A Conservancy for an Urban River

The San Gabriel River might not seem the pristine slice of nature that communities normally rally to preserve.

It pours out of a pockmarked canyon next to a gravel pit and a brewery, south of a quarry. Its tea-colored currents and eddies are guided by old tires and stray grocery carts, until finally it is locked into a drainage channel and whisked to the ocean.

But this week, the river and its watershed became the state’s sixth conservancy and the first to serve the predominantly urban area stretching from the San Gabriel Mountains to Long Beach.

“It’s not just mountain and wilderness that need to be protected,” state Sen. Hilda Solis (D-La Puente) said at a news conference near Whittier on Friday. “The state is taking an interest in an urban area.”

Solis had been working for three years to create such a conservancy. After a protracted battle involving dozens of cities and activist groups seeking control of the river and any state funding, Gov. Gray Davis signed two bills last weekend creating the conservancy.

With a name as unwieldy as the massive sprawl of almost 60 cities it encompasses, the San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy will next appoint its 13 voting board members, which will include municipal, county, state and water association officials.

State Secretary of Resources Mary Nichols, who helped broker its creation, will be a member of the board and said she will ensure that the conservancy maintains an environmental focus.

“We aren’t just going to hand these decisions over to the local level,” she said. “We can be the peacekeeper and the best broker to ensure equity in the way the funds are spread.”

Unlike the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the river conservancy will not have the power of eminent domain, but will serve as a conduit for state money to local projects. Many municipal officials also see it as way to consolidate political clout in a sprawling area where power is spread thin.

Solis helped secure $700,000 from next year’s budget to staff the agency. Supporters are also hoping for passage of Proposition 12 on March’s ballot. The $2.1-billion park bond measure includes $15 million earmarked for the conservancy, officials said.

The struggle to control the San Gabriel River pitted two groups against each other. City officials from the San Gabriel Valley joined environmentalists in proposing a park-lined watercourse. While city officials from low-lying areas around Long Beach were more concerned with keeping the concrete-lined waterway a flood control channel.

The conservancy’s governing board will include members from both sides of the issue. In addition, the conservancy will encompass southerly portions of the Los Angeles River, as well as parts of northern Orange County that are part of the region’s watershed.

At Friday’s news conference, held at the Whittier Narrows Nature Center, officials did not give any specific plans for the conservancy, but said some priorities would include creating riverside parks, restoring degraded land, and acquiring open space in the San Gabriel foothills and the La Puente Hills.

“Environmentalists are very committed to this,” said Jeff Yann, chairman of the Sierra Club’s San Gabriel Valley Task Force. “The San Gabriel River has been kind of a neglected child, a dumping ground.”

One of Yann’s priorities would be to preserve the wildlife corridor in the Puente Hills, which connects the urban valley and river to the Cleveland National Forest in Orange County.

After the news conference, officials took a hayride through a brown, withered field of weeds and native plants to a quiet stretch of the San Gabriel River. On the way, Solis talked of growing up in La Puente and how her family and many others would go to a Marrano Beach near Montebello.

“We couldn’t afford to go down to the ocean a lot,” she said. “We’d go there and pick watercress. We’d play in the river.”

Now, she hopes the river will once again become a destination for the millions of people who live around it. Despite its problems, most say it is more environmentally intact than the Los Angeles River, but gets a lot less attention.

Indeed, when Solis originally set out to create some kind of agency for the San Gabriel River, she turned to state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), who was pushing a conservancy for the Los Angeles River. The alliance worried some of the downstream cities because he was seen as a someone who wanted to tear down the concrete banks and replant river floors. Such plans set off alarms with residents south of Downey and South Gate, who must pay federal flood insurance.

So, after Solis introduced her Senate bill this year, state Assemblywoman Sally Havice (D-Cerritos) followed with an Assembly bill of her own. It took months of negotiating to bring the two together.

“Eventually the bills just mirrored each other,” said Carlos Penilla, chief of staff for Havice. “Everybody is happy now.”