Originally printed in GLUE-L.A. March 25, 1998

Ballona Baloney

By Rex Frankel

It's Friday afternoon. The rush hour traffic is whizzing by 10 people who are holding signs at a street corner covered with wildflowers south of Marina Del Rey. This curious, devoted group, who call themselves "BEEP!", has shown up every Friday at 5:00 P.M. for the last two years to protest the proposed real estate development, called Playa Vista, which will wipe out these wildflowers, replacing them and much of the marshy Ballona Valley nearby with a square mile of concrete, condominiums, and congested traffic. Vying for the right to pave over this rare L.A. open space are two of wall street's biggest financial powerhouses, Morgan-Stanley and Goldman Sachs, and the producer of many of Hollywood's recent blockbuster movies, Steven Spielberg -- and his multi-billionaire computer-monopolist partner, Bill Gates.

The battle over the Ballona Creek wetlands and wildflowers has lasted 20 years. Along the way, local groups have filed six lawsuits, mostly unsuccessful, to halt the development plans. Over that time, many millions have been given to local, state and federal politicians to grease the wheels of this massive proposal, on land mostly zoned for agricultural use until the mid 1980's, to allow the construction of over 13,000 high-rise condos and apartments and around a Century City's worth of office, hotel and retail space. Playa Vista is the last stand for wildlife in the City of L.A., say preservationists, and if built would be the largest development ever in L.A. City's history.

Supporters of Playa Vista say it's the most futuristic, "environmentally sustainable" development in the city's history. Indeed, if hiring many recycling, energy conservation and water pollution consultants were the barometer for sustainability, this project would get high marks. Folks in the local environmental community say what looks good on paper, however, means little in the real world of gridlock, overflowing sewers, and unbreathable air. All these good intentions mean little, they say, if there's no "teeth" to the promises to be "sustainable", or if politicians let the developer back out on the promises at the last minute. Local preservationists say what we'll get, instead, is just another sprawling dense development covering 2/3rds of this open space, creating the 4th largest polluter in the City, adding another 28% more rush hour traffic to the San Diego Freeway, while the 1/3rd which won't be developed, left as parks and a wildlife preserve, will be so severely compromised by smog and traffic noise as to be useless to the creatures it's being set aside for.

"Save All of Ballona" is the rallying cry of the locals, who have gathered the support of over 80 local and international community, Native American, animal rights and environmental organizations, from the Sierra Club, to Greenpeace, to the Surfrider Foundation and the California Public Interest Research Group, to the Green party and the Gray Panthers.

It Comes Down to Money

"We have no money to buy it," is the response back from the downtown L.A. power establishment, including West Side council member Ruth Galanter. The local environmentalists point out that the landowner has been in bad financial shape, which is why Galanter, Mayor Richard Riordan and Governor Pete Wilson in 1995 dug up taxpayer-funded "incentives" of over $100 million to bail this project out of the financial toilet. Money was so tight last year that the project's lead developer, Maguire-Thomas Partners, lost the land to their lenders. After borrowing $158 million from Chase Manhattan Bank to buy the land from the estate of the late billionaire Howard Hughes back in 1989, and fighting off a court challenge filed by the group called Save Ballona Wetlands, Maguire stopped making payments on the loans three years ago. Chase then sold the mortgage, with interest valued at $200 million, at a $100 million loss to Morgan-Stanley and Goldman Sachs, who took over the project from Maguire. The locals point out that rather than give such an enormous pile of, basically, corporate welfare to these developers to help build the project, the public funds and "incentives" could go to buying and preserving the land as a nature preserve. And what's $100 million in these days of billion dollar defense department waste scandals. Buying all of Ballona would cost less than 1/3rd of a mile of the MetroRail subway, they point out.

L.A.'S Last Open Land

Howard Hughes bought up the Ballona Valley for around half a million dollars in the 1940's so he could build airplanes, and the famous all-wood Spruce Goose plane. He built hangars on the far east end of the three mile long by 1/2 mile wide property, and relocated Centinela Creek, which during winter turned much of his factory site into a "quagmire", according to a history of the site published by the landowners. Movie maker Spielberg wants to build his new DreamWorks movie production complex by the hangars, and his spokespeople are quick to claim that there aren't now and never were any wetlands nearby.

Kathy Knight of the Sierra Club says this is baloney. "Any evening when we walk on the Dunbarton Avenue trail near the studio site we hear hundreds of frogs croaking. Frogs live in wetlands, not pavement."

What, you may ask, is worth preserving at Ballona? Apart from being just about the last unpaved private land in the massive sprawl of the L.A. monstropolis, the marshy valley by the Ballona Creek is an important stop for birds migrating on the Pacific Flyway. The land contains over 1100 kinds of plants and animals, according to studies by the developer, the City, UCLA and the County natural history museum. About half of those are native to the area; the rest are escapees from our front yards. A new lawsuit was filed in January by three groups seeking to protect 10 birds and shrimp which are listed as "endangered species" under federal laws. During the summer, much of the Ballona area's salt and freshwater marshes and drier uplands look like a wasteland, as the once-green weeds turn brown under the summer sizzle. During late winter and spring, one can see orange California poppies, purple lupines, and yellow oxalis, better known as sourgrass. These annual flowers usually disappear by summer. But many of the perennial native plants are evergreen, such as the coastal sagebrush, a minty bush with what looks like pine needles which are soft as a cat's whiskers. Others are mulefat and arroyo willows, which live in the few freshwater creeks and ponds there. In the west end of the property is the salt marsh, which receives daily flows of ocean water through two flapgates in the Ballona Creek channel. This keeps alive about a third of a square mile of pickleweed, a green-to-reddish plant which looks like links of frankfurters. These native plants are the primary food and nesting grounds for federally protected endangered birds: the California gnatcatcher lives in coastal sagebrush, the southwestern willow flycatcher hangs out in willows, and the Belding's savannah sparrow lives off of the pickleweed.

