Ideas Flow for a River Conservancy

The San Gabriel River is prettier, curvier and more fecund than its sister to the west. Yet the Los Angeles River--rigid, bleak and moody--seems to get all the attention.

Some say this disparity is rooted in the communities through which these waters flow.

Los Angeles is a herculean political and media force adept at catching the spotlight. The area around the San Gabriel is a loose patchwork of more than 50 cities that rarely musters the unified power to draw attention to itself or lobby for funds.

It’s this sense of insignificance that two state legislators are vying to change--hoping that the river can bring together the often-isolated cities of the San Gabriel Valley and southeastern Los Angeles County.

State Sen. Hilda Solis (D-La Puente) and Assemblywoman Sally Havice (D-Cerritos) have introduced dueling bills to create conservancies to protect the San Gabriel River and its watershed. Both would establish state agencies to raise funds and collect bond money to buy and preserve open space and create parks in the sprawling south and eastern reaches of the county. They would function much like the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy does in the west.

The legislation comes less than a year after the defeat of a bill, introduced by state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), to put both river systems under the authority of the conservancy. Although that bill foundered because of opposition from officials in flood-prone areas, it stirred new interest in preserving the rivers.

“The river is one of the great natural resources in the San Gabriel Valley,” said Solis, who grew up playing along its surrounding creeks and hills. “We have to do something and we have to do it now. Otherwise, we won’t have a river.”

Today, the 29-mile San Gabriel River flows rough and braided from the San Gabriel Mountains to Irwindale, then meanders in a gravelly channel across the urban valley to the lush Whittier Narrows, where it is locked in concrete for most of its remaining journey to Long Beach.

Under Havice’s bill, the conservancy would include--in addition to the San Gabriel--the lower stretch of the 51-mile-long Los Angeles River, which runs through her district and ends in Long Beach. Because many of her constituents live in a flood plain, her district often has different goals for the rivers.

“One of the intentions of my bill is to keep the decisions at the local level so the community is able to have input,” Havice said.

Environmentalists hope that a conservancy will connect fragmented pieces of nature, and even restore stretches of riverbank lost to concrete. Local government officials see it as a way that their smaller cities can consolidate political clout in Sacramento, and bring money home.

“The conservancy is an organized conduit that will facilitate the San Gabriel Valley and neighboring areas to compete as one entity,” said Nicholas Conway, executive director of the San Gabriel Valley Council of Governments. “Now we’ll be going to the table with the political strength of some 60 cities and 4 million people.”

Of course, unifying the upstream cities with the downstream ones is a delicate task on rivers that have traditionally caused more division than unity.

When high-ground environmentalists propose grand plans to remove concrete banks and levees and replant river floors, working-class cities south of Downey and South Gate panic because the southern ends of both rivers lie in a flood plain, defined by the federal government as the Los Angeles County Drainage Area.

As such, residents there must pay flood insurance until the county and federal governments finish a $200-million project that will raise the existing walls and levees to prepare for a so-called 100-year flood.

Officials in the area are worried that river restoration plans conceived upstream would impede this construction, committing the cities in the drainage area to pay for federal insurance indefinitely.

“The Solis bill will not address flood control,” said Carlos Penilla, chief of staff for Havice. “It says its primary goal is habitat restoration. When you talk to folks down the river about that, alarms go off.”

The issue stirs a lot of resentment. So it is no surprise that with two different visions for the rivers--one as real rivers, one as flood control channels--there are two separate bills to manage them.

Solis got involved in the conservancy issue last year, when she approached Hayden about including the San Gabriel River in his bill.

She soon learned that the drainage area cities were vehemently opposed to the legislation.

Led in part by Havice, they argued that Hayden and the conservancy would block the flood control project and place local land use authority in the hands of outsiders.

When the bill failed, Solis introduced her own Senate Bill 216, which passed through its first committee last week and would authorize land acquisition and management along the San Gabriel River, tributaries, creeks and foothills. Unlike the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, it would not have the right to force land sales through eminent domain.

The conservancy would be the state’s sixth; the last was created in 1996 to protect the mountains around Palm Springs.

So far, such agencies get mixed reviews.

The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy is commended by some for preserving natural acreage in the mountains and lobbying hard for funds. At the same time it is criticized for making deals with developers and allowing too much growth.

Under Solis’ bill, conservancy board members would include local and state-appointed officials, environmentalists and water association members.

Environmentalists, including the Sierra Club, and water quality officials support the bill.

But supporters of the Havice bill, AB 1355, which does not include environmentalists or water association representatives as voting board members, want a stronger majority of local representation on the conservancy board.

“The governance issue is really important,” said Richard Powers, executive director of the Gateway Cities Council of Governments, which helped write the Havice bill. “Are you creating a state agency governed by outsiders that will have some kind of local control in your city?”

Moreover, leaders in the “gateway” region, which includes 27 cities, want to include the southern portion of the L.A. River in the bill, so that Long Beach, which gets the polluted outflow of both rivers, would deal with just one conservancy to conduct cleanup efforts.

Others in the county want the conservancy to cover an even greater swath of land, saying that the whole of both river systems and their watersheds should come under the authority of one conservancy. They say it doesn’t make sense to include just the lower part of a river and not the watershed; both rivers are connected by the Rio Hondo.

“The overall sentiment is that the L.A. and San Gabriel river systems should be managed as a whole because they are joined at the hip,” said Dorothy Green, president of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council, a nonprofit group with the stated purpose of restoring and preserving the watershed.

Green said there are numerous plans pending to manage the rivers, including a new Hayden bill, SB 754, that would create a Los Angeles River Commission to oversee and coordinate any projects done on the river. Part of the impetus for the plans, Green said, is that there are eight bond acts before the Legislature that could provide money to such undertakings.

“We’ve never seen this kind of interest in our rivers, and it’s happening nationally,” said Green. “People are starting to look at rivers as ways to bring the natural world to urban areas.”