Slip-Sliding Away : Bike Path Along Coast Erodes as Officials Debate Its Preservation

Bit by crumbled bit, the ocean is eating away again at Ventura’s seaside bike path.

Three years ago, near the mouth of the Ventura River, a span the length of two 10-speeds had to be cordoned off because seeping water slid underneath the asphalt and carried the loosened pavement out to sea.

Now, a stretch midway between Figueroa Street and the shoreline dunes is cracking and corroding, sending jagged slabs of pavement tumbling down onto the shore below. Another portion closer to Figueroa Street threatens, too, to break away soon, also the victim of oceanic erosion.

If something is not done quickly, city and state parks officials say, the charging salt water will swallow up whole sections of the asphalt path by Christmas. Even parts of the adjoining parking lots will be submerged by the advancing waves, they predict.

Ventura officials hope to preserve the scenic bike path, which one city employee describes as nothing less than a “community treasure.” But state parks and Coastal Commission officials worry that any artificial repairs to the bike path area will only temporarily solve the problem, while further disturbing the delicate environmental balance of the area’s coastline.

The location of the bike path--actually, only a small portion of a statewide coastal path that stops and starts its way down the length of California--also has some people concerned.

“To me, it’s in kind of a bad spot,” said Terri Willison of Ventura, out for her morning walk last week with her friend Janine Williams. “But then, I like walking here and I don’t know if I’d walk it if it was” farther inland.

Williams pointed out, though, that local officials can only fight the ocean so long. “That’s the natural way of the water,” she said.

Originally, state and city officials say, the ocean’s natural path ran directly over the bike path, across the parking lots, atop Shoreline Drive and even onto the Ventura County Fairgrounds, just north of what is now the beach.

Starting in the late 1940s and lasting until the early 1960s, workers grading oil fields around Ventura Avenue loaded all their excess material into trucks and deposited some into a nearby canyon, and some onto the beach, said Steve Chase, Ventura’s environmental affairs coordinator.

Gravel, sand, various types of rubble--they all piled up along the shore between the mouth of the Ventura River and the beach promenade, in the process pushing the coastline outward artificially by a few hundred feet.

Today, the water, shoved backward by the artificial beach, laps aggressively at the shore as it attempts to return to where it once flowed freely.

“The ocean is working on it and it’s going to take (the sand away) to find a natural level,” warned Steve Treanor, district superintendent of the Channel Coast state parks. “That’s physics.”

The bike path, however, is suffering from more than just its location on a manufactured shore. Locally as well as internationally, years of human assault on waterways and coastlines are taking their toll on beaches, depriving them of essential sand and altering wave patterns. Because people dammed rivers and mined the sand from their banks, less silt now flows to the ocean. That translates into less sand for beaches and more opportunity for waves to reclaim what is now dry land.

Also, in an attempt to control deltas and protect coastal settlements, seaside residents from California to England have constructed such barriers as jetties and fortified their soft shores with structures such as rock revetments.

Scientists say that although such attempts may solve the local problem, they often ultimately worsen matters by altering wave patterns and thus hastening erosion farther down the shoreline.

Ventura’s bike path itself suffers from an jetty up the shore, which Chase said makes the coastal sand sweep away even faster than it normally would. The shore underneath the path also receives less sand than it naturally would have because of mining operations on the Ventura River, which during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s captured tons of sand otherwise destined for the ocean, Chase said. In addition, he said, the dam at Lake Casitas continues to prevent silt from reaching Ventura’s coastline.

Indeed, the beach north of the promenade is so fragile that the first path constructed in 1981 washed away six months after workers painted the last median stripe.

The bike path that now runs along the edge of the mound was built about 30 feet inland from its predecessor and fortified with deeper curbs to stabilize it against the tides, state officials said.

The current path and its adjoining parking lots were built with a permit issued by the California Coastal Commission in the late 1980s. Mindful of the fate of the earlier path and concerned by the delicate condition of the river mouth, commissioners designated the path and the parking lots “temporary facilities.”

They could stay as long as the ocean allowed, commissioners decided, but if the waves reclaimed their turf, local and state agencies were not to devise artificial solutions to preserve the properties.

With an engineer’s assurance that the construction work would last 30 to 50 years, local officials began building. But the engineer was wrong.

“We’ve expended a lot of money and a lot of energy over the years, but the ocean keeps on winning,” Treanor said. “Just from our track record, we’re not doing too good.”

Treanor, somewhat to his dismay, knows quite a bit about the asphalt path. As local director of the state park service, he is also the reluctant custodian of the bike trail. The fairgrounds owns the land on either side of the path, but the state parks retain an easement on the trail itself.

That does not mean, however, that Treanor can manage the path as he sees fit.

Management of the fairgrounds, which is north of the bike path, takes a keen interest in all the activities on its property.

Residents constantly prod Ventura to take a stand on the bike path’s future, and even though the city has no jurisdiction in the area, it has become a major player in the trail’s drama.

And the Coastal Commission, which oversees the state’s entire shoreline, holds its own, firm opinions on how to manage the land between the mouth of the Ventura River and the beach promenade.

The various interests clashed for the first time in the early 1990s, when patches of the path near the river mouth were washed away by pounding waves. The Coastal Commission ruled that the permit did not allow local officials to make any repairs, and state parks supervisors agreed. But under pressure from residents, the city and the fairgrounds spent $30,000 to stack rocks up against the side of the shore to stall future erosion in that area.

The Coastal Commission challenged the action, but the Army Corps of Engineers and the State Lands Commission both decided in favor of the city and the fairgrounds. The rocks remain today.

The revetment slowed erosion considerably at the stretch near the delta, but now two other sections farther down the shore are quickly deteriorating. Treanor estimates the erosion at a rate of three to four inches per day.

Still, he plans no repairs.

“It’s foolish for us to go in there when nature and the permitting authority say you can’t put it in there,” he said. “It’s the ultimate dilemma.”

Treanor said that if it were left up to his agency, he would let the path and parking lots slowly deteriorate and wash away with the ocean waves.

But the public does not badger Treanor. Instead, Chase said, irritated residents phone City Hall when they want to know the future of their bike path. That is why Ventura got involved nearly three years ago, he said.

“People said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. This is all bureaucratic gobbledygook. You’ve got to do something, City Council,’ ” he said.

This time around, council members are leading the fray to rescue the deteriorating path, even though legally it is none of their business.

“We should save it,” Councilman Gary Tuttle said. “Whatever it takes. We should do something and do it quick.”

Tuttle and Councilman Steve Bennett, both members of the council’s environmental committee, say they plan to discuss the path’s future at a meeting scheduled next month.

Meanwhile, Chase and the fairgrounds’ general manager, Michael Paluszak, have hatched their own long-term plan for the area, which the Coastal Commission will consider when it meets in San Diego on Oct. 12.

Chase said they would like three years to study the matter. During that time, city and fairgrounds officials would conduct an environmental review of the area, soliciting scientific opinions on the best way to save the bike path without damaging the coastline. They would investigate the wisdom of relocating the bike path farther from the shore.

Finally, he said, they would try to get the public involved in the process and find out what residents think should be done about the troubled ocean-side property.

The idea has won support from unlikely sources, including members of the Surfrider Foundation, an environmentally conscious surfer’s group that opposed Ventura’s intervention in 1991.

“I think that’s great that the city’s willing to study the problem,” said Larry Manson, a Surfrider member and history teacher at Ventura College. “Everybody loves the bike path.”