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How Los Angeles County Public Works Passed Its Ambitious Measure W Water Quality Program
The lower Los Angeles River in Long Beach, with the Dominguez Gap Wetlands Project, one of L.A. County’s first demonstration projects for a regional integrated storm water facility, to the left. Low-flow runoff from the river is siphoned into the engineered wetlands, treated with natural filtration, and then reintroduced to the river.
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os Angeles County (L.A. County) is the most populous county in California, and thus the one with the largest water demand and some of the biggest water supply and quality challenges. Los Angeles County Public Works (LACPW) decided to address these challenges through its Safe, Clean Water Program (SCWP), which aims to optimize local storm water for water supply and to improve the quality of L.A. County’s surface water. To pay for this ambitious program, LACPW needed to gain the support of two-thirds of the electorate for a ballot initiative, Measure W, that would allow it to collect a property tax. In this interview, LACPW Director Mark Pestrella tells us about this process and its results. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
14 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2021
Municipal Water Leader: Tell us about LACPW’s service area, customer base, and infrastructure. Mark Pestrella: Our service area comprises 4,000 square miles of L.A. County. The business lines have both regional and local service areas, the latter being the unincorporated communities where the county provides all municipal services. There are 88 cities in L.A. County, and our department serves all of them in some fashion. There are also rural and high desert areas in the northern part of L.A. County that have tiny populations compared to the urban areas. Each business line has its own customer base. In the water area, we provide flood control services to 10 million people. We maintain and operate a large flood control water conservation system in L.A. County. We also serve retail water to about 300,000 people within six water districts that are dispersed throughout the county. The largest one is in a rural area in the north and has around municipalwaterleader.com
PHOTOS COURTESY OF LACPW.
Mark Pestrella: I’m a civil engineer by training and am licensed with the State of California. I studied civil engineering in college and started my career with LACPW in 1987. I’ve been there for 35 years now, and for the majority of that, I’ve been working in our water resource management core service area. It is the third-largest municipal water agency of the 200 that exist in L.A. County. I have also made my way through multiple jobs on both the regulatory and land use sides. Most of my technical work was done on the water side of the house, but now I’m now just a manager. I spent time teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, and eventually became the director of LACPW.
LACPW is a corporate structure of six civil engineering business lines: water resources; environmental services; transportation; construction management; development services, including building and safety review and largetrack development review for the county; and emergency management. We handle some 70,000 calls a year for all things related to infrastructure, including water and waste emergencies. LACPW is the largest public works agency in the United States.
