A Looming Ecological Mistake

It’s been a good year for parks. The most remarkable year ever, in fact. In an unprecedented outburst of cooperation among community groups, environmental organizations, government officials and conservancies, the state has agreed to purchase 1,659 acres along lower Topanga Creek, extending the reach of Topanga State Park clear to the ocean. A major park expansion in the Baldwin Hills is moving forward. State funds have been set aside for parkland along the L.A. River at the old Taylor railway yards and at the Cornfields near Chinatown. And with Playa Vista developers clearly eager to sell their land west of Lincoln Boulevard, and the state ownership of 70 acres east of Lincoln, the potential for Ballona Wetlands expansion and restoration has never been greater. These long-overdue acquisitions of parkland in any city would be something to celebrate. In Los Angeles, with its appalling ratio of parkland to people, it’s a crucial triumph.

But in this year of good news, there is also a colossal environmental mistake in the offing: the planned development of Washington Mutual’s Ahmanson Ranch on more than 2,800 acres of Ventura County land at the headwaters of the East Las Virgenes fork of Malibu Creek. While the media have focused on the effects that the proposed development will have on Ventura Freeway traffic, or on the development company’s retention of former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt as its environmental fixer, the big picture has been overlooked. Ahmanson Ranch is not simply a beautiful and pristine swatch of coastal chaparral: Its habitat and ecological diversity are unique in Southern California. The ranch is home to at least two endangered species--the only population of California red-legged frogs in Los Angeles or Ventura counties is found there, as are tens of thousands of endangered San Fernando Valley spineflower plants, a species thought since 1929 to be extinct.

The ranch is located in the 110-square-mile Malibu Creek Watershed. Downstream from it are Malibu Creek State Park and Malibu Lagoon--Los Angeles County’s only brackish wetland, home to the endangered southern steelhead trout and tidewater goby--and the world-famous Malibu Surfrider Beach. The Malibu Creek Watershed is already on the brink of environmental disaster. Malibu Creek and Lagoon are polluted with nutrients and fecal bacteria from urban runoff, broken septic systems, horse ranches and discharges from the Tapia Water Reclamation Facility. Water quality in Malibu Creek and Lagoon is so poor that the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board ordered the Tapia plant not to discharge effluent during more than six months each year. Surfrider Beach is routinely the most polluted beach along the Santa Monica Bay. A 1995 epidemiology study demonstrated that people swimming in its runoff-polluted waters are far more likely to become ill with stomach flu, respiratory infections and skin rashes than those swimming elsewhere. In 1998, Heal the Bay, the Santa Monica Bay-Keeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council successfully sued the Environmental Protection Agency to require them to develop water standards and enforceable cleanup plans for all of Los Angeles and Ventura counties’ most polluted waters, including nearly the entire Malibu Creek Watershed.

Washington Mutual promises a development reminiscent of a Tuscan hill town like Sienna. But to build the Manhattan Beach-sized city, the company proposes to fill one linear mile of the Malibu Creek Watershed headwaters with earth from the flattened mountaintops of the ranch. Much of this fill will be dumped into the creek directly upstream of the red-legged frog habitat. Extensive grading will move 45-million to 50-million cubic yards of soil on the ranch to make room for 3,050 homes, a resort hotel, a town center and two golf courses. The grading and construction will take eight years, during which steep hillsides, stripped of vegetation, will be susceptible to erosion. Sediment from these hillsides will deposit silt in Malibu Creek and its tributaries, destroying habitat for frogs, fish and the insects they eat.

When building is finally complete, two golf courses will be placed beside and on top of Las Virgenes Creek, and they will likely discharge harmful fertilizers, pesticides and fungicides into the water that flows through red-legged frog habitat all the way to Surfrider Beach. Paving and building will render nearly 20% of the Ahmanson Ranch impermeable to rainwater and runoff, far above the 10% level known to cause irreversible water quality and habitat degradation. More impermeable land leads to more urban runoff, with higher concentrations of nutrients, fecal bacteria, toxic heavy metals and petroleum hydrocarbons. Already, the baseline dry-weather flows in Malibu Creek are 20 times higher than they were 50 years ago because of wastewater discharges and urban runoff. Additional stormwater runoff would result in massive habitat degradation caused by erosion and sedimentation throughout the watershed. Furthermore, the fate of the treated sewage generated by some 10,000 residents on the ranch has yet to be determined.

None of the aforementioned impacts was addressed by Washington Mutual in its 1992 environmental impact report. In fact, the developer claims not to have found any endangered species on the site until 1999, long after legal challenges to the original EIR by the City and County of Los Angeles, Calabasas, local homeowner groups and the environmental group Save Open Space were exhausted. With the potential for such devastation throughout the Malibu Creek Watershed, one would expect Washington Mutual to complete a comprehensive environmental review. Instead, the company recently spent an estimated quarter-million dollars on a series of full-page ads in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times touting planned conservation efforts for the endangered species on the ranch. These dollars would have been far better spent on the preparation of an environmental document that takes into account the massive changes in the watershed over the last decade.

In the Los Angeles area, we have paved over 95% of our wetlands and channelized nearly all our creeks and rivers. As this remarkable year has demonstrated, open space is a critical issue to everyone who lives in, works in or visits the region. The costs of remediating and restoring developed land--as we are seeing at Cornfield and Taylor Yards--are substantial. So why, when an undeveloped and ecologically important piece of land is about to be permanently and devastatingly altered, are we not moving to intervene?

If we can’t protect the headwaters of Malibu Creek, what can we protect? If we can’t restore the Malibu Creek Watershed, with its valuable resources like Malibu Lagoon and Surfrider Beach, what can we restore? We hear about heroic efforts all over the world to save unique areas of unparalleled biodiversity. We understand and embrace efforts to save rain forests in distant lands. Ahmanson Ranch, Malibu Creek and Surfrider Beach are extraordinary areas in our own backyard. As history has demonstrated, it is wiser to preserve natural resources than to try to restore them.