A Restored, Revived L.A. River: Master Plan Process Contributes to Realization of Dream

The city is in the midst of an 18-month planning process for the L.A. River. It's gathering input for the design of a master plan. Give us your thoughts on how that input process is going and what your hopes are for the eventual master plan.

As far as I can tell, it's going very well. I think City Engineer Gary Lee Moore and City Architect Deborah Weintraub, who are really the forces behind writing the RFP for this thing, are doing a masterful job. One of the things they did that I thought was so important was to write the RFP so that the firms that bid on it really had to focus hard on wetlands restoration as a vehicle for creating parkland and cleaning the water in the river, and as a vehicle for flood detention. All of those things together mandate the creations of large parks along the river – the "emerald necklace" of the entire Los Angeles County. Remember, except for Antelope Valley, the Los Angeles River's watershed is Los Angeles County. So you're talking about something immense.

The half-billion dollars from Prop O is going to create really maybe five projects, but they can be quite large and can become, we're hoping, the first projects to take concrete out of the river. The stretch along the riverfront in the Taylor Yard seems to be an ideal place to begin removing concrete and creating terraces and planting trees where people can actually come down and sit near the river. Actually, it's already started. Northeast Trees has planted thousands of trees along the river in the past ten years. Their little vest-pocket parks have been the biggest accomplishments up until the Cornfield and the Taylor Yards.

Your reference to such examples and the promise of next ten years is important. What can we expect from the current input process that we haven't already learned from the more than ten years of past efforts to revitalize the river?

This effort is by far the most comprehensive. It covers the entire course of the river through the city, which is about 60 percent the total length of the river. So you can begin to think about these larger issues. Up to now, the accomplishments have amounted to a small number of park spaces along the river.

This plan will not only deal with creating park spaces but will also deal with flood detention, wetlands restoration, water quality, and development. We see parkland creation as working quite well in areas where the river is still heavily industrialized.

There are tremendous opportunities for redevelopment in those areas and creation of entertainment zones, apartments, lofts, more housing along the edges of the riverfront parks. This is a pretty big plan, and as far as I can tell, the team in charge is up to the task.

Expand on FOLAR's potential role in helping to improve water quality in the river, as well as the ambiance of the river.

We issued our first report, which, hopefully will be an annual report, on the water quality of the river. Its title is, "Towards a Swimmable, Fishable, Boatable River," and that's our goal. We want the river to be healthy enough that the steelhead trout run can resume after it's been cut off for the last 75 years or so. That's obviously a hard goal to reach, but on the way to that, we can have a much healthier river.

The river is not actually terribly unhealthy north of Downtown, but from Downtown all the way to the ocean, it's disastrous. To clean that up means rethinking the stormwater runoff issues of Los Angeles, which the Regional Water Quality Control Board is doing. But they're still hung up in this lawsuit that's stopping them from making the total maximum daily load (TMDL) into law. I think that has to be settled.

FOLAR put out a long letter laying out what we saw as the issues. I think that there are some basic principles, and I think that our job is to push the principles of water quality improvement, outdoor education on the river, and just continuing what we've been doing, which is to make the river the front yard of the city rather than the backyard.

My own interest is the future of the river through Downtown. The river is 4.5 miles through the heart of the city, and for those entire 4.5 miles, the river is lined on both banks with railroad tracks. The river is completely inaccessible for that whole distance. We think that it's time that the city, the state, and the federal government bite the bullet and begin to plan to put the railroad tracks underground. Burying the tracks to Grand Central Station led to Park Avenue being built up and Midtown Manhattan being developed in New York. Many cities besides New York in the world have done that. And then you create parkland on both banks of the river, and behind that you start to be able to redevelop old industrial buildings into larger living spaces, which would help to pay for and maintain these parks.

One of the things I'm looking forward to coming out of this study is how to begin that process. It's obviously a generational change, but now when people are interested in the river, it's the time to look at this issue.

You refer to 75 years ago. Is it not true that if the County Board of Supervisors had given better instructions to the Army Corps of Engineers regarding flood control 75 years ago, we'd be much closer to realizing FOLAR's river goals today? Rather than just "stop the flooding," what should the Corps' instructions have been?

