Please Pull the Plug…

I guess Heal the Bay has been going after beach pollution in the wrong way over the last 20 years.  We’ve tackled the problem by authoring numerous statewide beach pollution bills, working with state Sen. Fran Pavley and the Davis and Schwarzenegger administrations to create and fund the Clean Beach Initiative to clean up California’s [...]

Septic Policy

Nine years ago, I worked with then-Assemblymember Hannah-Beth Jackson and the California environmental health agencies to draft Assembly Bill 885,which finally required the State Water Board to regulate water quality from septic systems in a systematic way.  Shockingly, the state had never required water quality performance standards for septic systems.  The cornerstone of the bill [...]

Hope Over Fear

The Golds were an FDR household. Both my Mom and Dad were born in Chicago soon after the beginning of the Great Depression and FDR was their President for their first 13 to 15 years of life.  During a time of unparalleled financial hardship followed by unprecedented global conflict, FDR was perhaps our most powerful [...]

The Definition of Insanity

Late into the night Tuesday — the temporal fate of most environmental measures in Santa Monica — the Santa Monica City Council delayed the first reading of an ordinance that would ban the distribution of plastic bags after receiving a last-minute opposition letter from the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition. 
The draft ordinance called for a [...]

License to Kill

On January 8, 2009, Heal the Bay released a report on the current state of the aquatic toxicity program in the Los Angeles region.  The report took about a year and a half to put together and never could have happened without an enormous amount of help from local Los Angeles Regional Water Board staff [...]