Ecology Area Network Hurt by Obscurity

With its coastal, desert and Alpine landscapes, Los Angeles County has a natural diversity almost unequaled in the world. In recognition of that, and under pressure from the courts, officials a decade ago created a network of “Significant Ecological Areas” to save remnants of that rich natural heritage.

Ranging from austere desert buttes and ancient oak savannas to deep canyons, coastal dunes and wetlands, the areas were selected for their value as habitat and migration corridors for wildlife, or as strongholds for threatened species of animals, plants and birds.

Since then, the areas have suffered from obscurity and neglect. They have been nibbled by development and, with other open space dwindling, are under enormous pressure from big housing and commercial projects, proposed roads and even garbage dumps.

One area alone--the Palo Comado SEA in Agoura--is targeted by four residential and commercial projects. A huge housing and golf course development proposed for Valencia would include 300 acres of a SEA there, and a planned city-in-a-city with 11,750 housing units and parking for 25,000 cars is to be built on the edge of the Ballona Creek SEA near Marina del Rey.

“I think the SEAs are struggling to survive,” said Tim Thomas, a biologist and member of a county advisory committee on the SEAs. “We’re . . . getting a wave of requests to develop in SEAs, to use SEAs to . . . put trash in and to put houses on, and these things are all incompatible with the intent of the designation of the SEAs.”

The 61 ecological areas were mostly privately owned, but the county’s 1980 General Plan made it official policy to protect them from incompatible development and to acquire threatened ones where possible.

In response to an earlier article in The Times, county planners have been asked to prepare a report on the SEAs. That report is expected to be presented to the Board of Supervisors next week.

Los Angeles County is not solely in control of the SEAs’ fate. Some are within municipal boundaries, where county land-use regulations do not apply.

Still, had the county made the areas a priority, development conflicts would have been reduced. But management of the areas has been a serious failure, interviews and public records show. Consider:

* The county did not fulfill the commitment made a decade ago to “actively search for funding mechanisms at all governmental levels” to purchase SEAs. The proposed county parks bond issue that failed Election Day would have provided the first funds to purchase the areas.

* County planning officials have not monitored development in SEAs, and do not know which areas are intact or degraded. Yet county supervisors have turned down requests for funds to study the status of the areas.

* The county itself is a threat to SEAs. For example, county transportation plans call for eventual extension of Thousand Oaks Boulevard through the Palo Comado SEA in Agoura, an expanse of grassy hills and stately oaks that supports deer, bobcats, coyotes and golden eagles. The county has also declared three canyons in protected areas in the Santa Susana and Santa Monica Mountains to be suitable sites for future trash dumps.

“If we take a so-what attitude towards the SEAs, we’re taking a so-what attitude towards the . . . ecosystems of the rest of the world, and the ecosystems are what support our lives,” said Dick Friesen, a biologist and consultant who chairs the Significant Ecological Areas Technical Advisory Committee, or SEATAC, a panel of biologists that advises the county on development in SEAs.

“If we can’t retain the SEAs in Los Angeles County, where there’s a big population base and a big economic base to do it,” it will be impossible to do in poorer parts of the world, he said.

Even when portions of the protected areas have been preserved, it has required big concessions to developers. Consider two recent agreements that were hailed as environmental triumphs.

In one case, Los Angeles airport officials agreed to preserve 200 acres of the El Segundo Dunes SEA, west of Los Angeles International Airport, while developing a golf course on 100 other acres.

In the other case, environmentalists and developers settled years of litigation over the Ballona Creek SEA, which includes one of Southern California’s last tidal wetlands. The developers agreed to preserve and help restore about 270 acres of the wetlands. In return, environmentalists agreed not to fight plans for a huge development overlooking the preserve--including 11,750 homes and apartments, 2,400 hotel rooms and 5.7 million square feet of office and retail space.

Other SEAs are also threatened.

Above Granada Hills, Browning-Ferris Industries is trying to expand its Sunshine Canyon landfill into more than 500 acres of the Santa Susana Mountains SEA, which would wipe out more than 7,000 trees.

West of Lancaster, the proposed California Springs development--5,700 acres and 21,000 homes --would encroach on the Joshua Tree Woodland and the Fairmont and Antelope Buttes SEAs.

Piecemeal development has pecked away at the Kentucky Springs SEA south of Palmdale, a swath of rugged foothills where a distinct subspecies of Great Basin sage grows in unusual abundance. According to Asenath Rasmussen, a biochemist and research consultant who recently visited the area, the northern part of the SEA has been “altered so dramatically that it’s not a continuously functioning community any more.”

Like the agreement protecting the Ballona wetlands, the SEA network grew out of a citizen lawsuit. In 1975, a group calling itself the Coalition for Los Angeles Planning in the Public Interest won a lawsuit against the county over deficiencies in the county’s General Plan, including the lack of adequate open-space protection.

As a result, the county had to rewrite the General Plan and improve its open space policies. The SEAs were designated by consultants whose report called for preserving the SEAs in “as near a pristine condition as possible.” A few uses--such as passive recreation and nature study--should be allowed, but “residential, agricultural, industrial and commercial developments” would damage natural vegetation and “are clearly incompatible,” the report said.

Saving the protected areas “would inevitably require acquisition of areas by Los Angeles County,” the report said. The General Plan ultimately diluted these conclusions in substance and tone. It did not rule out residential construction in the areas, for example.

Still, the plan declared it county policy “to preserve the county’s significant ecological resources and habitat areas in as viable and natural condition as possible.” And an accompanying document pledged that the county would seek funds to buy SEAs.

But budget shortages and pro-development policies have kept the county from keeping that pledge. Meanwhile, a building boom increased the pressure for development of open space.

“The county should be condemned . . . not because they haven’t come up with the money themselves, but because they haven’t cooperated with” agencies that had funds, said Carlyle W. Hall Jr., the Los Angeles attorney who filed the citizens suit that voided the General Plan.

“You have a Board of Supervisors that’s philosophically opposed to restricting the use of private property, and I think they’re philosophically opposed to the public ownership of land,” said David Brown, chairman of the Sierra Club’s Santa Monica Mountains task force.

But Dave Vannatta, an aide to Mike Antonovich, said the SEAs have been reasonably protected, and that development within them “has been compatible with the resource.”

He said the county faces critical unmet needs and purchasing SEAs “cannot and does not have that kind of priority.” Besides, Vannatta said, the idea is to protect SEAs, not own them.

As the first line of defense for the SEAs, the county created SEATAC, the panel of biologists that reviews projects in the areas.

SEATAC reviews building plans for the effect on native vegetation and wildlife, and typically recommends a few permit conditions to reduce environmental damage, such as clustering of homes. On rare occasions, the organization advises that a project be rejected as overly destructive. Such a recommendation by SEATAC figured earlier this year in denial of the huge Malibu Terrace development in the Palo Comado SEA, a project now being redesigned.

But some county planners, and SEATAC members themselves, see serious flaws in the system. As SEATAC member Frank Hovore put it: “The process still allows for the slow deterioration of the SEAs.”

For example, many encroachments on SEAs never come to the panel’s attention. Subdivisions require county approval and SEATAC review but uses such as cattle grazing and construction of single-family homes do not.