"Malibu Vs. Joe Edmiston;" The Issue: Access to Open Space

The Daily News recently ran an article entitled "Joe Versus Malibu, Part 2," detailing how this beachfront haven of Hollywood celebrities has once again locked heads with "the superstar of public space, Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy Executive Director Joe Edmiston." What is going on here, Joe?

I think it is a classic case of a small, local jurisdiction that happens to have some important public resources resisting public access. There is a legitimate controversy between the needs of the locals, as they perceive it, for peace and quiet, and the need for the public to have access to resources that they have spent millions dollars purchasing.

What is the status of this coastal access dispute?

We're going to be filling with the Coastal Commission something called a public works plan, which covers five different canyons in Malibu, linking those canyons with trails, overnight camping, and development of related facilities. That is probably going to the Coastal Commission sometime in November. We're having a public hearing in Malibu, which is going to be interesting, next Monday. We expect a couple hundred "Malibu-ites" with pitchforks. Actually, they don't use pitchforks-they use lawyers and sophisticated electronic gadgetry.

The Malibu Public Parks Enhancement Plan is at the heart of this dispute. What issues does this plan raise?

We trying to finally link up and provide access to areas that have previously been considered as individual parks. We would have Ramierez, Canyon, Escondido Canyon, Solstice Canyon, Corral Canyon, and Zuma Canyon, each one of those, accessed with greater or more difficult levels of availability. We want to create a coastal slope trail that links all of those together and put in trail camping and, in some cases, handicapped-accessible camping, at each one of those canyons.

The purpose is to finally provide overnight camping in Malibu. Right now that is illegal. A big sign greets visitors from the Valley as they come over Malibu Canyon Road that says, "Overnight camping prohibited in the city of Malibu." We want to change that.

Malibu officials are saying that the Conservancy's plan deliberately circumvents the city's own coastal plan and permitting oversight. What is your response to that charge?

It is not a circumvention. The law specifically provides that when you have a project of greater-than-local importance, you can go directly to the Coastal Commission, and that's what we're doing. It's clear that the Malibu City Council is opposed to this proposal. And to give one local jurisdiction a veto over the use of park resources by everyone in the state just didn't seem fair. So, we are using those portions of the law that specifically allow us as a public agency to go to the Coastal Commission rather than the city of Malibu.

Turning to state issues, in the November gubernatorial contest, a rhetorical battle is brewing between the candidates over who is greener, the Democrat or the Republican. Is that not the best of all possible worlds for you?

A lot of us have been waiting for a long time to have the battle over who is greener, as opposed to whether one should be green or not. I'm not sure that having a battle over it is better than having a consensus. The next step is to move toward consensus, and that is going to take a lot more energy than just press releases on both sides.

Lewis McAdams profiled you this summer in L.A. Magazine; he wrote: "(Joe) is the only boss that the 25-year-old organization (SMMC) has ever had. During that time he has brokered, threatened, cajoled, lobbied, networked, and generally out-planned, out-thought, and out-fought anyone who has stood in the way of the acquisition, restoration, and opening to the public of 55,000 acres of once-private land." Is there anything to add to the credentials McAdams describes?

Lewis is a friend, but he's also a poet. That's certainly not the way an historian would write the story of the SMMC. We need to roll up our sleeves and make the lands that we have acquired accessible and useable. For the first quarter-century of the Conservancy's existence, the issue always was that there had to be another acquisition on the horizon.

We couldn't take out the time or money to develop and improve facilities or make them accessible because there was another critical development that had to be stopped. There are certainly a lot of necessary acquisitions now, but there aren't the Sokas or Ahmanson Ranches to deflect all of our energies.

We have acquired 60-65,000 acres that have not been opened up to the extent that they should be. Now, some of it shouldn't be opened at all. Some of it is pretty pristine wilderness. But that doesn't exist in Malibu, and where it's appropriate, our focus is going to be getting people to use and benefit from the resources that they've spent so much money acquiring.

In addition to the Malibu dispute, what are SMMC's other priority projects?

I think it all depends on Proposition 84. If Prop 84 passes, then there's a whole other watershed program focused on both the coastal watersheds and the Los Angeles River watershed. If Prop 84 does not pass, then I think that we'll be in a holding pattern waiting for another resources bond.

Elaborate on the watershed projects and their importance.

Park planning has gone through two phases. The old Frederick Law Olmsted "stand in the middle of the valley, and if you can't see anything from ridgeline to ridgeline, then that's the ideal park planning element." Then conservation biology arrived in the 1970s and '80s, and that deals with habitat linkages and the context of larger habitat blocs.

Now we're realizing that the issues are so complex that nothing short of a watershed-by-watershed basis can suffice. That's particularly true of the Los Angeles River watershed. There are so many issues having to do with TMDLs and water quality, and every land acquisition means that there's going to be less development. Every new redevelopment project that has a greener component to it contributes to the larger scheme of water quality.

We've come full-circle in that now we're saying that water quality is probably the most significant determinant of where public agencies ought to be spending their money. And that's the new paradigm that Prop 50 and the work of the Regional Water Board has imposed on all public entities. Prop 84, if it passes, would continue that watershed protection paradigm started by Prop. 50.

Mayor Villaraigosa wishes L.A. to be the greenest big city in the country, and he'd also like to encourage elegant density given that a million new residents are expected over the next decade or two. How do we realize both goals?

