San Bernardino a Water Garden? Some Say Aquifer Plan All Wet

While outsiders are fond of referring to Southern California as parched, the problem in this blue-collar city of 180,000 is not too little water, but too much.

San Bernardino sits on a vast underground lake bigger than Shasta, the giant Northern California reservoir covering 46 square miles. Unfortunately, the city also sits on two of the most dangerous earthquake faults in the world, the San Andreas and San Jacinto. In a big quake, seismic experts have warned, the water could mix with the sandy soil into a giant soup and sink large parts of the town.

Now, in a controversial plan to build what would be the most ambitious public development project in the history of the San Bernardino Valley, local officials are pushing a $200-million-plus plan to use the water to create a network of lakes and streams in the city.

Besides drawing down the dangerously high water table, the project would accomplish an even more important goal that the city has pursued in vain for decades. The lakes and streams, says Judith Valles, the city’s new activist mayor, would turn around San Bernardino’s blighted downtown.

“We have this abundance of water, why not use it?” said Valles, a 66-year-old woman with a quick, definite mind. “This really is an opportunity, but it’s camouflaged as a major problem.”

The project, which faces key tests in coming weeks, is favored by the business community, the mayor and other political leaders. Lined up on the other side are the project’s high cost and vocal residents who might lose their homes. Whatever happens, the sheer grandeur of the vision has become the hottest topic of debate in town and could dominate the political agenda for years to come. For the mayor, the need to do something is clear.

“We need to begin some project soon,” said Valles, who is so obsessed by the blight that she counts boarded-up houses when she drives through town.

When she drives, she likes to imagine what her city could be: greenbelts with bike and running paths for joggers like herself replacing blocks of empty stores. Children skipping stones on the blue water. Street after street of waterfront shops for tourists who come to Southern California, not just to gawk at the beaches, Disneyland and Mann’s Chinese, but to stroll through the new Venice in the desert that will be San Bernardino’s future.

“I see a beautiful place,” Valles said.

Leaders of a business community that has floundered since Norton Air Force Base closed and Santa Fe Railroad moved out have been quick to hop aboard. “This is overwhelmingly positive from our standpoint,” said Steve Henthorn, the director of the Convention and Visitors Bureau. If San Bernardino could market itself as a tourist destination along the lines of San Antonio and its famous River Walk, it could yield a business bonanza.

More than that, it “could change the image of San Bernardino” from a low-income city scraping out a living on the dusty edge of the desert. From a place where block after block of decrepitude, enveloped in a ghost town-like emptiness, has replaced once thriving blue-collar neighborhoods.

But the proposal has touched off anger in the 316-acre area downtown that would be the first phase of the project. Although planning has not gone far enough to know which homes would be razed, 250 people carrying signs crowded the City Council chambers in late June to denounce the project and everyone associated with it.

“Look around you. You are surrounded and outnumbered,” said resident Matt Owen, one of many protesting the plan.

Others recalled past redevelopment projects that foundered in San Bernardino and said this will be no different. “We are a visionary city, but the vision never comes through,” Anna Cox said.

The quandary facing San Bernardino is a familiar one to urban planners. How do you change a city’s negative image when it has become so entrenched that it seems to hang overhead like bad weather? Valles, the first Latina mayor in the city’s 146-year history, thinks she knows exactly what it takes: bold, surprising, even eye-popping action. The kind that causes outsiders to say, “No kidding? San Bernardino is doing what?”

Without this project, local businesspeople fear, there may be no stopping the city’s long-term downward slide.

A Hangout for Hell’s Angels

San Bernardino has always been through and through a blue-collar community. It is a place where, said Henthorn, who grew up here, if you went to a party, the Hell’s Angels might show up.

“Then you knew it was going to get a little rougher.”

But as the seat of the largest county in the United States, it flourished for many years. The railroad was the first economic anchor. According to archeologists assessing the historical value of 1,200 structures in the project area, many of the houses were designed for the railroad work force.

“You could almost see developers targeting blue-collar Santa Fe employees,” said Bai Tang, a researcher with a Riverside company hired to assess the historical value of 1,200 structures in the project area. Most houses were Craftsman style or variations on it, such as the classic California bungalow.

Wars, both hot and cold, helped the area grow. Norton and March Air Force bases employed thousands. Christmas season found shoppers crowding the stores on E Street by day, and on weekend nights the same street was clogged with young people cruising through McDonald’s first drive-in hamburger stand.

Those days have been memorialized by the Route 66 Rendezvous, which last year brought 500,000 people to town and generated $25 million.

“It was a great place to grow up,” said Henthorn. The people were--and remain--unpretentious, the mountains were close and Huntington Beach was only 45 minutes up the highway.

But then the area absorbed a series of economic body blows. Kaiser Steel closed up, Norton shut down, taking 10,000 jobs. Then Santa Fe moved its repair yard, which at its peak employed 4,000, to Topeka, Kan.

When the jobs went, a lot of the middle class went with them, either to the high desert or to the new communities surrounding the city’s hub. Downtown, boarded-up houses became a common sight. Driving around the proposed first phase of the project area reveals block after block of dilapidated structures. Few people are on the streets. There is a stillness to the scene, as with ruins.

“As everything shut down, people had to leave,” said Henthorn. “What you had left was not a lot. When you hit bottom, it’s tough to work your way out.”

Today, more than 40% of the population receives some kind of public assistance, from Social Security to welfare and aid to poor families with children.

