Changing’s River’s Course

Los Angeles has big, two-hearted rivers running through it. The Los Angeles River cleaves the county down the middle. The San Gabriel River borders the county’s often overlooked eastern quarter. They are historically ambiguous rivers whose lengths, courses to the sea and places in the landscape have repeatedly changed over the past 150 years.

The county’s two rivers are problematic because they and their tributary streams drain an enormous, geologically young and rugged back country that drops with astonishing suddenness to the floor of two valley basins and the nearly flat coastal plain on which most of us live. In the rivers’ 1,700 square miles of watershed, nothing constrained them. They flooded repeatedly and fatally from 1868 to 1938. Empty now except for the daily flow of 90 million gallons of processed waste water, they might still discharge in a day a volume of storm runoff equal to the flow of the Mississippi at its mouth.

Beginning in 1939, the Army Corps of Engineers and the County Flood Control District redefined the two rivers with single-minded efficiency as the region’s storm drains. When the work was completed in 1970, 100 miles of concrete channels had replaced the vague beds of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers, the Rio Hondo and Ballona Creek. The system included five major dams and spreading basins for the recharge of underground aquifers, 370 miles of feeder channels, 2,400 miles of covered drains, 15 smaller dams and 129 debris basins. The work of making the rivers in our own image had cost a billion dollars.

For the millions of not-quite-middle-class residents of the Los Angeles plain, the nearly invisible flood-control system does more than the freeways to make their neighborhoods possible. Flood protection let developers build on land historically subject to flooding. It let the federal government underwrite loans that L.A. banks made to home buyers in the region’s endless suburbs. It lets me be secure in my house on the flood plain in Lakewood. Small houses on this cheap land, some of it crowding the right of way that edges the rivers, still fills the immigrant’s longing (and mine) for a private place of one’s own.

In October, after months without rain, it’s hard to equate the empty monumentality of the flood-control system with the protection of so many lives and everyday hopes. The gated and trespass-forbidden river channels seem superfluous, the ultimate “no place” in notoriously placeless L.A.

It’s the metropolis we have, chosen by real-estate companies, banks, city halls and homeowner preference since 1900 to become the most private of big cities. Collectively, we have fewer acres of city parks per capita and more acres of commodified “gallerias,” “lands” and “walks” than any other region in the nation. Worse, little of L.A.’s free public space is immediately accessible to those most crowded into urban communities and without adequate transportation. L.A.’s beaches and mountains are a long way from barrio residents in Bell Gardens and Whittier, and neither destination is part of their neighborhood. But the rivers are.

A gift of two dozen white roses--an ambiguous symbol of truce between state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) and Assemblywoman Sally Havice (D-Bellflower)--means these neighborhoods and the rivers that run through them could have their familiar association restored. Like the truce, which Hayden signaled on the closing day of the legislative session, the restoration is tentative. It needs Gov. Gray Davis’ signature. It depends on voter willingness next March to approve $2.1 billion in state recreation bonds, including $25 million for recreation facilities along the banks of the two rivers. It also depends on what you mean by restoration: giving people usable public places in their neighborhoods or simulating a “natural looking” river in the flood-control channel.

Over the past year, Havice and state Sen. Hilda Solis (D-El Monte) have worked with cities, neighborhood groups and regional associations of governments to draft legislation that creates the San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy. Their two bills are a radical break from the indifference that let the rivers slip into a kind of void, but they conserve the rivers’ essential function as guarantors of the region’s flood protection. It won’t jackhammer concrete out of flood-control channels, but the conservancy will use state and federal funding to build community parks and preserve open space in the San Gabriel River watershed and along the banks of the southern reach of the Los Angeles River from Vernon to Long Beach.

The break between the upper and lower L.A. River was a necessary compromise to keep upstream politics, like the controversial development of Taylor Yard, out of the conservancy. It inadvertently preserves another aspect of the L.A. River: its historic role as a separator of races, classes and communities of shared interest.

The Havice and Solis bills passed the Assembly, but Havice’s portion of the legislation (AB 1355) stalled in Hayden’s Natural Resources and Wildlife Committee. Havice had unexpectedly stopped Hayden’s nearly successful drive last year to put the entire L.A. River and its watershed, more than half the county’s land area, under the control of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and its appointed board. When Hayden’s bill setting up a new L.A. River commission failed to pass the Assembly in the final hours of the session, Hayden threatened to hold Havice’s river-conservancy bill in his committee until the legislative clock ran out. Assembly Speaker Antonio R. Villaraigosa intervened, Hayden’s and Havice’s bills passed within moments of each other, and the white roses changed hands. In the final roll call, Havice still voted against Hayden’s river commission.

Havice had successfully changed the debate from expansion of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to focus on the need that neighborhoods have for public places that belong to them, and she gave locally elected officials a significant role in turning that longing into a string of riverside parks and unbuilt open spaces. Unlike the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, which has no council members from the region’s cities on its 10-member board, the 13-member board of the new conservancy will have city-council representatives from the San Gabriel Valley, Orange County and southeast L.A. County cities that border the two rivers. In a final compromise brokered by Mary Nichols, the governor’s resources secretary, at least six of the board members, including some of those appointed by the governor and the Legislature, will be locally elected officials. Given its makeup, the conservancy board could have a working majority that directly represents the communities the conservancy will benefit.

But Hayden’s white roses had thorns. In exchange for releasing the rivers and mountains conservancy bill from his committee, Hayden’s L.A. River commission also went to the governor for signature. Davis now faces a choice between very different visions of what L.A.’s rivers might become, a choice he is likely to deflect by approving both.

Hayden’s Los Angeles River Conservation and Restoration Act sets up a 13-member commission, none of them locally elected officials, and gives them broad oversight of projects along the entire Los Angeles River. While the commission can’t acquire land (unlike the conservancy) or overrule local land-use decisions, it would advocate transformation of the river channel by dismantling some of its current flood-control features. The commission would back its advocacy with the results of another river study, the latest in a series that includes the Los Angeles River Master Plan (1991), the Los Angeles River Task Force report (1992), the Los Angeles River Park and Recreation Study (1993), and the County of Los Angeles Alternative Flood Control Study (1997). The commission’s new study doubtlessly would support the notion that restoration should engineer a “natural looking” river from some of the flood-control channel and that storm-water retention basins around buildings, permeable driveway and parking-lot surfaces and other nontraditional measures would protect neighborhoods from flooding.

The commission also would evaluate and comment on all state-funded projects directly affecting the river and its watershed. It would constantly bump in the conservancy and almost every other organization working at the local level on park and open-space projects.

The riverbanks are getting crowded after so many years of abandonment to narrowly defined flood-control use. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority and the Trust for Public Land are building a network of small parks along the Elysian Valley stretch of the upper river. Other greening projects along the upper river are also underway. Long Beach will use new water-quality funding to keep upstream trash and street runoff from fouling the rivers’ estuaries.

The new rivers and mountains conservancy will join this jostling crowd to put a neighborhood presence in the empty places along the lower Los Angeles River and the San Gabriel. We made these ambivalent rivers from two-hearted originals that were dry one day and at flood stage the next. We will continue to make them, always imperfectly and always recognizing our mistake of ignoring our rivers and those who must live by them. We cannot unmake the rivers as they are, but from our history of flawed encounters on their banks, we can begin to restore some usable places for people. *