Lawmaker Has Some Current L.A. River Ideas : Development: Assemblyman Katz expands on last year’s suggestion to open up the channel between the San Fernando Valley and Long Beach to trucks, buses and car pools.

Paris has the Left Bank, Venice the Grand Canal coursing through its heart. And Los Angeles?

Picture the Los Angeles River Parkway, traffic streaming down the bottom of a river channel, flanked by greenbelts, schools, shops and homes--if you could get anyone to live there.

That is the vision put forth by Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), who last year suggested opening up the river channel between the San Fernando Valley and Long Beach to trucks, buses and car pools. At a news conference alongside the Los Angeles River on Thursday, with helicopter wash from the roof of Piper Technology Center blowing over easels and the homeless clustered underneath a bridge nearby, Katz expanded upon his original idea. Unveiling a series of drawings, he promised to turn “an urban dead zone into a vibrant esplanade.”

And lovely drawings they were: trees, shrubs, grassy parks and new buildings covering land where most living things wouldn’t tread today. A “landmark gateway” where thousands of runners could start the Los Angeles Marathon. Commuter trains and a suspended tramway. Gleaming channel walls--with no graffiti in sight. A covered bridge with “habitable spaces” spanning the river.

“Are they time-share condos?” asked Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), who supports a rival concept. He was not impressed by the latest details of Katz’s plan.

“Our proposals are designed to encourage people to think about the Los Angeles River, they’re designed to stimulate conversation and thought,” Katz said. “From here, we take this plan to the public.”

A $100,000 study by the Los Angeles Transportation Commission of Katz’s proposal to turn the concrete riverbed into an expressway is due later this summer. In the meantime, Katz intends to take his plan to city councils, homeowners and business groups in the hope of drumming up support.

One place he will not be taking his proposal, however, is to a conference on the future of the Los Angeles River this Saturday at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum.

Among the sponsors of the conference--titled “River in the City”--are Mayor Tom Bradley and Friends of the Los Angeles River, supporters of Torres’ plan to tear up the concrete and restore the river to its natural state. The Army Corps of Engineers, public works officials and urban planners will discuss how the river should fit into the city’s future. Katz wasn’t invited.

“Either you’re an environmentalist or a freeway builder,” Torres said. “We feel that the Los Angeles River is and should be a riparian environmental treasure. . . . He has a different vision of where we want to go.”

Katz wouldn’t quite say that he scheduled his presentation to preempt the river preservationists’ event. But, he said, “we knew about the conference. . . . We’ve been talking about doing things with the channel for nine months now. I just wanted to get it out to the people.”

With Katz were architect Chester Widom, whose firm created the renderings, and Larry Berg, a board member of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, who endorsed the plan and said he would recommend it to his colleagues.

Widom--who designed the museum to which Katz is not invited Saturday--called the assemblyman’s plan an “integrator” that would become the spine of a city that has never had one.

“If you look at the shape of the river as it goes from San Pedro all the way into the Valley, it almost has the feel of the backbone of an animal or a human organism,” he said. “All we did is look at the possibility of very generic schemes that could be developed along the way.”

Katz said that his proposal to create new parks and preserve or expand areas of the river that are still relatively wild responds to criticism that his previous plan was all concrete.

“None of these ideas are mutually exclusive,” Katz said. “I try not to limit it to my ideas. It’s too valuable a resource to narrow our options.”

The expressway portion of Katz’s plan would cost roughly $30 million a mile to build, or a total of about $1 billion, some of which could come from Proposition 111 funds, he said.