Friends of the Santa Clara River, Santa Clarita Organization for Planning and the Envronment (SCOPE), the Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity, and Wishtoyo Foundation and its Ventura Coastkeeper Project yesterday sued the County of Los Angeles over its approvals of the first phase of the Newhall Ranch project. Advocates for the Environment, a non-profit law firm of which I am the Executive Director is the law firm representing  the five environmental groups. The petition and complaint is available online.

The first phase of the Newhall Ranch project is called “Landmark Village” and is designed to be a pedestrian-friendly, new-urbanism sort of development, like Disney’s infamous Centennial project in Florida. But the project is an environmental horror because a substantial part of the project is to be built in the floodplain of the Santa Clara River. Protecting the development from the river when it’s flowing fast will require “channelizing” the river, i.e. erecting concrete barriers to keep the flow within the desired channel. While Newhall’s “buried-bank stabilization” is more visually appealing than a traditional concrete storm-drain channel, it has the same effect on the river.

The Los Angeles River was “tamed” by the Army Corps of Engineers in the years between 1935 and 1959, turning it into a network of concrete storm drains. Now, Friends of the Los Angeles River and other environmental organizations are gradually restoring the Los Angeles River, creating parks alongside it, and making it more attractive and accessible.

Why do we need to go through this cycle with the Santa Clara River? It’s the last wild and free river in southern California, starting high in the San Gabriel Mountains and running out to the ocean between Oxnard and Ventura. You can see it by driving Route 126 from the coast up to the I-5 freeway near Magic Mountain. In most places, it’s a beautiful broad river valley, and the Newhall Ranch project will destroy its beauty, at least the portion in Los Angeles County.

The Newhall Ranch project hurts the environment in lots of other ways: the urban runoff will poison the river; paving over so much land will diminish groundwater recharge; the project will disturb and interfere with important Native American sites; condors will lose more of their habitat; traffic, already bad in the area will grow significantly.

The Environmental Impact Report for the project is available online. Running to many tens of thousands of pages, it tries to convince the reader the project is environmentally benign, and that most of its environmental effects have been “mitigated into insignificance.” But it still fails to properly analyze many of the project’s environmental effects. And it’s very difficult to read and understand because the final version is published as redlined update pages to the previous version, so you have to flip back and forth between version to see the whole picture.

The inadequacy of the EIR and the inconsistency of the Landmark Village project with the Los Angeles County general plan is the basis of our lawsuit. We hope to use the litigation process to convince Newhall Land and Farming Co. to improve the Landmark Village project environmentally, particularly to keep it out of the Santa Clara River.

The petition/complaint is online.

Some online press coverage:

• Los Angeles Times
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Daily News
• Santa Clarita Valley Signal
• Ventura County Star
• Courthouse News Service
• SCV News
• The Republic

Center for Biological Diversity’s Press Release is also online.

It’s amazing how many important environmental issues there are in Los Angeles, and at what a high rate they arise. Here’s a sampling of things I found about this week, just to give an idea of the rate at which major environmental issues and campaigns arise.

Ballona Wetlands Restoration

According to the LA Times, the California Coastal Conservancy has approved spending $6.5 million to plan the restoration of the Ballona Wetlands. Of course the project is controversial, with some environmentalists opposing industrial-sized restoration projects.

AES Power Plant in Redondo Beach

AES, a global company, has filed an application to build a natural-gas fired power plant in Redondo Beach. It will be strongly opposed by environmental groups.

Los Angeles County General Plan

I was also reminded, at a Sierra Club meeting, that the Los Angeles County General Plan update is expected to be complete around the end of 2012. The EIR will be available for comment this summer. This is a hugely important project for those of us who care about land use in L.A. County. We need to work to ensure that the plan requires care for the environment as much as possible.

