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By Deborah
Schoch
Los Angeles Times
September 25, 2005
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."
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