If the Governor and Legislature are still taking ideas for which parts of state government to lop off, I have one!

Can the Regional Water Quality Control Board. (You thought I was going to say cut former Assemblywoman Nicole Parra and her do-nothing-$128,000-a-year salary, didn’t you? Come on now, you know it.)

OK, maybe the board shouldn’t be eliminated all together, but I think it’s ripe for some drastic changes. 

Just looking at the section of the board that affects us most directly, Region 5, here are the stats:

It stretches from Modoc County in Northern California to the valley portion of Kern County.

It has three branches, in Redding, Sacramento and Fresno, employs about 260 people with a budget of $38 million a year and has a wide range of duties including inspecting everything from corner gas stations to major waste water treatment plants as well as jumping on major leaks and spills.

That last part is where I think we can do much better given the board’s recent actions — or inactions.

In three high-profile cases of water contamination, board regulators have sat on their hands, saying they weren’t staffed well enough, didn’t think there was reason to do more, or just haven’t responded.

This is the safety of our groundwater we’re talking about. The stuff we put in our bodies on a daily basis.  Kind of important.

In the most highly publicized incident, the board didn’t even know the effort to clean up 20 years’ worth of spills and leaks at Big West Refinery had stopped until The Californian broke the story in the summer of 2007.

Regulators had been sending Shell Oil letters asking the former refinery owner to please, really PLEASE! clean up its mess — but nothing else until our story ran. The  board finally sent Shell and new owner Flying J an abatement order telling both entities to get busy — or else.

Lonnie Wass, a supervising engineer with the water board, told me Tuesday that even through Flying J’s bankruptcy, the work continues.

Then there’s Hondo Chemical. Matt Constantine, director of Kern’s Environmental Health Department, tells me he’s begged the water board to look into whether Hondo has  been dumping “leachate,” (the scum that leaks out from the bottom of landfills) on property right over the Kern River Water Bank, but can’t even get a response.

Wass acknowledged he didn’t know much about Hondo but thought Kern was handling it.

And just last week, the owners of Starrh and Starrh Cotton Growers in Lost Hills again won a lawsuit accusing Aera Energy of letting toxic waste water from their Belridge Oil Field seep into groundwater used for irrigation on the Starrh land. The oil waste water had been dumped into unlined sumps for years until farmer Larry Starrh sued after discovering it was tainting his aquifer. He also tried to get the water board to intervene, to no avail.

Wass said it was his understanding that Aera was now injecting that waste water deep underground where it wouldn’t affect the groundwater. An Aera spokesperson confirmed the waste water is now being recycled as steam and used in waterflood operations or is being injected, all of which was done by Aera with no urging from the water board.
Aera wouldn’t comment much further; Starrh may appeal to the 5th District seeking higher damages.

Starrh’s attorney, Ralph Wegis, contends the bigger issue is that Aera dumped so much polluted water over the years, the ground is saturated and still leaking into Starrh’s groundwater supply.

“Aera’s own testimony was that it would continue to drain into the water basin at the same rate for the next 30 to 40 years,” Wegis said. Right now, it’s only affecting Starrh, but Wegis says in time the plume will destroy far more than the water below one grower’s land.

And the water board stood by and let it happen, he said.

“They react by drawing 1,000 lines in the sand...and then drawing another line.”

Hmm. Sounds familiar.

In previous stories, water board officials told us they were doing as much as they can with severe understaffing. And I was told that again by Assistant Executive Officer  Richard Loncarovich of the board’s Sacramento office.

“There was a report to the Legislature a few years back that looked at what we regulate and our resources and showed we’re understaffed by 30 percent,” he said.
It’s probably true. I mean, how many times has the state mandated programs at the local level and not paid for them?

But maybe the answer isn’t to throw more money at the board.

Why not look at the programs it runs and see A) if they’re all absolutely needed and B) which could be taken over by another agency that does the same stuff anyway, like perhaps county environmental health agencies?

I asked Constantine if he thought his 50 employees could handle that. He’d need more resources, but the short answer was “yes.”

His people have the expertise, knowledge and contacts to make it work. Besides, they’re no strangers to taking over state work. The state used to inspect above-ground storage facilities, but gave that function to the counties.  Constantine said it was the same story:They took the fees, but didn’t do much else.

Constantine’s people keep up with all the inspections necessary to manage 12,000 permits. They take complaints on a wide array of topics, which they post on the web so the public can see their response times. And Constantine is directly accountable to the Board of Supervisors, which is accountable to us.

Beyond all that, I like the idea he’s here drinking the same water as the rest of us.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her  column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com