$100K for promo designs
By Daily Press staff
(Editor’s note: This is part of an ongoing series that tracks the city’s expenditures which appear on the upcoming Santa Monica City Council consent agenda. Consent agenda items are routinely passed by the City Council with little or no discussion from elected officials or the public. However, many of the items have been part of public discussion in the past.) City Hall is expected to spend $2.3 million tonight on Santa Monica’s drinking water, sewers and roadways.
The most expensive item is $1,370,000 for the design and construction of a facility that will gauge the quality of drinking water.
In 1996 it was discovered that Santa Monica’s wells had been contaminated with a chemical called MTBE from underground gasoline storage tanks and pipelines. The leakage caused the closure of seven wells and several oil companies have since been targeted by City Hall.
With a lawsuit against them pending, Chevron/Texaco and Exxon/Mobil agreed last summer to pay the full cost to design, construct, operate and maintain a water treatment facility that is estimated to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Since 1996, City Hall has paid private contractor KOMEX H20 Science Inc. to oversee that process at Charnock Wells, one of Santa Monica’s main sources of drinking water located in Mar Vista, near the intersection of Palm and Sawtelle boulevards.
KOMEX reviews work plans and other correspondence, does laboratory analysis, interprets various data, reviews compliance and permitting, prepares technical reports and presentations, and is in constant touch with City Hall.
To ensure the work gets done through June of 2004, the City Council is expected tonight to approve $390,000 to extend KOMEX’s contract.
But in the meantime, officials also want to test for themselves the new treatment processes. And testing involves the construction of a $1,370,000 small-scale facility at the Charnock site, according to City Hall documents.
The City Council is also expected tonight to approve $375,000 in additional funds to complete the makeover of Main Street’s sewers and another $100,000 for graphic designs to promote City Hall’s environmental programs.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 23, 2003. Read the original PDF.