LOS ANGELES (CN) - Los Angeles' water wars continue, with the city suing the state in Superior Court, claiming that the state's demand for dust abatement at Owens Lake could cost taxpayers $1.5 billion.
The City of Los Angeles challenges the validity of Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District's dust pollution control program, under a section of the Health and Safety Code.
Los Angeles claims the program could cost $1.5 billion - "the most expensive dust control program in the entire nation, and likely the world."
Los Angeles began draining Owens Lake, on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas, in 1913, sending its water into the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Many people know of the tremendous power struggle over the water through the Jack Nicholson movie, "Chinatown." Residents of Inyo County claimed, reasonably, that Los Angeles was stealing its water for the insatiable needs of the city. Owens Lake once covered 108 square miles and was up to 50 feet deep. Today much of the old lake bed is a mud and salt flat, whose alkaline dust is stuffed up by dust storms that carry away as much as 4 million tons of dust and dirt from the lakebed each year. The lake itself, much shallower than it was, covers no more than 27 square miles today.
Los Angeles sued the State Air Resources Board, the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District, and the state itself, through the California Lands Commission.
The city asks the Superior Court to order the State Air Resources Board to conduct an independent hearing to review Great Basin's 2011 Supplemental Control Requirements Decision.
State Air Resources Board Executive Officer James Goldstene is also named as a defendant.
"This action arises out of a long running dispute between LADWP [Los Angeles Department of Water and Power] and Great Basin over the City's lawful transport of water from the Owens Valley to the City's 4 million people through the Los Angeles Aqueduct," the complaint states. "This dispute is another chapter in an ongoing saga that involves Great Basin's repeated attempts, in excess of its authority under Section 42316, to require LADWP to solve all of the air quality issues in the Owens Valley Planning Area ('OVPA'). The OVPA is a much larger area than Owens Lake, extending north of Independence to south of Olancha. Long before the Los Angeles Aqueduct was constructed, the Owens Valley was a naturally arid desert situated near the Mojave Desert and Death Valley, where natural wind and dust storms were prevalent.
"LADWP is not an owner or an operator of a source that emits air pollutants and, therefore, its water gathering activities would not normally be regulated by air quality laws. It is only through special legislation, Section 42316, that Great Basin is allowed limited authority to impose reasonable measures to mitigate dust only when Great Basin proves with substantial evidence that it is LADWP's activities in water production, diversion, storage, or conveyance that causes or contributes to an EPA-recognized exceedance of the PM102 National Ambient Air Quality Standards ('NAAQS') in the OVPA. It is not enough to merely observe dust or assume the dust is caused by LADWP's water gathering activities. Further, even when the measures are reasonable and supported by the required substantial evidence, Great Basin cannot impose requirements if it affects the right of LADWP to produce, divert, store, or convey water.
