I’m living in Brooklyn now and so, for obvious reasons, am no longer updating this blog.

I’ll leave it available online for now.

I’ll be happy to direct any future visitors to Nature Trumps to any new blogs devoted to the River that I’m made aware of, so please let me know of any.

Thanks to everyone who’s contributed to this blog, with a special thanks to Katie Smith, who made it possible; Lewis MacAdams, who accidentally gave it its name; and Carmelo Gaeta, who taught me so much.

All best,

Jay Babcock

PRESS RELEASE:

Sunday, July 6th 9:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.

On Sunday, July 6th, TaskForce and Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) come together to present a day-long, unique performance and bus tour with River guide Jenny Price and poet Suzanne Lummis. This will be a once in a lifetime chance to see the masterful creativity of TaskForce using the LA River as both muse and stage. $45 FoLAR members; $50 non-members. Lunch included. For more information and reservations, e-mail Alicia at akatano@folar.org.

TaskForce is a new and unique touring performance company will be performing site-specific performance tour of water related sites throughout the Los Angeles area. Artistically directed by veteran site artist Stephan Koplowitz, TaskForce is made up of artists drawn from the fields of dance, music and visual media who will move across a range of locations to create performances in response to unusual, inspiring or challenging spaces.

PRESS RELEASE:

“On June 21, 2008, shortly after dawn, WALKER, a Los Angeles artist, will launch 6,564 yards of clear packing tape in the form of thirty zafus (Zen meditation cushions) that will traverse the length of the Los Angeles River, from the Sepulveda Dam to the Long Beach Harbor, a distance of over forty miles. A contingent of monitors/documenters will follow on bicycles to record the progress of these pod-shaped objects until they reach the harbor where they will be retrieved by boat to prevent them from going out to sea. No animals or environments will be harmed as a result of these actions.

“This project is the inaugural event for L A L O C A, a recently conceived arts organization dedicated to promoting idea based art. WALKER is a Los Angeles based artist.”

From the Los Angeles Times – June 5, 2008

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers confirms non-navigable status for most of L.A. River

The ruling sparks sharp warnings that it will weaken federal Clean Water Act rules protecting the river’s sprawling 834-acre watershed.

By Deborah Schoch, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials announced today that they are standing by their decision that most of the Los Angeles River is not navigable.

The ruling sparked sharp criticism from some other regulators and conservationists who warned that it will weaken federal Clean Water Act rules protecting the river’s sprawling 834-mile watershed.

They believe the ripple effect of the decision will make is easier to develop large areas of the Santa Susana, Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains because landowners will not be required to obtain certain federal permits. Some federal and state officials fear that the decision also may undermine rules against discharging wastewater and storm water into the river’s tributaries.

Corps officials said that they will continue enforcing the Clean Water Act as usual along the river.

“This decision does not in any way lessen the protections on the L.A. River itself,” said Col. Thomas H. Magness IV, who oversees the Southwest regional office.

The Corps review of the largely concrete-lined urban river has been attracting national attention, since it is among the first to test the scope of a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that weakened protection of certain seasonal streams of the sort common in Southern California and the arid West.

Some landowners have questioned whether altering or building on those streams should require federal permits because the streambeds may only contain water a few weeks or months annually.

The 2006 ruling linked such Clean Water Act protections to the closeness of such streams to “traditional navigable waters.” The streams would have to have a direct effect on water quality in a navigable waterway to be protected, the ruling said.

The Corps made one change to its draft decision by adding as navigable the two miles of the Sepulveda Basin in the San Fernando Valley to the 1.75 miles of river between the ocean and the Pacific Coast Highway bridge in Long Beach. Adding the Sepulveda basin section of the river will extend protection to upstream tributaries, Corps official said, but they did not identify the specific streams.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) said in a statement: “I am disappointed with the Corps’ draft determination, and urge EPA to ensure the entire L.A. river basin remains protected by the Clean Water Act.”

deborah.schoch@latimes.com

“Is the L.A. River up a creek?” – June 1

If the waterway is not officially deemed to be ‘navigable,’ many of its tributaries could lose important protections.

