Glowing from the approval of a $1 billion revitalization plan, Los Angeles City Council members proclaimed Wednesday L.A. River Day, hailing its pending rebirth and the possible return of endangered steelhead trout.
But behind the scenes, other officials were working on a separate ambitious plan that could suck up much of the river’s water.
Two city agencies are drafting a new proposal to purify treated sewage and refill the groundwater basin, where wells would pump it up, eventually leading to the taps of homes and businesses.
Right now that very same treated water that used to be sewage flows into the Los Angeles River from a Van Nuys plant. Under this new plan, much of it would instead be pumped into the ground, leaving the river’s water levels substantially lower.
“Maybe 60 years from now we won’t be kayaking on the river,” said Council for Watershed Health program director Mike Antos, who leads the Los Angeles Basin Water Augmentation Study.
“We’ll be mountain biking.”
That scenario is not a given at this point, but it is among the range of possible outcomes.
It comes into conflict with Mayor Eric Garcetti’s plan to make the L.A. River more welcoming for birds, businesses and residents. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently gave its support to the $1 billion plan, with costs to be shared among federal, state and local agencies.
His plan depends on the same scarce ingredient that is key to the purification proposal — clean water.
As the drinking water plan advances, city leaders will have to balance these competing interests.
By 2022, the Department of Water and Power and the Bureau of Sanitation want to purify much of the sewage effluent coming from the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, near the intersection of the 101 and the 405 freeways.
To fulfill this DWP plan would mean no longer pumping the plant’s water into the river but instead sending it into the groundwater basin.
Today, about 30 million gallons of treated outflow is emptied into nearby lakes and the L.A. River each day, according to a preliminary study of the purification plant. That happens to be the same amount that officials want to purify for drinking water.
Will there be enough left over for recreation?
“It depends on how much river you want under your kayak,” said Jim McDaniel, the senior assistant general manager at the Department of Water and Power.
McDaniel and other water industry leaders were speaking Wednesday at Woodbury University in Burbank, at a forum presented by BizFed, an L.A. County business advocacy group.
There could be more effluent by the time the plant is built, he said after the forum, if the economy performs well and businesses expand. But in some stretches of the river, more than 90 percent of today’s water comes from the treatment plants, McDaniel said.
“There’s going to have to be balance,” he added. “There’s a finite amount of water there.”
As the DWP is planning the groundwater replenishment facility, it is also working to clean up pollutants in the San Fernando Valley basin. The purification plant is estimated to cost $400 million to build, with $19 million in annual operating costs, while the chemical remediation plant could cost between $600 million and $900 million to build. Funding sources have not yet been finalized.
This would be the second time the city tried to replenish the groundwater basin with treated sewage. In 2000, it pulled the plug on a project dubbed by skeptics as “toilet to tap.”
As officials try to gather support for the project, which adds another layer of purification, they will study how much water would flow into the L.A. River. Public comments on the draft environmental impact report will be accepted around mid-2015, according to the DWP. That will be the time environmentalists, businesses, water consumers and others can make their case about the river’s future.
“The riddle is: ‘What do we want the river to be?’” said Antos from the water study group. “In the long-term, all these things can be balanced, but it’s a choice on our part.”
