BILL ANALYSIS �
SB 658
SENATE COMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY
Senator Jerry Hill, Chair
2013-2014 Regular Session
BILL NO: SB 658
AUTHOR: Correa
AMENDED: April 11, 2013
FISCAL: No HEARING DATE: May 1, 2013
URGENCY: Yes CONSULTANT: Rachel Machi
Wagoner
SUBJECT : ORANGE COUNTY WATER DISTRICT ACT: INVESTIGATION,
CLEANUP, AND LIABILITY
SUMMARY :
Existing law , under the Orange County Water District Act (OCWD
Act),
1) Establishes the Orange County Water District (OCWD),
consisting of specified lands in the County of Orange,
including the Cities of Anaheim, Fullerton, and Santa
Ana.
2) Authorizes the district to investigate the quality of
the surface and groundwaters within the district to
determine whether the waters are contaminated or polluted
and authorizes the district to expend funds to perform
any cleanup, abatement, or remedial work to prevent,
abate, or contain the contamination of, or pollution to,
the surface or groundwaters of the district.
3) Requires the person causing or threatening to cause
the contamination or pollution to be liable to the
district for reasonable costs actually incurred in
cleaning up or containing the contamination or pollution,
abating the effects of the contamination or pollution, or
taking other remedial action.
This bill requires the person also to be liable for the costs
actually incurred in investigating the contamination or
pollution. The bill would provide that these remedies are in
addition to all other legal and equitable remedies available
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to the water district, including declaratory relief.
COMMENTS :
1) Purpose of Bill . According to the author, in the first
contamination cases pursued under the OCWD Act, judges have
misinterpreted the OCWD Act as excluding investigatory work
from recoverable remedial expenses. State and federal
hazardous waste statutes and remediation professionals
consistently regard investigatory work as a necessary
element in the remediation process.
The author states that a recent judicial decision has also
interpreted the OCWD Act as excluding equitable relief to
assign liability for future costs and expenses. As such,
OCWD could be required to wait up to thirty years, until
remediation has been completed, before seeking to recover
these costs from polluters.
The author further contends that if OCWD has to wait thirty
years before it can even seek cost recovery from polluters,
as a practical matter it will be nearly impossible to hold
polluters liable for the impacts of their contamination.
The author believes that after thirty years evidence will
have gone stale, parties will have disappeared, and
ultimately rate payers will be stuck paying the costs
related to remediation.
The author asserts that the intent of the Legislature,
through its 1989 amendment of the OCWD Act, is clear: OCWD
has the right to recover the full costs of contamination
clean-up from polluters.
Absent clarifying language by the Legislature to close
these perceived loopholes in existing law, polluters will
unjustly shift the costs of clean-up of their contamination
to the community at-large.
2) The Orange County Water District (OCWD) was formed in 1933
by the California State Legislature enactment of the OCWD
Act to protect Orange County's rights to water in the Santa
Ana River. OCWD's primary responsibility is managing the
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vast groundwater basin under northern and central Orange
County that supplies water to more than 20 cities and water
agencies, serving more than 2.3 million Orange County
residents.
OCWD primarily recharges the basin with water from the
Santa Ana River and, to a lesser extent, with imported
water purchased from the Metropolitan Water District of
Southern California. OCWD currently holds rights to all
Santa Ana River flows reaching Prado Dam. Water enters the
groundwater basin via settling or percolation ponds in the
cities of Anaheim and Orange. Behind Prado Dam (constructed
and owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for flood
prevention), OCWD owns 2,400 acres in Riverside County,
which the District uses for water conservation, water
quality improvement, and environmental enhancement.
OCWD monitors the groundwater taken out each year to ensure
that the basin is not overdrawn, refills the basin, and
carries out an assessment program to pay for operating
expenses and the cost of imported replenishment water. The
groundwater basin holds millions of acre-feet of water (an
acre-foot satisfies the needs of two families for one
year). The groundwater basin provides more than half of
all water used within the District. Protection, safety and
enhancement of groundwater are OCWD's highest priorities.
With one of the most sophisticated groundwater protection
programs in the country, OCWD uses more than 700 wells
providing more than 1,400 sampling points-from which OCWD
takes more than 18,000 water samples and conducts more than
350,000 analyses every year. OCWD's monitoring program
looks for more than 330 constituents-far more than the 122
required by the regulatory agencies.
In 1989, Section 8 of the Orange County Water District Act
was amended to allow OCWD to recover from parties, who
contaminate groundwater, the OCWD's costs in remediating
contamination.
3) This bill is consistent with federal and state statutes
concerning a responsible party's obligation for the full
costs associated with remediation of contamination. Under
California law, both the State Resources Control Board's
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and the Department of Toxic Substances Control's statutes
allow for recovery of investigatory costs as well as
declaratory relief for ongoing cleanup activities.
SOURCE : Orange County Water District
SUPPORT : Burlington Safety Laboratory of California,
Inc.
City of Santa Ana
City of Buena Park
City of Garden Grove
City of Orange
East Orange County Water District
Halsted and Hoggan, Inc.
Mesa Water District
Orange County Coastkeeper
Pacific Surveys, LLC
TAB AnswerNetwork
Yorba Linda Water District
OPPOSITION : None on file