Build the River, Not Walls

As the contractors prepare to begin construction, state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) is trying one last time to encourage local officials to reconsider a public works project that may not be in the best interests of the public.

Hayden and his colleague on the Senate Natural Resources and Wildlife Committee, Sen. Hilda Solis (D-El Monte), have scheduled hearings for Friday in Los Angeles on the county’s plan for the Los Angeles River. That plan would raise flood walls and levees along the lower 21 miles of the Los Angeles River as much as eight feet, raise bridges along this same route and cost as much as $500 million.

The need for improved flood protection in this part of the county is unassailable. Downstream residents and businesses in Downey, Long Beach and the other cities near the mouth of the river understandably fear the widespread property loss and injury that could result if storm runoff, channeled into the concrete-lined river, overflowed the existing banks. That’s why the county Public Works Department and the Army Corps of Engineers, responding to federal directives, have devised the plan to raise the river’s walls.

But having settled on this plan some years ago, their minds seem to have hardened against serious consideration of alternative proposals that would provide comparable flood protection and, at the same time, better watershed management along the river’s northern stretch, thus mitigating the need for the higher walls. Even some senior corps officials now acknowledge that the widespread flooding that occurred along the Mississippi River in 1993 despite its levees demonstrates the peril of focusing on walls and levees to the exclusion of other measures such as upstream storage and water reclamation.

Time is running out. The Board of Supervisors meets early next month to consider the county’s environmental impact report on the project. The cement mixers could begin mixing soon afterward. To date, the supervisors have shown little interest in an alternative drafted by the Friends of the Los Angeles River. Hayden hopes his hearing will draw the supervisors’ attention to the many merits of the alternative plan for the entire region as well as the downstream cities. We do too.