Port May Help L.A. Marshes

The Port of Los Angeles has spent more than $100 million in recent years to restore coastal marshes in Orange and San Diego counties, rankling Los Angeles-area conservationists struggling to save remnants of endangered wetlands closer to home.

Now, port officials may try to earmark funds to preserve marshes within Los Angeles, notably the Ballona Wetlands and former marshland in the harbor area. S. David Freeman, president of the city’s Harbor Commission, plans to take up the issue Wednesday with the rest of the panel, newly appointed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

“I’m going to lay out the concept that we’re willing to make a commitment to wetlands that can be resurrected and preserved in Ballona and San Pedro and Wilmington,” Freeman said Friday, adding that the promise of new funding may prove a catalyst for agencies and groups that deal with such restoration.

“There’s an old expression that money talks,” Freeman said.

Such a commitment could be a significant boon for groups fighting to salvage the last fragments of marshland along the city’s heavily developed coast.

“If this is going to be the direction staff is given, it’s just a big win for the places in Los Angeles that have long been neglected,” said Marcia Hanscom, executive director of Wetlands Action Network.

Community activists in San Pedro and Wilmington said that they, too, would welcome port funding for much smaller wetlands efforts they hope to launch close to the port.

But federal and state officials cautioned last week that a focus on Los Angeles projects could face significant legal and logistical challenges. They say that Ballona and other local projects may not be the type of wetlands restorations that the port could fund and receive the same economic and development benefits it has reaped from earlier projects in other counties.

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have emerged as two of the largest funders of coastal marsh restoration in California, propelled by major port expansions that required filling portions of the harbor they share.

Salt marshes flush with shorebirds once lined the Southern California coast, but 95% have been destroyed by development, leading to fierce battles to salvage and restore the few pockets that remain.

The two ports were required by law to compensate for the marine habitat lost with construction by funding the restoration of habitat elsewhere, but no suitable restoration projects were underway in Los Angeles County at the time. So millions of dollars in port funds went to restore marshland farther south in the 1980s and ‘90s, notably at Bolsa Chica, Anaheim Bay and Upper Newport Bay in Orange County and Batiquitos Lagoon in San Diego County.

The Port of Los Angeles has spent $57 million at Batiquitos and $40 million at Bolsa Chica, which after a decades-long battle is one of the largest ongoing wetlands restorations on the West Coast.

Conservationists in Los Angeles County have long felt shortchanged, particularly those fighting to preserve the largest marshlands remaining on their shores -- the Ballona Wetlands, south of Marina del Rey, and the Los Cerritos Wetlands in southeastern Long Beach.

Prospects for restoring Ballona have brightened considerably since the state purchased nearly 200 acres there in 2003 and the Playa Vista developers committed hundreds of acres more. The state Coastal Conservancy is beginning work on a 600-acre restoration plan.

Restoration at Los Cerritos remains stymied because of stalled efforts to strike deals with several private landowners for the property near Pacific Coast Highway and Westminster Avenue. That has frustrated Long Beach residents, especially with new malls and stores tightly ringing the property and a Home Depot proposed nearby.

Port of Long Beach officials would like to spend wetlands funds at a Long Beach-based restoration, such as Los Cerritos, but the port probably will not need more credits in the foreseeable future, environmental planning manager Tom Johnson said.

Talk of channeling port funds to Los Angeles projects surfaced publicly Sept. 14 at the first meeting of the five-member Harbor Commission that Villaraigosa appointed this summer. Commissioners were scheduled to approve another $11.4 million for the Bolsa Chica restoration, the same amount that Long Beach commissioners approved a few weeks earlier.

But Hanscom urged commissioners to take heed of projects closer to the port, and the panel delayed voting on the Bolsa Chica funding to allow more study. Now Freeman has reserved time for discussion at the group’s second meeting, set for 6 p.m. Wednesday at Liberty Hill Plaza, 100 W. 5th St., San Pedro.

Freeman said that he does not plan to renege on the port’s funding for Bolsa Chica, but that he wants to make sure that so-called “wetlands credits” are available to allow for future port expansion. He underscored that the Villaraigosa administration wants to promote port growth in an environmentally sound fashion. That means the port will need to fund more wetlands projects to earn more credits to expand, said Freeman, former general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. The cost of such credits has been escalating -- from $150,000 per credit in the late ‘90s to $300,000 per credit today. Investing in such credits makes economic sense, Freeman said. It would also send a message to shippers that the port is committed to expanding, he said.

No vote is scheduled for Wednesday, but Freeman said he anticipates a resolution coming to the commission soon that not only supports investing in Los Angeles projects, but also puts money behind that support.

State and federal officials warned that complex requirements govern the type of restoration that can be used by the port to offset its construction in offshore waters and it’s possible that neither Ballona nor smaller projects in San Pedro and Wilmington would qualify. In fact, planning for Ballona is only getting started now, they said.

“The problem is, there isn’t any project that’s been developed at Ballona. It’s difficult to say if there’s a port project there or not,” said Robert Hoffman, Southern California environmental coordinator for the National Marine Fisheries Service, which helps oversee the system of granting credits for wetlands restoration.

Mary Small, the Coastal Conservancy’s Ballona project manager, said the port would need assurances that the project would include the type of habitat that could legally offset port expansion.

“Decisions about exactly what the habitat at Ballona would be -- they haven’t been made yet,” Small said.

Yet some city residents say they are encouraged.

Wilmington activist Jesse Marquez said he is lobbying the port to fund wetlands projects at the mouth of the L.A. River and in the area of Wilmington known as the Consolidated Slip.

San Pedro residents hope to restore a marshy area near Cabrillo Beach.

June Burlingame Smith, a San Pedro activist, said that future wetlands funding still would not compensate harbor-area residents for the damage in their neighborhoods caused by decades of port growth.

“That’s a huge issue,” she said. Still, Hurricane Katrina’s effects on the Gulf Coast have focused new attention on how the loss of wetlands can remove an important natural guard against flooding, she said.

“Those who are aware of how wetlands protect the environment,” she said, “would certainly like to see the port agree as to their value and use the money accordingly.”