Community Conservancy International Releases Impressive Study on Green Solutions for Public Land

Executive Summary

Green Solution Projects improve water quality by using soil, plants, and natural processes to capture, filter and clean polluted urban and stormwater runoff, while creating new parks, natural habitat, recreation and other open space lands.

...For a copy of the complete report, go to www.ccint.org/greensolution.html.

Nearly all of the county's waters are in violation of federal and state water quality standards. CCI's Green Solution Project study presents a creative, practical and fresh approach to these problems by focusing on unpaving concrete and impervious areas and retrofitting pervious areas on existing public lands throughout Los Angeles County, so that these lands can act as natural filters while also providing important and badly needed park, habitat and recreation opportunities.

The results of this study are quite exciting, as they show that there is indeed a substantial amount of land throughout every watershed in the county-up to 20,000 acres-suitable for Green Solution projects. These findings are particularly important as the need for innovative solutions to both water quality problems and the lack of park, habitat and open space in urban areas continue to grow.

As part of Community Conservancy International's focus on critical problems affecting people and the environment, CCI identified polluted urban and stormwater runoff as an increasingly serious and pressing need in California, and especially in Los Angeles County, where extensive urbanization has resulted in vast areas of paved surfaces and daily high volumes of contaminated runoff. These same urbanized areas are among the most park-poor in the United States, lack natural open space that serve as a healthy respite to city dwellers from urban congestion, and have lost nearly all of their native habitat lands.

The long-term, damaging impacts of polluted urban and stormwater runoff on beaches, aquatic life, and human health and on the health of oceans, birds and marine mammals worldwide have been well documented. This Green Solution approach is essential to effectively address water pollution produced throughout the nation, and particularly in areas where the natural functions of watersheds, rivers and the soil itself have been dramatically altered. CCI initiated, designed and directed the Green Solution Project study, provided the initial funding, and secured the public and private grants to fund this work. This study focused on the water pollution clean-up needs within the watersheds of the L.A. County Flood Control District.

Green Solution projects focus on combining land conservation with water quality improvements to:

• Create new habitat and open space to naturally clean up polluted runoff

• Re-green urban areas

• Restore native habitat to cultivated landscapes

• Develop new recreation opportunities

• Protect threatened creeks and rivers, as well as the ocean and coastal waters

To be considered a Green Solution, projects must:

• Convert paved, impervious areas to pervious lands that allow water to filter into soil and plants

• Retrofit existing pervious areas to effectively catch, filter, clean, store, and, reduce runoff

• Create multiple benefits, such as parks, recreation, habitat, and other open space opportunities

...Until CCI's Green Solution Project study, the conventional assumption made in examining how to improve water quality using natural Green Solutions in L.A. County was that this approach was not really feasible, as very little land was believed available for these types of solutions. Part of this perception was due to the assumption that only existing open space or vacant lands were suitable for conversion to Green Solutions.

The CCI study found that there is a wide range of existing public lands, in a variety of land uses, that are in fact potentially suitable for creative multiple-benefit, Green Solution projects.

A Fresh and Practical Approach: Green Solutions on Existing Public Lands

The Green Solution approach can be implemented in any area that needs to address urban runoff pollution problems. Conventional thought has often been that, in heavily urbanized areas, very little land is available or suitable for conversion to green, multiple-benefit projects that can naturally filter and clean urban runoff...We found that a significant amount of land does exist that is suitable for Green Solutions-and that there are also a surprising number of large (greater than 10 acres) parcels that could be effectively utilized.

The CCI Team's analysis found that nearly 40 percent of the polluted runoff clean-up needs in the county could be met by implementing Green Solution projects on existing public lands (based on average need and acres of suitable land). The CCI Team's analysis showed 10,027 parcels of public lands with some portion suitable for Green Solution projects. The team's analysis found that an average of 39,000 acres are needed county-wide for Green Solution projects, and that a net average of 15,000 acres of existing public lands in the county are in fact suitable for Green Solution Projects. By implementing Green Solution projects on these public lands, an average 360,000 acres of drainage area could be treated. We found a maximum of 20,000 suitable public acres with Green Solution project potential.

While Green Solution Projects can be implemented on both public and private lands, focusing on existing public lands offers a cost-effective and readily available solution not only to the increasingly serious water quality problems in Los Angeles County, but also to the demand to make communities healthier and more livable by creating a green network of park, native habitat, recreation and other open space lands, as well as to the growing need to address drought and global warming issues by capturing, conserving and recycling our increasingly precious water resources.

