Thicket of Rules Fuels Flood Fears

Thirty feet below a smelly, trash-strewn path between a shopping center and a condominium complex, a wild forest of reeds and brush bursts forth from a barely moving stretch of Medea Creek in Agoura Hills.

Defiantly green against the surrounding concrete, these cattails, arundo and willows provide an odd and incongruous patch of beauty behind a locked and rusting chain-link fence.

To environmentalists, the flora in these “soft bottom” dirt-floor channels are things to be preserved and cherished, a way to return the ugly, artificially redone rivers of Los Angeles County to their natural states as ambling creeks and waterways, carrying storm runoff from the mountains to the sea.

But this stretch of Medea Creek, like nearly 100 other channels across Los Angeles County, wasn’t built for scenic beauty. It was dug out by a developer in the 1980s under orders from Los Angeles County to provide flood control.

The county is legally bound to keep the channels clear so the water will be contained during heavy rains like the ones anticipated to accompany El Nino this winter.

But in the past decade no fewer than eight federal and state agencies have asserted jurisdiction over flood control channels, creating a bureaucratic tangle so vast that obtaining permission to clear them out can take years.

As a result, 47 of the 95 channels designed to protect Los Angeles County residents from flooding are so clogged with brush and debris that their capacity for carrying water has been reduced more than 35%. Of these, 22 have lost up to half their capacity, and eight, including a stretch of the San Gabriel River in El Monte and several spots along the Santa Clara and Los Angeles rivers, have lost more than half. If nothing is done, top public works officials warn, this winter’s rains will bring massive flooding.

Cutting Through Mountain of Red Tape

Los Angeles County has been trying since 1995 to secure permits to clear brush from soft bottom channels where trees and other plants grow.

Along with eight counties and several cities across California, public works officials here have gone to battle over what they see as a mountain of red tape so high that it will prevent them from preparing for El Nino. Civil engineers have appealed to Gov. Pete Wilson, the state’s two U.S. senators, the California League of Cities and regulatory agencies.

Several public officials have joined the fight, including Los Angeles County Supervisors Mike Antonovich and Don Knabe, and Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-Santa Clarita).

In Los Angeles, public works officials plan to ask the county Board of Supervisors for the right to sue the Army Corps of Engineers, the lead agency overseeing flood control regulations, if permission is not granted soon to clear the channels.

And it’s not just flood control channel maintenance that has been held up. The mayor of San Luis Obispo says he has been threatened by the corps with criminal charges if he carries out repairs on an eroding embankment that might cause the local sewer plant to slip into a creek. So he has decided to look for a different solution.

The public works director in Santa Barbara County has not received permission from the corps to do repair work that could prevent a flood, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency has said it will hold the county liable if a flood occurs.

During last winter’s storms, said Tim Nanson, county engineer for San Luis Obispo County, “I stood on one side of a 30-foot break in the road, holding a mom back and telling her she couldn’t get to her kids on the other side because I did not have permission to repair the road.”

For their part, regulatory agencies recognize that the process is slow and cumbersome, and have promised to authorize at least some work in the channels by the end of the month, so counties can prepare for El Nino.

But Richard Schubel, chief of the regulatory branch for the Army Corps’ Los Angeles district, defended the current system, saying it is important to coordinate the sometimes conflicting needs of the eight regulatory agencies.

And, Schubel said, some of the blame lies with the public works professionals. Los Angeles County, he said, could have had temporary permits last year had officials not dragged their feet in providing biological data and other information requested by the California Regional Water Quality Control Board.

And, he said, Los Angeles County, along with the other seven that have complained about the permits, has resisted requests from environmental regulators that wetland habitat destroyed when the channels are cleaned be rebuilt somewhere else.

“Part of the problem with flood control agencies is that they think flood control is the only value to these channels,” Schubel said. “It’s not worthless stuff that they want to pull out of there.”

Officials Balk at Replacing Habitat

One way the corps hopes to speed up the process this year is to require the counties to sign a contract stating that they agree to mitigate, or replace, any habitat destroyed by clearing the channels. But county officials are balking at this, saying the foliage has only grown up over the last couple years, since the permitting process slowed down, and that it would cost millions to replace it.

The fix that the cities and counties find themselves in has been brewing slowly over nearly four decades, ever since the California Fish and Game Code was passed in 1961, requiring a permit for altering a stream bed.

In the 1970s, the federal Environmental Protection and Clean Water acts added another layer of rules, as did the California Environmental Quality Act and other laws.

Today, agencies involved in granting permission to work in streams and flood control channels include the Army Corps, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Fish and Wildlife and the National Marine Fisheries Institute on the federal level; and at the state level the California Department of Fish and Game, the Regional Water Quality Board, the Coastal Commission and the Office of Historic Preservation.

Even regulators say the result has been a crazy quilt of codes that means it can often take years to win permission to do work in a California stream.

