
It’s not cheap.
Ocean economy
Everything from so-called forever chemicals (PFAS) to microplastics to tire rubber to pet waste flows from human communities and their businesses into drainage systems, streams and the underground water table. In this region, all that stuff (along with lots of trash) routinely gets into the Santa Ana River and, eventually, into the local stretch of the Pacific, a patch of ocean that’s central to the culture – and the economy – of Southern California.
Though the exact cost of keeping local waterways as clean as is feasible isn’t known, it almost certainly runs several billion dollars, according to economists and others.
But the alternative also might be pricy.
While there isn’t a widely known report looking specifically at the local economic impact of letting pollution into the ocean, that doesn’t mean it isn’t expensive for taxpayers, employers and workers.
In 2020, Los Angeles County published “The Ocean Economy in Los Angeles County,” which estimated how much money the ocean generates for California and Los Angeles County. Economists from the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.’s Institute for Applied Economics, using numbers from 2018, the last year then available, tracked everything from ocean-generated jobs to mineral rights to hotel room taxes.
Even when excluding the broad economic effects of ocean-inflated property value, the numbers commissioned by Los Angeles County also were startling: Statewide, the report concluded, the ocean sustained 660,000 jobs and generated about $143 billion in annual revenue.
Given that Orange County accounts for about 10% of the state’s economy, the stretch of ocean affected by the Santa Ana River Watershed might be generating far more income and jobs in a single year than the $10.8 billion of new expenses spread out over 20 years in San Bernardino County.
Advocates, including some observers from the Inland Empire, suggest letting anything threaten the long-term health of the region’s biggest money maker would be fiscally, if not ecologically, unwise.
“I don’t live near the beach, but I can’t imagine anything more stupid than letting the ocean go to hell,” said Monte Alvarez, a retired lawyer in Ontario who said he learned about MS4 permits when he represented home builders in Texas in the 1990s.
“I’m not saying that’s what’s happening with the permit they’re talking about. There’s always some middle ground out there,” he added.
“But the economic importance of the ocean, and of it being a place where people like to visit and such, should probably be a pretty big factor in all this.”
Brown, of Coastkeeper, notes that “everybody will have to pay something, in some way,” when the new permit negotiations are concluded, probably early next year.
“That’s going to be true for people inland and for people near the coast,” Brown said. “It’s just reality.”
Old rules, new geography
Haggling over water pollution rules is a grind, according to Brown and others who have helped write earlier versions of the region’s MS4 permits. But two factors – history and a quirk of federal water pollution laws – are helping to make the local negotiation particularly tricky.
The history side works like this: Regulators have been issuing MS4 permits (also known as Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Systems) to every community in the United States with 100,000 or more residents since the 1990s. Currently, there are three separate MS4s in the Santa Ana River Watershed region, with three different sets of rules. The MS4 covering Orange County differs from the rules in Riverside County and, again, for the rules in San Bernardino County.
But the negotiations currently underway, overseen by the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board – the local branch of the state agency that oversees water pollution control efforts – is for a new, single permit, one that will cover all three counties.
That means the new rules will have to take into account issues as diverse as fertilizer waste churned up by dozens of poultry farms in San Bernardino County and industrial chemicals spewed by the hundreds of manufacturers and restaurants and grocery stores that make up much of Riverside and Orange counties.
On the regulation side, the complicating factor is this: According to rules sparked by the Clean Water Act of 1972, any new MS4 permit can’t be less stringent than the one it replaces.
So, because of the history and the “no going backward” rule of water clean water law, the current round of MS4 negotiations might mean different things in different counties. In Orange and Riverside counties, where the current rules are relatively strict, the new proposals might feel incremental, while any changes in San Bernardino County might feel like a big leap.
After the September meeting in Cypress, officials from the Santa Ana Water Board urged public works officers and others from all three counties to work with water quality advocates on a compromise that might work for all. Hundreds of details – about water science, about construction of monitoring stations, about the number of times water inspectors should visit restaurants and garbage dumps – remain in flux.
Brown, who is part of the discussion, said a key factor in his view involves enforcement.
An early version of the MS4 would have allowed counties to push off enforcement rules for several years, and to then write rules in ways that, in his view, might let polluters slide. Instead, Brown wants agencies from all three counties to agree to use specific data and to impose rules that will track polluters, and then to force them to pay up if they violate the rules. He also wants those rules written into any version of the permit before it goes into effect.
If enforcement isn’t part of a final draft, Brown suggested his organization might ask a court to impose it.
“Compliance, using data, is part of the law,” Brown said. “Our case would be pretty clear.”
Another factor – one that might not be so easy to take to court – is wealth.
Median household income in Orange County is $110,042, or 30% higher than in Riverside County ($84,505) and 42% more than in San Bernardino County ($77,423).
Niree Kodaverdian, research manager at Beacon Economics and an author of the report on how the MS4 proposal might land in San Bernardino County, said she looked only at economic numbers – not science or politics – when measuring the impact of the proposed water rules. She found several communities that might face a double-whammy of sorts – high expenses because of new water quality rules and populations struggling to make ends meet. Those included the cities of San Bernardino, Fontana and Ontario.
“I can’t say what a win would look like for (San Bernardino County). You’d have to ask them about that,” Kodaverdian said.
“But the rules would definitely have different effects in different communities.”