By Deborah Schoch, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Over the years, the Los Angeles River has been redrawn, clad in concrete, tainted with chemicals, invaded by countless Hollywood car chases, dismissed as a glorified storm drain.

Now comes the latest slap. The city’s river can’t even float enough boats to qualify as a full-fledged navigable waterway, according to the Army Corps of Engineers.

River advocates are outraged.

“They’re just wrong. That’s the simple version of it. We’ve done kayak trips from the Valley to Long Beach a dozen times in the past 10 years,” said poet and writer Lewis MacAdams, founder of Friends of the Los Angeles River.

It doesn’t end there. What might seem a minor bureaucratic tweak by the Corps could have a domino effect across the river’s 834-square-mile watershed, say worried environmentalists and some federal, state and local officials.

Critics say the draft decision issued by Corps regulators weakens federal water protections for many seasonal streams that feed the river. They say this could translate into more mountain development and more dirty runoff flowing through cities to the Pacific.

“Practically speaking, the March 20 decision would open up a number of tributaries and streams to the argument that the Clean Water Act doesn’t apply,” said David Beckman, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

But how is the Clean Water Act — among the strongest federal laws guarding rivers, lakes and streams — linked to the ability to float a boat down the Los Angeles River?

The answer is cloaked in bureaucracy and court rulings.

A 2006 U.S. Supreme Court decision weakened the power of the Clean Water Act to protect certain seasonal streams. Federal regulators who decide whether a stream is protected by the law must first find the closest navigable waterway. Then they have to decide whether the stream has any effect on that waterway.

If it doesn’t, landowners may not be required to obtain certain federal permits before building homes, roads or other projects over those seasonal streams. Their plans, however, would still be subject to local zoning laws and building codes.

In a case involving the Los Angeles River, regulators determined that most of it isn’t navigable in the first place. So some streams on the edges of its watershed — most in the mountains and foothills ringing Los Angeles — may lose some federal protection, critics say.

The local Corps officials who wrote the March 20 draft decision say they strictly followed guidelines developed after the Supreme Court decision.

“When we looked at the L.A. River, we did not find evidence of navigation” beyond the Pacific Coast Highway bridge in Long Beach, two miles north of the ocean, said Aaron Allen, the regulator who wrote the draft decision.

He stressed that the decision does not weaken any federal laws that protect the water in the river, which is fed in part by reclaimed water from sewage treatment plants. He agreed that seasonal streams far up in the watershed, however, could have less protection.

But in the face of critics’ concerns, the Corps has withdrawn the navigable river decision pending further study. The results of that review are expected within days.

Col. Thomas Magness, commander of the Corps office that oversees part of the Southwest, emphasized that the Corps is working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on a final decision.

He promised, “it’s going to be something we can all understand and defend.” He said it was “purely speculative” to conclude that designating the Los Angeles River as nonnavigable would lead to more lax development standards over streams. “I would not begin to throw in the towel and submit to that conclusion.”

Any proposal to fill in or build over streams will still be reviewed on a case-by-case basis “on its own merits,” he said.

Yet the Los Angeles River case is attracting interest in Washington and elsewhere in part because it’s among the first in the nation after the Supreme Court decision.

“The implications of these decisions could be quite large,” said David Smith, chief of wetlands regulation at the EPA southwest region, who has met twice with Corps officials while trying to change their decision.

Los Angeles River defenders such as Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) and Nancy Sutley, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s top environmental deputy, have written letters to federal officials, criticizing the river ruling.

“If the Corps of Engineers applies a similar approach to other rivers, protections against water pollution that are now taken for granted could be seriously eroded throughout the nation,” Waxman wrote in a letter to the EPA. He said the draft decision could undercut Clean Water Act rules governing waste discharges, dredging, oil spill prevention and water quality standards in much of the Los Angeles River basin.

Meanwhile, local river enthusiasts are rushing to collect photos and videos of friends and relatives paddling on the river in canoes and kayaks.

Their goal is to prove that yes, indeed, just like the Mississippi and the Potomac, Los Angeles’ river is worthy of navigation — maybe not by cargo ships, but at least by canoes.

Web of tributaries

The drama got its start not on the river but in a far-flung web of tributaries in the Santa Susana Mountains north of Chatsworth.

