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Mercury Cleanup Plan for San Francisco Bay Rejected

Posted on: Thursday, 8 September 2005, 18:00 CDT

Sep. 8--SACRAMENTO -- A plan to remove mercury from San Francisco Bay was rejected Wednesday by state regulators who said the cleanup strategy, which would take more than a century, was not aggressive enough.

The decision by the State Water Resources Control Board was a severe blow to regional regulators who police water quality in San Francisco Bay and could set back efforts to develop cleanup plans for other pollutants.

Environmentalists cheered the 4-1 decision, while business interests and sewage treatment plant representatives criticized it.

Under the order issued by the state board, the Oakland-based San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board has nine months to rewrite the mercury plan.

Bruce Wolfe, the regional board's executive officer, was noncommittal when asked if his agency would do so.

"That's ultimately going to be up to our board to decide," Wolfe said.

State officials held out the possibility that, if the regional board fails to rewrite a more acceptable plan, they could write their own.

The mercury cleanup plan was the first in what is to be a series of comprehensive plans to attack pollution in San Francisco Bay. It was the product of efforts dating back to 1998 by regulators, representatives of sewage treatment plants and refineries, environmentalists and others.

In the end, the plan was supported by sewage treatment plant officials, refineries and the regional board. It was opposed by environmentalists, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state board.

The rejection is "a great decision by the state water board," said Sejal Choksi, director of Baykeeper's San Francisco Bay program. "The new (cleanup plan) is going to be really protective of the Bay and the communities that rely on the fish in the Bay."

San Francisco Bay, and particularly the fish that live in it, are heavily polluted with mercury. Fish consumption advisories warn people, especially children and pregnant women, to limit their intake of fish from the Bay.

Much of that pollution is the product of gold and mercury mines that stretch from the Sierra Nevada to Santa Clara County -- pollution that dates back to the Gold Rush but remains in sediment and continues to flow down rivers, through the Delta and into the Bay.

Today, refineries and sewage treatment plants are a relatively minor source of mercury pollution, and the regional board's plan added few new restrictions to their operations.

Instead, the regional board's plan relied largely on future efforts to clean up upstream mines and the passage of time to scour and wash mercury from the Bay.

The state board was clearly unsatisfied that it would take an estimated 120 years before Bay fish would be safe to eat.

It ordered the regional board to require refineries and other dischargers to use the best pollution control methods, and it ordered the regional board to update its water quality standards for mercury.

The state board also said a pollution "offset" program should be set up that would allow refineries, sewage treatment plants and other mercury dischargers to pay to remove mercury elsewhere if that is cheaper than eliminating their own mercury discharges.

Sewage treatment district officials and refinery representatives objected, saying the federal government, possibly through Superfund, should be liable for cleaning up abandoned mines.

"If all municipal discharges stopped, it wouldn't speed the removal of mercury of fish," said Michele Pla, executive director of the Bay Area Clean Water Agencies, an association of districts that run sewage treatment plants.

"We really object to the idea of our ratepayers ... could be responsible for cleaning up mines," Pla added.

The state board said in its order that dischargers would not be held responsible for more than their "fair share" of pollution elsewhere.

The mercury plan is the first and probably the most important in a series of comprehensive clean up plans called TMDLs, or total maximum daily loads, that are to be developed for the Bay.

It is also the first of about 200 TMDLs considered in California that was opposed by the EPA.

Wolfe, the regional board executive director, said the order would set back efforts to develop more TMDLs.

"If I need to devote staff resources to this, that means I don't have staff devoted to TMDLs for PCBs, selenium and other constituents. It's a trickle-down effect," he said.

He also expressed frustration with the state board's decision.

"Our sense remains that many of the issues they addressed here were already addressed" in the regional board plan, Wolfe said.

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Copyright (c) 2005, Contra Costa Times, Walnut Creek, Calif.

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Source: Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.)

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