The Problem: Polluted Urban Runoff Impacts L.A. County's Rivers, Bays and Beaches & Ocean Waters Worldwide

There is an urgent and growing need to clean up polluted runoff to improve water quality throughout Los Angeles County. Serious water pollution from stormwater and daily urban runoff plagues all of the rivers, streams, lakes, coastal waters, bays and beaches in the county, endangering the health of people, animals and the aquatic and marine life dependent on these waters for survival, closing beaches, causing grave economic impacts, and polluting ocean waters around the world.

Pollution associated with stormwater and daily urban (dry weather) runoff can only be solved by addressing the generation of pollutants, and the flow and treatment of runoff throughout each watershed, and by taking full advantage of all opportunities for conversion of paved, impervious surfaces to pervious surfaces that allow soil and plants to naturally infiltrate and clean water.

Almost 100 different pollutants are found in L.A. County's waters in amounts significantly above federal and state public health standards. Nearly all water bodies in Los Angeles County-rivers, streams, lakes, bays, ocean-are in violation of the U.S. Clean Water Act, which sets water quality standards intended to protect human health and marine and aquatic life. These pollutants have contaminated over 300 miles of rivers and streams, 160,000 acres of lakes, both Santa Monica and San Pedro Bays and the entire county coastline. UCLA and Stanford University scientists found that up to 1.5 million people get sick each year from infections and gastrointestinal illnesses caused by bacteria at L.A. County beaches. L.A. County had the worst beach water quality record in California in 2005, as well as the five most polluted beaches in the state.

The pollution impacts from urban runoff are endangering oceans and marine life around the world. Sixteen million tons of trash end up on L.A. County's beaches every year-and this does not count the additional millions of tons that are carried by ocean currents and which accumulate in huge floating "rafts" of plastic trash in the Pacific Ocean between California and Japan. The largest of these is twice the size of Texas. Trash chokes one million seabirds worldwide every year; plastic is found in the stomachs of seabirds, turtles and marine mammals around the worlds, and toxic pollutants and bacteria from runoff can be fatal to marine mammals. Low oxygen "dead zones" are spreading due to increasing fertilizer use and growing coastal populations.

Urban runoff is polluted water from sprinklers, yards and landscaping, from hosing down driveways, sidewalks, cars and parking lots, from washing equipment outside businesses, and from other daily home and business uses that flows-untreated in any way-through county and city drains every day, even in dry weather. All property in every community throughout the county produces runoff, and in dry weather generates a total of 330 million gallons of water every day-enough to fill the Rose Bowl four times over. This daily runoff carries pollutants from homes, landscaped areas, businesses and parking lots directly into our creeks, rivers, lakes, beaches, bays and ocean-in most cases without treatment of any kind.

When it rains, the problem is far worse, as the high volumes of stormwater carry huge amounts of trash and pollutants through the county's drainage system very quickly. On rainy days, the flow can increase to 6.5 billion gallons per day. In an average rainfall year, over 150 billion gallons of stormwater flow through the county's drainage system, without treatment of any kind.

Pollutants in L.A. County's stormwater and daily urban runoff include infection-causing bacteria, toxic metals, pesticides, household and industrial chemicals, trash, oil, oxygen-choking fertilizers and other toxins. High bacteria counts cause serious illnesses and thousands of beach closures in L.A. County every year. Summer beach closures cost local cities millions of dollars in lost revenue, and these ongoing ocean and beach pollution problems hurt L.A. County's worldwide image as a desirable tourist destination.

The Importance of The Green Solution

Many water quality experts and scientists believe that much of the toxins, bacteria and other contaminants carried by daily urban and stormwater runoff can be permanently addressed by directing these polluted waters to a network of new and well-designed "green" areas: new and restored natural habitat, parks, and recreation lands that allow soil and plants to naturally filter and uptake water and pollutants as well as providing a wide range of open space and other benefits. This would also provide desperately needed park, recreation and habitat in areas throughout urbanized L.A. County that are starved for these amenities.

As a result of decades of intensive growth and development, much of the county is now heavily urbanized; this extensive development has resulted in a majority of the county's urban areas being paved with concrete, asphalt and other non-porous or impervious substances that do not allow water to penetrate into the soil. This widespread imperviousness is one of the biggest causes of L.A. County's polluted runoff problems. Green Solution projects provide one of the most viable and effective means of permanently cleaning up polluted runoff because they restore the natural functions of soil and plants to capture, filter and clean contaminants from runoff before it reaches rivers, bays, beaches and the coast.