There, rancher Wayne Fishback hoped to fill some seemingly dry stream beds to build a road and prevent erosion on his sweeping mountain property above Brown Canyon Wash, a tributary of the Los Angeles River. He asked for guidance from the Corps of Engineers, which regulates parts of the Clean Water Act.

Fishback’s request landed on the desk of Aaron Allen, chief of the Corps’ North Coast office in Ventura, who holds a UCLA doctorate in fluvial geomorphology, or how streams shape the land.

Ten years ago, Allen’s job would have been easier. In those days, federal clean-water laws typically covered the seasonal streams, marshes and pools common in the arid West.

All that changed with the 2006 Supreme Court decision in which Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that the Clean Water Act would apply to a water body if it had a “significant nexus” with “traditional navigable waters.”

So Allen’s review ballooned into a full-scale review of the Los Angeles River. He concluded that only 1.75 miles of the river upstream from the ocean is navigable.

The remaining 49-mile stretch — which cuts north through southern Los Angeles County and then west into the San Fernando Valley — did not meet the legal test of being navigable, he wrote.

“Presently, the occasional use of kayaks and/or canoes on other reaches of the river are sporadic and do not support any associated commerce,” Allen wrote in the March 20 memorandum. Nor could he find evidence of historical navigation.

“Finally, the capacity to provide navigation at some point in the future is highly doubtful given the river’s configuration, hydrology and fundamental use as a flood control channel.”

Memo leaked

For Fishback, that was good news: His land lies so far upstream from the PCH bridge that he probably can fill four of his streams without navigating the time-consuming permit process.

But when the Corps memorandum was leaked to river advocates in April, the uproar ensued.

George Wolfe, a Venice-based kayaker who founded the satire website www.lalatimes.com, helped create a video last year featuring him commuting by kayak on the river in a business suit.

“As a boater with some 30-plus years of boating I can honestly say that it’s a perfectly navigable river,” he said in a letter submitted to the Corps along with the video.

Some local officials are urging the Corps to conduct its review in public.

“My agency wasn’t consulted, wasn’t made aware of it,” said Tracy Egoscue, executive officer of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, who learned about the decision from the EPA and criticized the lack of citizen input.

Magness said the Corps invested countless hours in the decision and conferred with other federal, state and local officials. “By no means have we done anything without public involvement.”

But for Egoscue and others, the designation reaches beyond the thicket of environmental bureaucracy.

Egoscue characterizes the Corps’ decision as showing “a fundamental lack of understanding and respect for the resource to come in and make a decision without citizen involvement.”

“It’s not just about the law and the permits this board writes,” she said. “It’s about the perception of the river. . . . The Los Angeles River is our Potomac.”

deborah.schoch@latimes.com

MAY 13…

TODAY (JUNE 5)…

As promised by L.A. City Councilman Eric Garcetti’s deputy Mitch O’Farrell, the clearcutting by chainsaw has indeed continued…

Large foot-wide tree limbs have been severed…

Meanwhile, as predicted, the bamboo-like arundo is already growing back strong in the areas where it was chainsawed last week.

You cannot remove arundo from an area without removing the underlying root mass, which requires herbicides… and that’s in the best case scenario, where you have a limited infestation. We do not have a limited infestation of arundo in the Narrows — it’s massive. To get rid of the root mass would likely require removing the islands altogether.

To summarize: if the goal is to curtail the infestation, a half-measure like clear-cutting stalks

a) is doomed to fail
b) causes inadvertent damage and disruption to the rest of the environment and its inhabitants
c) may actually make the arundo distribution in the environment wider, as roots, plant detritus and so on enter the air and water and find new places in the River to grow

This is a fatally flawed plan. Apparently the chainsawing work crews are part of a “Clean and Green” program the City is doing. Whoever organized and approved this plan should know better. They should also cease this counter-productive work immediately.

Visited the River late yesterday afternoon and ran into Tony Taylor, the Duck Man. Weather has cooled and he said he hasn’t seen any new duck carcasses.

Saw some baby geese with mother who are doing well. Beautiful!

