L.A. River Marker System Is Getting Back on Track

With the once-desolate Los Angeles River emerging as a popular recreation area, city officials decided to create a system of place markers and computer mapping that would help emergency crews pinpoint the location of people who call needing help.

As part of a pilot project, the painted markers would have been placed on both sides of the river from Los Feliz Boulevard to Fletcher Drive. But 2 1/2 years after the idea was first proposed, the mapping system remains incomplete and has become the subject of much finger-pointing and confusion.

Apartment manager Tony Taylor, 59, learned this in December when he came across the body of a man hanging from a sycamore tree in one of the pocket parks along the river.

Taylor said a city official had told him a week earlier that the location system was in place. He glanced at the walking path for the nearest marker and called a police dispatcher, giving her the mile location “22.8.”

“She had no idea what I was talking about,” Taylor said. “The markers meant absolutely nothing to her.”

The markers on the east side of the river were put in place more than a year ago. But they have not been connected to the Los Angeles Police Department’s computer locator system. On the west side of the river, which includes a bicycle path, the markers have yet to be painted.

Gina Shovan, an LAPD senior lead officer whose beat includes the Los Angeles River from Colorado Boulevard to Fletcher Drive, said the signage program would be a great aid to law enforcement. The blue-and-white markers, which have a mile number and depict a heron, would essentially act as new addresses along the river.

“In case of emergency, it would be extremely useful not only to help dispatch but the officers,” Shovan said. “Especially with the influx of new officers into the division, it would be nice to know there’s a number out there that will help officers respond quicker, rather than relying on a guessing game.”

Taylor is not the only person who thought the program had already been launched.

Councilman Ed Reyes, who chairs the council’s Ad Hoc River Committee, said he found out only on Monday that calling police with the marker numbers was futile.

“To be honest, I thought it was already done. I saw the markers when I was riding a bike with my kids one day” during the summer, Reyes said, adding that he hopes the system will be up and running in two weeks.

At City Hall, officials offered different reasons for the delay, including a slow bureaucracy, a lack of funding and a shift in priorities. Even the storms that drenched Southern California early this year have been blamed.

The city’s Bureau of Street Services, which operates under the Department of Public Works, was busy cleaning up the damage in the city after the rains, said Dennis Weber, general superintendent of the bureau.

But the most compelling reason given for some of the delay involves a shooting in February in a downtown maintenance yard.

On Feb. 24, a city street worker who had reportedly been reprimanded for being late to work opened fire with an AK47 and killed his boss and another co-worker.

Renee Ellis, an official for the city Bureau of Engineering’s architectural division, said the stencils used for the west bank markers were thrown away because they were damaged in the shooting.

On Tuesday, Weber said the stencils may have been in an office behind the desk where the shooting occurred. He said a cleanup crew may have thrown them away because blood had spattered on the stencils.

Weber said that in March his office was “given notice that the west bank had to get done.”

Now, he said, the stenciling on the west bank could be completed by this week. However, the Bureau of Engineering’s computer mapping group would then have to incorporate the numbers into emergency computer systems.

City Councilman Eric Garcetti said that whatever the reasons, the program should not have taken so long to complete.

“I’ve been very frustrated that it’s taken this long,” Garcetti said. “I know that this was an additional piece of work ... but if people do not feel safe being [at the river], it’s going to be very difficult to have this shining jewel.”

The program began in 2003 after Garcetti asked the LAPD for stepped-up bike patrols along the Los Angeles River.

Garcetti was told that there were no statistics to justify the need, in part because there are no addresses to report crimes along the river.

In June of that year, Garcetti and Reyes proposed painting markers along a portion of the river in Atwater Village. If the one-year pilot program was successful, it could be expanded, city officials said.

Garcetti said his priority still remains having “dedicated” police patrols along the Los Angeles River and installing cameras, but that the signage program would enhance the reporting of crimes.

“Sometimes it’s the big things that are easy to do, and the little ones that are harder to do than you expect,” Garcetti said. “Small things should not trip us up so much.”

The plan corresponds with an increased desire to turn the river into a draw for visitors. The city is trying to get grants to beautify and improve the river.

“We really want to make this place a destination for recreation,” Reyes said. “But to make it a destination, safety is a high priority.”

Taylor, a North Hollywood resident, visits the river in Atwater Village four times a week to feed the geese and ducks that stop in the waterway.

It was on one of these visits in December that he found the young man hanging, apparently already dead, from the tree. He called police dispatch on his cellphone, confident that the city had already connected the markers to the LAPD’s computer locator system.

In the end, he said a young man in the area hopped on a bicycle and flagged down police and paramedics on Los Feliz Boulevard.

Taylor said he was not inclined to blame city workers for the delay because he believes city leaders bear the larger brunt of responsibility.

“They’re the ones who are elected, they’re the ones who get their names in the paper over and over and over for projects like this,” Taylor said. “They take all the credit, so they’re the ones to blame for it.”