I just finished reading Land of Sunshine, labeled “An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles,” edited by William Deverell and Greg Hise.  It’s not really an environmental history, but rather a series of environmental-history essays about Los Angeles. Nonetheless, it’s well worth reading for anyone interested in L.A.’s environment.I’ll discuss some of the essays in future posts. Highlights:

• L.A. was a grassland prairie before it was developed. A wide area was periodically inundated by floods.
• There was a big fight about oil drilling on L.A. County’s beaches in the 1920′s and early 1930′s. This history of oil drilling in L.A. provides a background for a number of environmental fights going on over building housing on top of oil fields, such as in Coyote Hills, Montebello Hills and Baldwin Hills.
• Flood control in the L.A. River converted the river into a network of concrete storm drains, effectively wasting a huge volume of storm water by conveying it rapidly out to sea. It’s a model of what not do do in the Santa Clara river. We’re right now at the point of deciding the fate of that river – it’s not too late to adopt a different paradigm up there!
• John McPhee’s essay on “Los Angeles versus the Mountains” provides great background for today’s decisions about what to do with debris filling our flood-control debris basins. The recent tree-murder of a hundred native oak trees in Arcadia, by cutting them down to make room for hundreds of dump-truck loads of sediment, is an example of what not to do. But, given the huge volume of debris being generated by the San Gabriel Mountains, which John McPhee says are the quickest-growing mountains in the world, it’s not easy to find a good solution.
• The section on zoning and environmental equity is very relevant for our east side. We have a number of communities, such as Bell, City of Commerce, and City of Industry, that were set up in order to provide a legal and regulatory environment that is good for business. This means, according to their proponents, that enviornmental controls should be loosened. The problem is that a lot of lower-income people, mostly Hispanics, live nearby and suffer health problems as a result. Municipalities traditionally have control over land use and local environmental decisions, but there’s an environmental-justice issue when polluting industries are concentrated in such a configuration.
• Jennifer Price’s wonderful article “13 Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.” makes a case for nature writing about urban issues. She challenges that nature is something we encounter away from home, e.g. in Yosemite or the Grand Canyon, not near home.
• Some of the articles are a bit academic, such as the one on changing attitudes of Chicanas and Latinas toward animals. This article in particular seems out of place.

At their Dec. 13, 2011 meeting, the Orange County Board of Supervisors drastically reduced the licensing fee for the Orange County Landbase from $375,000 to between $1,000 and $5,000 depending on the type of use. The OC Resolution is available on the California Public Records Access Project’s litigation blog page.

The Sierra Club is suing Orange County to obtain the OC Landbase, which is a GIS map of all the 640,000+ parcels of land in Orange County, under the California Public Records Act. Under the PRA, the fee for providing this information should be the direct cost of copying, under $10. The great majority of California counties currently provide their GIS parcel data for a nominal fee like this.

Orange County adopted its resolution drastically reducing the fees it charges for the landbase while its lawyers were replying to the Sierra Club’s brief in the California Supreme Court. In its reply brief, Orange County claims that the fee changes were motivated by Prop. 26, and the resolution was adopted to avoid the OC Landbase licensing fees being considered a tax under Prop 26, which would require voter approval under Cal. Const art XIIIC section 2.

This change may have been also motivated by the Sierra Club lawsuit. As part of the Prop 26 evaluation, Orange County surveyed numerous jurisdictions throughout the country, and evidently found that their landbase licensing fees were significantly higher than the national average.

As a result of the new Orange County resolution, a much broader range of  non-profits and individuals can now afford a copy of the OC Landbase at least for important mapping projects. This is an important step, but doesn’t go far enough. As a public record, the data should be available to everyone for just the cost of copying. And requiring licensing fees and agreements stymies state and federal efforts to integrate parcel data into publicly-available wide-area parcel databases.

When the Sierra Club lawsuit is decided, we expect the Supreme Court to rule that this data must be provided for the cost of copying under the PRA. In the meantime, someone might bring a nice class-action lawsuit against Orange County to recover fees they’ve charged their licensees since Prop 26 went into effect about 14 months ago.

Happy New Year, and welcome to Advocates for the Environment’s Los Angeles Enviro Blog. I will discuss environmental issues affecting the greater Los Angeles Area. The header on this page, by the way, uses a photo taken in the Verdugo Mountains, from a site within the City of Los Angeles. Though LA has a low density of parks per resident, particularly in poor areas, it has some of the largest urban park areas in the country, such as Griffity Park, the Verdugo Mountains, and Topanga State Park.