Mark Gold and others stressed that the current year is a golden opportunity for obtaining funds for environmental issues. Our committee should be trying to get funding from the bond measures proposed, which have very good chances of being approved by the voters. We should talk to Guang-yu Wang and the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project with respect to having them hire a consultant to prioritize projects and target some urban runoff studies in the LA River watershed for funding. We need to lobby the Regional Board to provide some funds from enforcement action settlements (e.g., recent Equilon settlement) to fund CSTF projects.

We need to look for and evaluate large-scale projects for sediment control in other areas of the country. We should talk to the Army Corps to find out what they know about such projects and perhaps schedule a workshop to pursue this.

We need to assemble a list of existing Best Management Practices for sediment control/pollutant reduction methods. Rick Cameron, Port of Long Beach, volunteered to put something together as a starting point for our discussion. We also need information on cost-effectiveness of such methods. There was a general feeling among committee members that we may have done what we can with source control for metals, but removal of sediments (especially the fine-grained fraction) could be improved. We need to talk to Xavier Swamikannu (LA Regional Board) to find out what types of pilot trials have been conducted on various devices.

We need to coordinate our efforts with the Regional Board’s TMDL process. We will invite Jon Bishop, LA Regional Board, to a subcommittee meeting in early 2000 to discuss this issue.

We need to decide how to proceed with contaminant source identification work. Although the Ballona Creek sampling conducted by CH2M-Hill, as part of the Army Corps/LA County Dept. of Public Works study, may implicate some tributaries or certain land uses as potential sources, we would need additional sampling to trace actual sources. Although transportation has been suspected as a source of some contaminants, particularly lead, we need better characterization of this type of runoff to verify the problem and identify the actual source (e.g., brake dust or tire breakdown?). We may be able to use LA County’s predictive model for pollutant loads by land use to help define a sampling program.

Can we steer the upcoming Corps’ feasibility study to help accomplish the goals of this subcommittee? We need to coordinate with Tony Risko at the next subcommittee meeting on this issue.

The Army Corps expects to have the results from Ballona Creek sediment sampling within the next week or two. Tony Risko requested time at the next subcommittee meeting to discuss the results and plan for additional work (some funds have been reserved for additional sampling). This will be the focus of the next meeting.

[Come to the morning meeting and discuss the Ballona Creek sediment sampling results]