REGIONAL REPORT : Cities Hope to Reclaim Lost Rivers : Resources: Salvaging waterways brings chance of commercial, environmental benefits. But cost and the need for flood control loom as obstacles.

For more than five decades, the Los Angeles River has been nearly bereft of friends and the butt of jokes.

Converted, beginning in 1938, into a massive concrete plumbing system for the region, the 58-mile river has been not so much despised as ignored and forgotten.

Now, however, the river described by legendary city water engineer William Mulholland in a memoir as “a beautiful, limpid little stream with willows on its banks” when he first saw it around the turn of the century, is being rediscovered.

“The river could be the string that ties the city together,” said Wendy Harmon, an aide to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley who sits on a task force studying the river. “If we green it, if we’re able to make it attractive to people and safe and it felt healthy and natural and good, we would have a lot more people there.”

Ideas for achieving that include building parks, along with biking and equestrian trails, on its banks and installing a white-water rafting course in the Sepulveda Basin. Some enthusiasts are even looking for ways to dispose of the millions of tons of concrete they want to see ripped out.

Los Angeles is not alone in having renewed hopes for its river. Regionally, such cities as Ventura, Santa Clarita, Pasadena, Costa Mesa, Encinitas and San Diego are studying ways to protect or restore neglected rivers and streams to create recreational opportunities or habitat for wildlife.

In Pasadena, a bimonthly volunteer bucket brigade nurtures a stand of Engelmann oaks along the concrete channel of the Arroyo Seco; the Friends of the Santa Ana River helped persuade officials to plant wildlife and bird habitat, rather than put in a golf course, along a stretch through Costa Mesa; and the city of Ventura helped fund a $100,000 study of the Ventura River estuary ecosystem.

Besides salvaging an environmental resource, these cities and others hope such moves also will pay off commercially by attracting tourism or, in downtown areas, upscale stores and restaurants.

“For a long time, we have turned our backs on these rivers without recognizing that they can contribute to the quality of urban life as well as rural life,” said state Resources Secretary Douglas Wheeler.

In April, Gov. Pete Wilson proposed establishing a state conservancy, similar to conservancies for the Santa Monica Mountains and the coast, to acquire, protect and restore lands along rivers, including those in urban areas. The proposal has been approved by the state Senate and is awaiting Assembly action.

“In Southern California, rivers as a natural feature are very much under the same kind of pressures as . . . other habitat types and land forms,” Wheeler said. “As a natural consequence of development, fewer and fewer of them are found in free-flowing and natural condition.”

Some communities, like San Jose and Santa Rosa in Northern California, are already transforming their rivers from utilities into natural recreation areas, he said. A State Lands Commission survey this year found 34 river parkway projects, including ones on the San Luis Rey, Otay, San Dieguito, Santa Margarita and Tijuana rivers in San Diego County and the Santa Ana River in Orange County, were on the drawing board or begun. Most of the projects were awaiting money to acquire land.

David Bolling, executive director of the San Francisco-based Friends of the River, said the drought has caused a surge of interest in rivers. In addition, he said, the impact of decades of dam building and channeling on fisheries, birds and vegetation is only now being fully realized.

Southern California has nine rivers 50 miles long or longer, with the Kern at 164 miles the longest. A 1989 report from the federal wildlife service found that 53% of the length of the region’s rivers was controlled by dams and reservoirs; the length remaining in a natural state ranged from 12% of the Los Angeles to 70% of the Ventura River.

Public and private studies have concluded that development, flood control, gravel mining, water projects or agriculture has wiped out as much as 95% of the state’s riparian habitat. As a result, as many as 17 of the 111 bird species that breed or forage in those areas have been extirpated.

Despite that, even more flood-control projects are under way.

The Santa Ana River, for example, is targeted for $1.45 billion in new dams and channel improvements, while the Los Angeles River needs $340 million in work to help control flooding, engineers say.

Many environmentalists, wildlife biologists and hydrologists now contend that alternatives to more channels or culverts are possible--especially in newly urbanizing areas where there is enough land to allow creeks and rivers to meander, rise and fall.