I just came back from Italy, and, for example, Venice is an island, and it's pretty dense. The buildings are three and four stories with very few backyards, yet there wasn't a time when I couldn't look down a street and see another plaza or mini-park. They're all over the place, and kids were playing in these areas, which are maybe 3/10 of an acre green spots. And you could always walk to those green spots.

To me, an ideal city has regional parks, but it also offers the ability to go from green spot to green spot-not just backyards. So public green spaces scattered equidistantly through the more dense communities will benefit everyone. With more housing, there's more recreation, more trees, and a much more pleasant environment. Everybody goes from Los Angeles to all the other places in the world. There probably isn't a city that is less dense than Los Angeles, and we can have world-class parks and density and green spaces.

Is it fair to say that there has not been much emphasis in metro L.A. on regional and community planning; and on the integration of infrastructure investments, housing, jobs, green space, and schools? We seem to plan on a transaction-by-transaction basis. How do we change those processes?

I think there has to be disciple on the part of the decision-makers-get the plan and stick to it. Everyone understands long-range planning to be a joke. There hasn't been a major project anywhere in L.A. County that I can recall that has stuck with the current zoning or the current general plan. Everybody wants a general plan amendment, and when you operate on that basis, there is no comprehensive planning. If a project gets a zoning variance, then it's economically foolish for the project down the street not to do the same thing.

The statutes are there; we've had comprehensive planning in California since the planning and zoning law, which is over 50 years old. So it's not for want of laws or tools. It's for want of political willpower to enforce the plan.

How important are the infrastructure and water bonds on next month's state ballot?

For the first time, those bond measures have built-in mitigation. The housing bond has strong mitigation and planning components, and there are strong planning components in Prop 84. I think the Legislature and the governor did a good job bundling things together, and I especially want to give credit to Sen. Perata for insisting that these measures include good planning.

Give us update on the restoration of the LA. River. Where does planning stand today, and what investment choices do we face in the upcoming years?

Having just come back from looking at the Arno, and the Tiber and the Grand Canal, it's hard not to look at the L.A. River and wonder why we can't do a better job. The most critical issue confronting the river is whether we can make enough physical change to the river to slow it in some critical areas in the Valley such that we can change the nature of the containment of the river from a box culvert to something greener and more beautiful.

Studies indicate that it wouldn't take very much to change the gradient enough to have a major physical change in the river. Everyone has always assumed that we couldn't do anything about the concrete walls because the river has to carry so much water in the flood stage. But the studies found that by making some relatively small changes, then the river can accommodate flood stage and still not be a box culvert. It would make all the difference in the world.

But unless we do that, I fear that everything we do on the river is just going to be little dabs of green here and there, and fundamentally it's still going to be a cement box culvert. I'm looking forward to the day when we agree that that's not good enough for Los Angeles.

Lastly, you've collaborated in the past with New Schools/Better Neighborhoods and others about how best to site, plan, and develop over 150 new public schools in the L.A. Basin. We know that 60 years ago the county invited the Army Corps to stop the flooding on the L.A. River, but asked for no more, and that's why we have that concrete box culvert. Are we repeating those mistakes 60 years later with LAUSD's school goals of building more seats and nothing else? How do we define our public works projects so that we get the long term results we all want: a healthy river and livable learning neighborhoods?

That's the best question I've been asked in a long time.

How do we get beyond building seats? It really has to go to the mission. Well-run organizations carry out their missions. For example, the Conservancy's mission includes such things as environmental education. So we don't see building a nature center or classrooms as somehow being ripped off by education. It's part of our mission.

The schools have to have a broader mission to the community such that when you want to put in green space or a community clinic or other community facility that they don't say, "Ah! Our precious education dollars are being ripped off by somebody else." The fight for education money has created this hoarding concept on the part of education that anything that is not seats or salaries or books is outside the mission. Unless we change that paradigm, then we will never have anything other than seats, salaries, and books.

I also go back to the community centers movement around the turn of the 19th century. Realizing that we had a tremendous immigrant population that needed education and assimilation into American ways and values, the idea was that if we're going to invest in infrastructure for education every school should be a community center to serve multiple objectives. This movement spread throughout the country.

We've lost that sense that schools are not one-dimensional and that they are the heart and soul of the community, both in terms of physical space and their cultural relationships.

Take my elementary school in the Montebello School District: they used Proposition A money to create a park at the school that operates from 3 p.m. to closing and all day Saturday and Sunday, and it looks greener and more beautiful than when I was there 50-some years ago. If it can be done in combination with the Montebello School District and the Monterey Park City Council, then why can't it be done on a larger scale with even more resources-such as the L.A. City Council and the school district.

If there's one thing I would counsel the mayor to focus on is this integration. If all you're doing is focusing on seats, then you're missing the point. Demographers tell us that the cohort has already passed us. By the time we finish that building program, some schools simply won't have the enrollment. That doesn't mean we don't build schools. It means we build schools that when you don't need 50 classrooms but can do with 30, you have alternative use for that space and have built enough open space that it can become a community park as well as a school.

We don't have to look any further than some of the suburban communities for living examples. It is a tragedy that in the largest city in California, we can't do what some of the smaller cities have done. The mayor hasn't asked my opinion on this, but my advice to him is that this is the most important thing he could do to make a contribution towards the governance of LAUSD.