Water Quality Berkeley Index
Clean Water Act
  water quality

For nearly a hundred years, Berkeley has struggled to maintain its storm system of inlets, culverts and pipes that carry rain and other surface waters to our creeks and into the San Francisco Bay. Historically, our city has always placed a very low priority on the general maintenance and the annual repairs of the storm system. However, in 1992, there was a serious legislative move to fix Berkeley’s beleaguered storm system when voters authorized a new stormwater property assessment.

Now, more than a dozen years later, Berkeley’s half-inflated stormwater program has finally hit bottom. This crisis has raised questions of fund misrepresentation and program mismanagement. Voters deserve to be told the truth about Berkeley’s Clean Water tax dollars and why this mandated program has been allowed to go down the drain.

storm drain and gutter runoffSome voters may remember the stormwater initiative back in the early 1990s. The idea of a storm tax was sold to residents with the rhetoric of environmental protection, and moreover, with the provision that this tax would be a placed into a designated fund. In the beginning, the stormwater fund was never intended to fully support all our municipal stormwater activities or to completely pay for the system’s under-funded capital improvements. This fund was adopted to help support the city’s stormwater permit process with its newly mandated state and federal requirements.

The stormwater property tax also funded Berkeley’s participation in the Alameda County stormwater support group, a consortium of East Bay cities that share consultants and work together to meet the legislative requirements of the Clean Water Act. They identified several existing municipal activities that are required by our federal stormwater permit, including street sweeping and storm drain cleaning.

Although these costs had traditionally been paid out of the general fund, the City of Berkeley began to transfer ALL the costs for these pre-existing maintenance tasks to the stormwater fund. The storm property tax initiative was not meant to simply be financial relief for general fund activities. The long-term impact of this funding shift has struck a fatal blow to the development of the city’s stormwater program. Predictably, this fund is broke, which in turn is being used to justify no improvement in performance.

The annual assessment of 1.9 million dollars for the storm fund has been used for some maintenance costs, but with almost no money allocated to capital improvements. Today, this practice continues to have undeniable consequences. Recent emergency repairs of the collapsed culvert downtown and past flooding problems have all been exacerbated by the lack of an active replacement program of the system’s aging components. The contamination of Blackberry Creek several months ago is a perfect example. Though the city was quick to claim victory in fixing the pipe break near the creek, the fact is that this “fix” represented nearly all of this year’s capital allotment for stormwater improvements.

old wooden storm inletMuch like the tale of the little Dutch boy plugging up the hole in the seawall, we are trying to shore up a rapidly deteriorating storm system with a convenience-store approach that has forced taxpayers into paying top dollar for these unscheduled repairs. Even more troubling, there now seems to be no escape from the growing number of emergency repairs or to head off the serious flooding likely to occur during the rainy seasons ahead.

In the last dozen years, our local legislators have missed numerous opportunities to raise the stormwater tax through another ballot measure. Granted, culverts and storm drains are not very sexy issues, but in terms of budget outlay, the storm system’s infrastructure has always been a costly and critical expenditure.

However, the last decade of city budgets shows inadequate funding in this area which has led to a backlog of necessary repairs that adds up to tens of millions of dollars. Lack of capital improvements is not the only problem plaguing this program. Even street sweeping and storm basin cleaning are currently at the same level, or lower, than they were twelve years ago. When some stormwater consortium members began to increase permit activities, like Oakland did with its street sweeping, Berkeley chose to opt out.

Public Works, which manages the city’s stormwater program, has had difficulty keeping up with our permit’s requirements. In fact, Berkeley’s permit should now be called into default over Public Works’ failure to implement inspection programs for both commercial businesses and restaurants.

storm drain with grass growing out of the grill cover Unquestionably, city staff has provided disastrously poor direction for our stormwater program at the expense of both taxpayers and environmental protection. In private industry, the magnitude of this budgetary bungling would have caused heads to roll. Furthermore, this failure is shared with the San Francisco Bay Area Regional Water Control Board which, in each round of program review, has continued to exempt consortium members from Clean Water compliance. The board’s message to do what is “practical” has stifled the development of our county’s stormwater program and continues to prop up Berkeley’s Clean Water scam.
Excerpt from Berkeley's Stormwater Property Tax: Where's the Money?
L A Wood, Berkeley Daily Planet, October 29-November 1, 2004

NEW Berkeley Opts Out of Clean Water
L A Wood, Berkeley Daily Planet,  March 11, 2008

HISTORIC WELL FIELDS IN THE EAST BAY 1860-1930
Groundwater supplied 30 to 100% of the water used in the East Bay area between 1860 and 1930 (depending on the time of year). Most residences had private wells. Within 5 to 10 years after drilling, many of those wells failed (sanded up/casing collapsed) or became contaminated from outhouses. Well fields were drilled by water companies to provide cleaner, better water.

Berkeley Water Quality and Clean Water Act News Articles
At that time, there were approximately 3400 active wells. The data were collected by Dockweiler (1912). The map does not include wells that had been abandoned prior to 1910. The pattern of wells provides an Indication of the population density of the cities at the time. Oakland, Alameda Island, and Berkeley were well developed, while Richmond (founded in 1900), Hayward, and San Leandro were just beginning to develop.

Berkeley Containment Zones Policy discussions

News Articles regarding Containment Zones and Groundwater Deregulation

On Berkeley Soil (1996) 13:48 TRT...a look at groundwater beneficial uses, the State of California's efforts at deregulation, SB 92-49 and its "containment zone" and "brownfields" policies. Script: L A Wood
Berkeley's Storm Drain System: Portal to the Bay (1992) 8:30 TRT...on the impact of the City of Berkeley Public Works street sweeper operations on storm drains, urban runoff pollution and the San Francisco Bay.
Conversations About Watersheds 2005 ...about the health of our watersheds. A discussion of the obstacles and opportunities for Volunteer Stewardship in the East Bay and beyond.Bay Area Stream Buffers: Recent Regulatory Efforts and Next Steps Viewed on cable access in Berkeley.
Save the Strawberry Creek Watershed (2004) 14 :00 TRT...the Berkeley community speaks out on Nano Technology at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
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