“It’s a crying shame [San Bernardino] got to where it is,” Henthorn said. “Now, we’ve got a resurgence of folks who toughed it out, saying ‘we’re going to put this back together.’ ”

City Sits on ‘Vault of Gold’

The water under the city, this “vault of gold” in the words of City Councilwoman Esther Estrada, has built up over thousands of years by runoff from the San Bernardino Mountains, which rise to a peak of 11,500 feet north of the city. But until recently, it was as much a source of civic worry as opportunity. When the water table rose in wet years, it seeped into the basement of the post office and soaked the feet of downtown theatergoers.

In 1964, the Metropolitan Water District in Los Angeles tried to get its hands on the water. When local voters said no, the MWD for years blocked San Bernardino water agencies from selling the water on the open market.

Only recently was a truce arranged in which the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District will sell 15,000 acre-feet of water--an amount of water covering 15,000 acres a foot deep--a year to the MWD. The money will help build the lakes and streams project.

Pollution also became a problem when solvents leaking from a World War II Army base and a railroad yard invaded portions of the water basin. But the major threat to the water in the eyes of local folks was the jealousy of its giant, thirsty neighbor to the west.

As the water table rose over the years, anxiety about the earthquake danger has grown. Water board President Pat Milligan recounts the visit from a Sacramento official who was alarmed by the failure to deal with the problem.

“What are you people doing?” the official said, predicting mass destruction and death in a major quake.

One solution that has been discussed is pumping out large volumes of water and storing it in a series of what Milligan called “ugly, immense steel tanks.”

That proved unpopular. “I said ‘not in my backyard,’ ” Milligan said.

Over time, the discussions evolved into a stunningly ambitious proposal to do more than just draw off the water, and even do more than just sell the water to finance redevelopment. The city would use the water to build a more attractive town that would invite the return of middle-class homes, jobs and businesses.

Planners envision a series of small lakes connected by streams covering an area as large as 15 square miles. There would be meandering streams, feeding larger lakes, all flowing past a thriving new business district of shops catering both to tourists and local residents.

Middle-class homeowners would be drawn in by new development of hundreds of new homes costing $125,000 to $170,000--cheap by coastal county standards but solidly in the moderate price range for San Bernardino.

The first-phase plan submitted by Urban Spaces would include 40 acres of lakes and about 20 acres of streams up to 300 feet wide, said Bernard Kersey, the general manager of the city water agency.

“Water is magic,” Al Groves of Urban Spaces said at the June hearing. “It can do a lot to transform an area to something new. You need to change the image of San Bernardino.”

Urban Spaces is the company that designed a portion of San Antonio’s 2.5-mile River Walk, with its Tex-Mex restaurants and boutiques, which has spawned an $800-million annual tourist industry.

It also designed Kansas City’s Brush Creek project, a scenic river walk winding six miles through the city, which has caused several commercial institutions to move to the area.

While the cost of the San Bernardino project would depend on its configuration and size, river walks are expensive redevelopment tools, costing as much as $10 million per mile. The $200-million estimate for San Bernardino’s project is just for the first phase. While that’s a lot of money for a city like San Bernardino, decision-makers think they can find the funds to get going, partly drawing on a massive water bond passed by state voters.

These projects also take a long time to complete, as much as 10 to 15 years.

While she didn’t come up with the idea, Mayor Valles has become identified with the water project, and is taking the heat for it. To her, a local girl who made it good in the world beyond the confines of the insulated, working-class Inland Empire, the problems of her hometown are too serious for incremental action.

“This is a bold venture,” admitted Valles, a lifelong educator who has served as president of Oxnard College in Ventura County and Golden West and Coastline community colleges in Orange County. “It is a painful one also. [But] water can be and should be a catalyst to turn our city around.”

Mayor Known for Toughness

If those who stayed are tough, Valles might be the toughest. Striding into a room, peering over her glasses, her angular brows furrowed with intensity, she exudes confidence in herself and her ideas. Those who want her time had better use it well.

A graduate of San Bernardino High School, Valles made a career as an educator in other parts of the state, but kept her home in San Bernardino. After seeing what was happening to her hometown, she decided to run for mayor in 1998.

Since taking office, she has embarked on an aggressive campaign to clean up the city. The Mayor’s Demolition Initiative has been responsible for leveling scores of dilapidated structures. But she admits that she is impatient with the slow process of change.

Her dynamism is catching. Some aides who were successful in private industry went to work for the city only because of her.

“I would not have taken the position if it was not for her,” said June Durr, the mayor’s spokeswoman, who had spent her career in corporate marketing.

“The mayor is fantastic,” agreed Henthorn. “She’s a can-do person.” And, he said, “she’s not afraid to take criticism.”

That’s good, because she’s gotten her share, from those who say that she forsook a campaign promise not to build a big lake downtown to those who accuse her of callously planning to toss the elderly into the street.

“My name is carved into the back steps of a house they are planning on demolishing,” said Owen, the self-described human rights activist. “That will not happen. We will do whatever it takes to stop it.”

Valles tries to assure her critics that no final decisions have been made about which homes to raze. As to her campaign promise, she said she didn’t promise not to build anything downtown, just not a giant lake.

A joint powers authority composed of the city, the water district and a regional redevelopment agency is expected to vote sometime this fall on whether to move ahead with a project, and what type to build. The City Council would have to ratify it. Meanwhile, a historian doing an archeological review of the area said he expects to recommend preserving a couple of historical districts reflecting the housing that accommodated the town’s early railroad workers.

Valles sees a bright future for her city and sometimes wonders why others don’t.

“The comment [I hear] over and over is, how much is this going to cost?” she said to the protesters. “My question is, how much are we willing to invest in the future of the city?”