Tony says it looks like it was mostly the Muscovys that died. We’ll see what happens. The water is still pretty putrid (low oxygen) from the excess early-season algae that happened this year, and as long as that’s the case, this could flare up again. (“The Botulinum bacteria is harmless unless exposed to low oxygen conditions, which allows it to grow into a vegetative state that contains a toxin capable of paralyzing the muscles and respiratory systems of fish, birds and humans.” ([source])

There’s some speculation going round as to why the algae bloom came so early and heavy this year. More on that later.

No pictures, but yesterday I witnessed Tony (the Duck Man) moving a large duck corpse into the open River water, trying to get it to sink. I asked him what was happening. He told me that there’s been a massive die-off of muscovy ducks, mallards, geese and drakes in the last week in the Atwater area of the Glendale Narrows, between the Sunnynook footbridge and the Los Feliz bridge.

Tony said the muscovy population has dropped over a few days from around 40 to around a dozen. The drakes are almost gone. There are only 7-8 geese left. The mallard hens are mostly gone, and we’re not seeing any baby ducks, which is extremely unusual. He said this happened once before, in 2001 or 2002. What’s happening now, he says, is avian botulism. Maggots eat the duck corpses, and then the surviving ducks eat the maggots, catch the virus and die.

The plague can be stopped if the corpses can be disposed of in time — that is, removed from the River and burned or buried, or sunk in the water.

Tony says his phone calls and letters to local government authorities and agency officials pleading for monitoring of the situation and prompt corpse disposal have gone unanswered. So, he’s doing what he can, himself. But he can’t be down there all the time, and the situation is made worse by the high heat…

According to TIM WARNER at
http://www.atwatervillage.org/forum/threads.php?id=1521_0_13_0_C:

“FYI [CD13 deputy Mitch O'Farrell] and a botanist from the Army Corps. of Engineers walked the islands a couple weeks ago and the botanist marked the Arundo and some other vegetation for removal so that when they come back shortly to remove the Arundo root systems they can minimize the intrusion. The money is coming from a grant. [Mitch O'Farrell] also said they looked for birds nests and other signs of wildlife at that time to make sure they would not disturb anything…

In a later post late Thursday night, TIM WARNER reported: “Mitch says the project should be over within two weeks and that he will not have time to have a meeting before then. Sorry I wish I had better news than that. He also said that crews have started cleaning up the debris and will continue to do so over the next couple days and that it will hopefully be gone before the FOLAR clean up ["La Gran Limpieza," Friends of the L.A. River's annual volunteer clean-up of the River, scheduled for Saturday, May 17].

“I asked if in the future the public can have more involvement and prior knowledge of such work or proposed work and he said he would be happy to talk to and include members of the public in the process. He did mention there is the possibility of some more projects in the near future for any of you interested in finding out more. His email is: Mitch.ofarrell@lacity.org

In a later post this morning, TIM WARNER wrote, “I walked down there this morning and the amount cleared out is surprising. I also saw that a lot of the debris is still there. I have been getting email responses so I will follow up and see what other info. I can get.”

This whole series of events is just nuts and reflects poorly on LA City Council District 13 councilman Eric Garcetti.

Eric Garcetti is a very smart guy, who I’ve voted for, who I’ve met, and who who I admire and respect — but he’s also been very busy in the last six months, what with holding the president’s chair at City Council and campaigning all over the place for Obama.

Somehow I doubt that Eric knows about what his deputy [Mitch O'Farrell] is up to here. I can’t believe Eric would approve of the high-handed way in which river users, naturalists and advocacy organizations are being treated by his office–even Friends of the L.A. River can’t get through to these people.

Just doesn’t make sense.

The River is a BIGGER than CD13. It is not even completely in CD13’s jurisdiction, it also falls under other city council districts, county supervisorial districts, and so on, up to and including the federal level (Army Corps of Engineers), etc.

No single office or government agency has power in the River; and to the degree that one entity has any power, it certainly does not include the right to unilaterally order the chainsaw clearcutting/destruction of habitat by untrained workers.

CD13 should not be going into the River and doing stuff on its own, or even in tandem with a single botanist from ACE. They don’t have the right to do so. This is not their River to do with as they please.

This is a power-grab. It needs to be stopped.