“The more you work with nature . . . the more effective and successful your project will be,” said Mitchell Swanson, a geomorphologist who has helped local groups analyze alternatives to channelization. “The more you ignore nature . . . the more the likelihood of a failure.”

While sympathetic to the aims of preservationists, flood-control engineers say leaving channels in a more natural condition in urban areas can be dangerous and, because of the cost of maintenance necessary to keep them free of obstructions, even more expensive than building channels. Replacing concrete with vegetation can impede the flow of flood waters and cause them to rise, with potentially disastrous consequences.

“When you have people proposing to rip out the concrete, at the same time you have to also be talking about acquiring additional rights of way and removing homes and businesses, and so those things aren’t really cost-effective at this point,” said Michael S. Anderson, a civil engineer who is head of drainage planning for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works.

The department is responsible for maintaining the Los Angeles River.

Nonetheless, in the fast-growing Temecula-Murrietta area of Riverside County, for example, citizens groups are seeking to dissuade local officials from spending $60 million to channel 11 miles of Murrietta Creek, but so far have had little success.

They say that digging 1,600 ponds, mostly on private land, upstream from Temecula, could capture enough water to avoid flooding. Zoning ordinances that prohibit new development close to the stream and other policies to reduce runoff also would help.

“A concrete ditch like that is the same as a freeway, it cuts communities in half, and it’s irreversible,” said David Hutt, a leader of the Citizens for Responsible Watershed Management.

In San Diego, the Friends of Tecolote Creek and the Tecolote Creek Advisory Committee were surprised to find in 1983 that the city was considering damming the creek, building a 2,000-foot channel and installing a basin to catch sediment and prevent it from flowing into Mission Bay.

The result would have been disastrous for the 900-acre natural park along the creek. But the groups persuaded the city to reduce siltation by installing gabions--rock-filled wire baskets--that allow vegetation to take root. The groups also have planted trees, cleaned out debris, put in devices to redirect runoff and built devices to shore up stream banks.

Even though the area is protected, “you never can relax, new issues come up all the time . . . and abuse can begin at any time,” said Eloise Battle, a stalwart Tecolote Creek activist.

According to a survey by the private, nonprofit Urban Creeks Council, more than 350 such clean-up and restoration projects are under way statewide involving thousands of volunteers.

Not all of the rivers attracting preservationists’ attention are urban. The Santa Margarita River, a 27-mile ribbon of woods and scrub lining a series of canyons between the Temecula Valley and Camp Pendleton, is among the most natural.

The river, whose banks provide habitat for such endangered species as the California least tern and the least bell’s vireo, lies mostly within publicly owned lands, which helps protect it from development. But the river’s water quality is beginning to decline from urban runoff from housing and agriculture.

The Friends of the Santa Margarita, based in the San Diego County community of Fallbrook, is preparing a comprehensive management plan that would have to win agreement from numerous local, state and federal agencies. Cat Brown, a wildlife biologist with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Ventura County, is proposing similar protection for the Santa Clara River, which is the second-largest in the area and drains parts of northern Los Angeles County and much of Ventura County.

Although only 6% of its length is in channels, Brown fears that pressure for more channels or dams is building. In particular, some local officials want Sespe Creek, a vital tributary in the river’s upper watershed, set aside as a potential source of drinking water.

“It’s almost a miracle that a river of such size in Southern California has escaped relatively unscathed,” Brown said. “It certainly is not going to be an easy task but if we don’t do it, it will most likely become another L. A. River and that is simply not acceptable.”

Ironically, perhaps, it is a flood-control project that is prompting one of the most extensive river restoration efforts in the area. The project, on hundreds of acres behind the Prado Dam on the Santa Ana River, near Corona, is required to offset potential flood damage to habitat after the dam is raised by as much as 28 feet.

Leslie Friedman, director of public lands programs for the Nature Conservancy, said the Conservancy already has begun planning to rid the area of invasive, non-natural reeds such as arundo donax and to plant sycamores, willows and cottonwoods.

“The river is still functioning as a normal river, the basin floods and the river channel moves and meanders,” said Friedman, making it attractive for restoration.