“The law is so confusing because you have so many different laws that apply,” said Catherine Kuhlman, associate director of the water division in the federal EPA’s 9th District, which includes California. “I’m sure if one were trying to get a permit, it would seem really disjointed.”

County’s Rivers Once Meandered

None of this was anticipated in 1915, when the Los Angeles County Flood Control District was set up. At that time, rivers meandered throughout the county, frequently changing course from one year to the next.

To contain the streams so they would not move and threaten homes and businesses, officials decided to build a series of concrete channels along the Los Angeles River and other waterways, digging them deeper and forcing them to stay in one path.

The Army Corps of Engineers did most of the work, and later assigned the channels to the county, which promised to maintain them and keep them clear of sediment and vegetation.

“When they were built, they were clean as a whistle,” said Jim Noyes, chief deputy director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works. “For years we cleaned them up every year or every other year. We just went out and did it.”

Some repair and maintenance work was regulated as time went by, but for the most part counties were allowed to clear out vegetation.

Environmentalists, however, began to believe that these engineered streams could serve more than one purpose, and that they ought to function as scenic waterways and animal habitat as well as flood control channels.

“The channelizing of our rivers and streams really happened before people were as consciously aware of what we were losing,” said Dorothy Green, a founder of Heal the Bay and its former president. “Our environmental sensitivities and concerns have been heightened over those years.”

After environmentalists filed a lawsuit to impel the federal government to tighten its oversight of wetlands, the Army Corps agreed in 1993 to apply federal and state rules to the removal of vegetation and certain other activities in flood control channels.

And that, to the dismay of flood control engineers, virtually ground the permit process to a halt.

Threat of El Nino Spurs Response

Los Angeles County applied in 1995 for a permit to clean out 95 flood control channels, which include several stretches of the Los Angeles, San Gabriel and Santa Clara rivers, along with Compton Creek and other streams.

The permit wasn’t denied, but it hasn’t yet made it through the approval process. Temporary permits were issued for last winter by one agency but not another, and the process broke down, with the county blaming regulators and the regulators blaming the county.

The issue came to a head late last month, when the eight counties, led by public works officials from Los Angeles County, began their lobbying campaign.

Noyes appeared before the Board of Supervisors, requested its help, and organized a series of meetings with the Army Corps. Officials from Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Imperial counties participated, along with representatives from San Diego and other cities.

Flood control engineers wrote letters to politicians and complained loudly about the situation at a state summit on El Nino.

In response, the Army Corps has promised to hurry the permit procedure, offering a five-year permit that the agency has promised will be ready by Oct. 27.

But the counties say they are skeptical that permission will be granted before the rains come, and environmentalists and some politicians are weighing in against efforts to speed up the process.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) has condemned the public works officials and their lobbying campaign, accusing them of exploiting fears of El Nino-induced winter storms as a way to get carte blanche to rip up river wildlife.

“The real agenda,” Hayden said in a letter to the EPA last week, “ . . . has been to destroy cottonwoods, willows and cattail marsh growth in the river bottom before any such habitat becomes home for endangered species.”

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said he would support requiring the county to replace any wetland habitat it destroyed.

“I do not believe in charging full steam ahead and ripping everything out,” he said. “This is not a black and white issue, and it needs to be handled with care.”

Alternatives Seen to Blanket Bulldozing

According to Melanie Winter, executive director of Friends of the Los Angeles River, there are several alternatives to bulldozing the channel bottoms.

She said the county could remove invasive plants such as a bamboo-like reed called arundo donax, while not touching willows and other native flora. This, she said, would clear significant space in the channels without harming useful species.

Other possibilities include widening those channels that are not near development, or even deciding to let some flood if there are no buildings nearby.

In Santa Barbara, where environmentalism has become part of civic policy, the decision has been made to simply endure some flooding, said David Johnson, the city’s public works director.

Mission Creek, which flows through the city, overflows every three years, often causing massive damage, Johnson said. But while officials are willing to widen it enough to accommodate a 25-year flood, storms like those predicted for El Nino will continue to cause it to spill out of its banks.

“A concrete channel like a Los Angeles River would carry the water, but it’s ugly and it’s not going to be put in,” Johnson said. “So we’ll endure a certain amount of flooding.”

Such a policy would certainly not be acceptable in the Santa Clarita neighborhood where Linnea Hollowell, a retired interior designer, has lived 17 years.

Many homes in the area back up to the South Fork of the Santa Clara River, and residents have circulated a petition asking Rep. McKeon to help the county win permission to clear the channel.

Allowing the waterway, which is deep and barely visible from nearby homes, to overflow “would be fine if it were in a natural area,” she said. “But the area where they want to do this preserving was really designed to keep our homes free from flooding.”

Kuhlman of the EPA said she plans to support allowing most of the 95 channels on Los Angeles County’s list to be cleared, but only if the permits are for just this year.

Then, she and other regulators have said, the process will begin again.

“This year, we’re going to bend over backwards,” Kuhlman said.

“But if we were making the decision without the threat of El Nino, it would be different.”