First of two parts.
Former Mayor Meghan Sahli-Wells has become a player in County/Los Angeles City politics.
As an architect of yesterday morning’s mayoral gathering at Sony Studios – an ongoing series of mayoral conferences sponsored and led by Mayor Garcetti of Los Angeles – Ms. Sahli-Well gave an address on the perils of stormwater and urban runoff.
“A huge, huge issue for all of us here in the region,” she said.
Speaking before about 40 mayors in the Rita Hayworth Dining Room, Ms. Sahli-Wells said “the takeaway message was that all of us in Los Angeles County need to work together.”
On the subject of stormwater, she made two major points. “I told them we have been given mandates for a reason,” she said. “Between 1868 and 1969, the Cuyahoga River in northeastern Ohio was so incredibly polluted – probably the most polluted river in the United States — caught fire 16 times.
“Because of the environmental disaster the Cuyahoga represented, that spurred the creation of both the Clean Water Act and of the Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1970s.
“That was America’s wakeup call. The message was that we needed some kind of environmental regulations.
“Since then,” said Ms. Sahli-Wells, “the mandates making sure that all of our water is clean, have been strengthened.
“In my mind,” said one of Culver City’s most prominent environmentalists, “this has been necessary. We still have major pollution we need to deal with.”
One motivating reason for sitting down periodically with other mayors in the County, said the former mayor who stepped down a week ago, “is that we really must work together.
“Right now, we have mandates and time constraints in which to do major work on our infrastructure that are unfunded and imminent.
“We must work together with others in the County. L.A. County and parts of Ventura County are under the same water regulators, the Regional Water Quality Control Board.
“The permits and the standards they have set for us,” Ms. Sahli-Wells said, “are much more aggressive than pretty much any other area of the country.”
(To be continued)