Another large project involving the Conservancy, a private, nonprofit group, has been under way for four years on the Kern River, near Lake Isabella. Staff members and hundreds of volunteers are planting trees along four miles of the river to try to save populations of yellow-billed cuckoo and yellow-breasted chat.

Many believe that the call to action in Los Angeles was, ironically, a proposal by Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) to convert the river to use as a commuter lane to ease freeway congestion. The proposal remains under study.

It is also ironic that another boost to the river’s future will come within the next several years when the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant more than doubles the 40 million gallons of treated effluent it now releases daily. Although the water, which already makes up 80% of the river’s volume, is reclaimed, officials say Tillman’s sophisticated treatment processes make it cleaner than storm drain runoff.

Lewis MacAdams, a poet and film maker who was a founder of the Friends of the Los Angeles River, said he became an ally of the embattled stream because he saw it as a “symbol of what humans had screwed up and . . . if we could turn this around it would stand for something.”

Since the Katz proposal, the organization has accumulated a 1,000-name mailing list and a number of powerful friends, including state and federal lawmakers who have sponsored measures to study the river’s potential. Among the areas considered ripe for recreation are the Tujunga Wash area in the northeast San Fernando Valley, the Sepulveda Basin and a defunct railroad switching yard near Dodger Stadium.

The river “has been ignored for 70 years and it’s sort of amazing how much is alive still,” said MacAdams, referring specifically to a seven-mile stretch near Griffith Park where the river still flows along its natural bed between concrete embankments. There, cottonwoods and willows bend in the breeze and red-winged blackbirds, green-backed herons, ducks, hawks, egrets and numerous other species of birds populate the shores.

Anderson, the county civil engineer, is sympathetic to efforts to revive it.

But, he said, acquiring land and moving development back from the river so it could harmlessly overflow its banks in a flood would be costly.

Although cities like Scottsdale, Ariz., and San Antonio have parks and commercial areas along their rivers, Los Angeles has ignored its river until now.

“When you are starting from scratch, you can do a lot,” he said. “With the Los Angeles River you are talking about a retrofit situation.”

River Restoration

Dams and channels designed to control flooding along much of Southern California’s rivers have left little in a natural state. Now, efforts are under way to restore and preserve what is left. Here is a look at some area rivers:

River Drainage Percent Percent in Percent in Dammed Concrete Channel Vegetation* Santa Ana 4,406 sq km 90 29 46 Santa Clara 4,219 sq km 37 6 60 Los Angeles 2,155 sq km 40 83 17 San Gabriel 1,663 sq km 84 55 47 San Luis Rey 1,450 sq km 37 0 100 Ventura 585 sq km 42 2 100 San Diego 119 sq km 61 1 96

* Trees, bushes and brush on the banks of river channels, whether native or introduced

River Vegetation

Santa Ana River

Santiago Oaks Regional Park, along Santiago Creek, has large oaks on upper terraces next to a narrow riparian corridor. O’Neill Regional Park on Trabuco Creek, north of El Toro, has 600 acres of overgrazed riparian corridor that includes handsome live oaks.

Above Prado Dam near Corona is a wide corridor of willow thickets, with stands of cottonwood and sycamore trees.

Santa Clara River

Large willow stands along Piru Creek below Lake Piru, west of Santa Clarita, are accessible from roadside.

San Gabriel River

Alder, willow, sycamore, bay and oak trees near Switzer Campground, off Angeles Crest Road, off Angeles Crest Highway.

Whittier Narrows has 277 acres of riparian habitat with many exotic species.

San Diego River

Mission Trails Regional Park has dense willow and mulefat thickets, as well as cottonwoods, large sycamores and oaks.

Santa Margarita River

Santa Rosa Plateau has willow thickets, very large sycamores and oaks on terraces near Temecula.

Camp Pendleton, at the river’s mouth, has sizable remnants of wide willow scrub forests that include naturally occurring ponds.

Ventura River

Wheeler Gorge Campground in Los Padres National Forest has an undisturbed natural riparian corridor of Matilija Creek, a tributary.

SOURCE: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1989