Essentially, you can do two things. You can get the water to the ocean as fast as possible, which is what they did. Or you can create flood detention basins, like the Sepulveda Basin or Pan Pacific Park, which detain floodwaters for the two or three days that it's raining and then release it downstream. But that would involve taking more land.

When you're creating parkland, you also have to create flood detention. Things that solve only one problem at a time are obsolete. Essentially, that's what the Corps did. They solved the flooding problem, but they didn't solve any of the other problems, such as water quality and parkland creation.

This sounds eerily similar to the facility challenges LAUSD faces. They tend to myopically focus on the need to build seats and to avoid the attendant need to plan and build healthy learning communities.

It is a very similar situation, but thankfully the city Bureau of Engineering-and I assume Ron Deaton was involved in collaboration with Gary Moore and Deborah Weintraub's office-has now addressed the river much better. This is evident in the way they wrote the RFP. And to me, the team of Tetra Tech, Mia Lehrer & Assoc., Civitas, etc. are very capable of thinking in a holistic way.

One of the things that was really wonderful about the RFP process was to realize that there are a lot of talented, capable people that can do this work. With $500 million in Prop O, as we learned from the Cornfield and the Taylor Yard, we should be able to get some significant new parkland and wetlands, and some significant improvements in cleaning the river.

But this is just the first phase. By the end of this phase the city will be a considerably nicer place to be, but it will be far from the end of the restoration of the L.A. River. One of the humbling things I learned in San Antonio is that they've been working on the San Antonio River since the Depression.

These are major infrastructure projects. It's like building subways. You have to think of restoring the river at that level of public commitment over long periods of time. And the way you get that political will is through successes. As the tiny vest-pocket parks in Frogtown spawned the Cornfield, the Cornfield will spawn a number of new parks that are perhaps a little more sophisticated and multi-purposed.

Progress will require collaboration between the county, the Corps, the stakeholders along the river, and the environmental interests. What will keep all parties together?

I think successes will. One of the things I learned at the beginning of this process, 20 years ago, is that most people can't see things that aren't there. You have to give people examples of success in order to encourage them. Success encourage the public to support larger and greater things. I think that this big move by the city – Prop O and the master plan process – is another major step. I think people will be really happy, but it's going to take a few more years to see the implementation of recommendations.

One of the most critical issues is governance. There has to be a county-wide Los Angeles River authority with final say on river issues over the L.A. County Department of Public Works and the Corps of Engineers. That's what they do in San Antonio, and I'm hoping that the restoration master plan shows us the way to get to that point in L.A.

You speak of Prop O as if its funds are dedicated to the L.A. River. Elaborate on your hopes and expectations for Prop O.

It's true that it's not exactly an L.A. River bond issue. But the president of our board, Jose Sigala, is on the Prop O oversight committee, and I'm very hopeful that the vast majority of that proposition will go towards the projects that are recommended by the Tetra Tech team. But I'm also very scared that the money is going to be dribbled away in other projects. I know they've already done a couple calls for proposals, and I have not yet been mightily impressed in terms of any of these projects having to do with the river. They've been relatively small financially, but I'm really worried about it. You're right, in a sense these two issues are not directly connected, but they'd better be.

Would any project that dealt with cleaning the water flowing into the L.A. River be eligible?

Yes, definitely. That's the beauty of the way the RFP was written. The projects that come out of this have to contribute to cleaning the L.A. River. Cleaning the river is not going to be done by just one thing. This is obviously a vast watershed with immense problems, but calling for the cities to reduce the volume of trash in the river is critical.

We do an annual cleanup – the next one is May 5 and 6 – and we take out 25 or 30 tons on a Saturday morning, but that's just a drop in the bucket. Plenty of education and legislation must be done. My mantra has always been that the river is going to be there; whether it's ugly or beautiful is up to us.

Let's close with your sharing what you do in your free time, when you're not working for FOLAR.

I'm writing a biography of Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone, for Knopf. I'm trying to tell the story of the last 50 years of American culture. It'll probably be about 600 pages. And I have a new book of poems out, The River, Books I, II and III, and by poetry standards it's selling like hotcakes.