Green Solution projects include regional scale projects on large parcels that can clean runoff from surrounding areas and serve a large drainage area, as well as local or on-site projects, which typically clean runoff just from that site, and serve small drainage areas.

These Green Solution projects can make urgently needed and lasting water quality improvements in the county's polluted waters, and can provide many multiple benefits, including:

• reduce infection-causing bacteria

• remove other pollutants

• reduce runoff volumes

• store and recycle water for later use as irrigation

• improve water quality in rivers, at beaches, and in Santa Monica and San Pedro Bays

Green Solution Projects are proving to be one of the most effective and cost-efficient ways to make lasting water quality improvements consistent with the requirements of the Regional Water Quality Control Board. While providing park and recreation opportunities in heavily urbanized and park-poor areas and restoring important natural habitat, Green Solution Projects can also be effective "water recyclers", and can reduce the effects of drought caused by global warming by catching, storing and re-using stormwater to water parks and landscaping or to sustain natural areas.

Green Solutions effectively utilize natural treatment processes that take advantage of the natural functions of soils and plants. These include biofiltration (filtration of pollutants through vegetation and soil), bio-uptake (biological processes such as the assimilation of pollutants such as nitrogen and phosphorous, which soil and plants can convert for their beneficial use), infiltration, runoff volume reduction through evapotranspiration, and other biological, physical, and biochemical processes that significantly improve water quality. In many cases, natural treatment processes are more effective than other types of more structural and conventional Best Management Practices because they are passive systems, requiring little energy, operations and maintenance-often similar to conventional landscaping maintenance...

Recommendations and Next Steps

Next steps should focus on public lands within specific watersheds that are most suitable for Green Solution projects. Further studies should develop site-specific concept designs for Green Solution Projects that combine park, habitat and recreation with water quality improvements aimed at naturally cleaning polluted runoff on the highest priority sites that meet strict water quality, land conservation and community needs criteria. Water quality, hydrologic, land conservation, open space and community demographic data must be integrated to carefully analyze, prioritize and rank for project implementation those lands selected as most appropriate for Green Solution projects in each watershed. Top-ranked, specific sites should then be selected for development of Green Solution Project concept designs; these sites should be representative of sites throughout the watershed and should be chosen for maximum replicability to produce the greatest possible benefits to both water quality, natural and human communities.

Water quality, land, conservation and community need and demographic information that should be researched and quantified include the following:

Water Quality Improvement Factors

• Pollutant loading and runoff quantity

• Potential water quality benefit

• Area-specific hydrology

• Proximity to storm drains

• Size of drainage area to be treated

• Other site-specific opportunities

Community Need Factors

• Park & open space deficit

• Public access need & potential

• Youth density

• Population density

• Income

• Other demographics

Land Conservation/ Multiple Benefit Factors

• Nexus with other park & open space uses

• Trail and river connectivity potential

• Potential for trail creation

• Habitat connectivity & need

• Habitat sensitivity

• Habitat restoration potential

Conclusion

Community Conservancy International's Green Solution Project Study demonstrated that significant and wide-spread opportunities exist on public lands in Los Angeles County to address serious polluted runoff problems that harm human health and the environment, while re-greening the heavily-urbanized landscape in the county by creating new networks of park, recreation, habitat and other open space lands...

The CCI Team found that there are between 9,500 and 20,200 acres on 10,000 parcels of public lands currently suitable for Green Solution Projects in all of the watersheds in L.A. County, and that conversion or retrofit of these publicly-owned lands would address nearly 40 percent of the polluted runoff problem in the watershed that can be dealt with by Green Solutions-while also creating badly-needed park, habitat and other green open space amenities for surrounding communities.

This new and innovative Green Solution Project approach presents a practical way to move forward quickly to protect and improve water quality throughout Los Angeles County and to establish a network of green open space, park, recreation and habitat lands. In addition, the Green Solution Project approach has ramifications throughout the United States. The Green Solution approach can be applied in any area which needs to address pressing water quality problems due to runoff, and which wishes to emphasize the multiple benefits that can be achieved by Green Solution Projects through restoring and creating habitat, park, recreation and other open space lands.