Last month, for the first time in my career, I was called to the stand as a witness in a Baykeeper Clean Water Act case. While I was preparing, visions of the infamous court scene from A Few Good Men raced through my mind, with Jack Nicholson hurling “You can’t handle the truth!” across a breathless courtroom. Fortunately, my experience was nothing like the movie, except for swearing to tell “nothing but the truth.”
Back in 2017, 2018, and 2019 Baykeeper investigated bacteria pollution in the creeks around Sunnyvale and Mountain View that lead to the South Bay. The results were alarming: a clear trend of pollution, and in several instances, our scientists water samples collected from the two cities’ discharges showed bacteria at 50-100 times above the levels that EPA has deemed safe for people.
Baykeeper has been advocating for the cities to monitor this pollution for themselves and take steps to find the sources and reduce it. But as is so often the case, regulators weren’t enforcing the permits, and the polluters weren’t doing the right thing.
So Baykeeper sued the cities under the Clean Water Act in 2020 to solve the problem.
As always, Baykeeper was ready to help them stop polluting their creeks so that they would be safer for local residents to enjoy. Based on our experience over decades of litigation against public entities, we assumed these two progressive Bay Area communities would acknowledge their responsibility and take steps to fix their old, failing stormwater systems. In fact, just two years earlier, we identified similar pollution problems in the city of San Jose and worked with them to come up with long-term solutions.
Instead, the Sunnyvale and Mountain View attorneys have repeatedly tried to deny the reality of the ongoing pollution the cities are causing. Over the last six years, they filed five motions to try to dismiss our lawsuits—each of which was denied. At one point, the attorneys representing the cities argued that their creeks were not protected by the Clean Water Act. (Notably, their proposed “solution” is to remove the regulations designed to keep water clean, rather than reduce their pollution.)
So here we are, six years later, having our day in court.
It’s disappointing to see Bay Area cities go to such lengths to avoid responsibility. Our cities owe it to their ratepayers to adequately upgrade and maintain their infrastructure. And they owe it to their residents to keep the local environment safe.