According to experts, 91% of the State's wetlands have been developed or turned to farmland. 95% of L.A. County's wetlands are gone, leaving only Malibu Lagoon, Ballona and the Los Cerritos marsh in Long Beach in a natural state. Most of the Venice community south of Abbot Kinney Blvd. and all of Marina Del Rey were once part of the Ballona marshes.

Questionable Science

Wetlands are protected by federal laws because they not only serve wildlife, and provide the birthing grounds for many of the ocean's fish, but they also serve human needs by serving as flood control basins, protecting developed areas. They can also absorb urban street runoff pollutants from rivers before they reach the ocean. This pollution-cleansing ability has lead to much controversy at Ballona, because the developers seek to use some of the 1/3rd of the site not slated for development as treatment basins for the project's urban street runoff. Federal law already forbids the developers pouring their untreated runoff into the Bay. But this dual use of a wetland, as wildlife habitat and as a pollution treatment site, caused many of the plant and wildlife consultants hired to design the project's nature preserve to jump ship, and they now serve as the project's sternest critics.

Dr. James Henrickson, a botanist based at Cal State L.A. says the wildlife experts' views were misquoted by the developer. "They've not wavered from their original plans; they have ignored the comments of their own biological team while saying that we support their original plan without reservation.".

Dr. Rudy Mattoni, an insect and butterfly expert at UCLA, says the wildlife experts' studies were used as window-dressing on a project which had been decided long before the developer asked for expert advice.

"From the beginning of my participation on the biological field team until the completion of my report for the draft environmental impact report," Mattoni says, "a contentious relationship existed between the biological field team and the administrators of the Playa Vista project. The principal basis of the contentiousness was the belief of most of the biological field team members that the data they generated from field surveys was not being utilized in a neutral and scientific manner to discuss the true environmental impacts of the proposed project, but was instead being ignored in order to justify a project whose design was already a foregone conclusion."

By keeping the urban runoff out of the saltmarsh, the landowner can also use their saltmarsh as a wetland mitigation bank site, meaning that developers of other southern California wetlands can give money to "improve" the Ballona saltmarsh, and get wetland loss credits. Technically, this would convert shallow bird habitat into deeper fish habitat. In reality, this turns the concept of "no net loss" of wetlands, pushed by federal wetland protectors, upside-down, allowing loss of two acres of natural habitat for every one saved.

Locals have called this "externalizing" the development costs by the landowner. Rather than put their own money out to build Playa Vista, and sink or swim as capitalism dictates, the Ballona developers have got their hand out in a variety of ways. To build the streets and sewers in their project, they've asked the City and County to OK sale of tax-exempt Mello-Roos bonds of over $400 million, to be sold on the national bond markets. To build their first 570 apartments, they asked for $70 million in tax exempt housing bonds authorized by the State. This was rejected by the L.A. City Council last month in part due to unanimous opposition by the locals at the Council's public hearing.

The development firm says any public giveaways will be more than offset by many millions in tax dollars received plus at least 137,000 long term jobs created. The problem with the "benefits" of mega-real estate developments is that no estimate is available of the costs to our health from smog, costs of congestion and overuse of jammed streets, and of the benefits of preserving the entire site. At least one of the developer's statistics is suspect. According to the Kenneth Leventhal Co. study which produced the figure of 137,000 jobs, those are actually one year jobs, taken over a ten year period. So actually the total is 13,700 ten year jobs for a ten year period of construction.

Ballona Baloney

Many other claims by the developer sound persuasive until one reads the finer print. Peter Denniston, who heads the project for Morgan-Stanley, wrote an editorial two weeks ago in the recently demised Santa Monica Outlook, to expose the "myths" he claims are being spread by Ballona preservers. He described his project as leaving over 50% of the land as open space. But some of the things he calls open space are a concrete flood control channel, a yacht harbor, landscaped street medians, and existing parks next to his land. Natural open space will actually be about 1/5th of the site, on the saltmarsh which is protected from development anyway under a federal law called the Clean Water Act.

When they unveiled the project with great fanfare in 1989, the developers and council member Galanter said in order to be "sustainable", the project would fully recycle its trash and sewage, with no tax dollars needed to make this happen. Numerous glowing articles ran in the L.A. Times extolling the futuristic concepts. But somehow, along the way, the owners found a way to back out on the promises, or get taxpayers to foot much of the bill for those they could keep. Basically, despite all their enormous campaign contributions, they pleaded poverty. So, taxpayers have instead financed a water treatment plant in nearby El Segundo which will supply Playa Vista's landscape irrigation needs. Playa Vista's sewage will go to the City's Hyperion treatment plant. Their trash will go to City landfills.

The bailout program unveiled in 1998 by Galanter, Riordan and Wilson pays to widen many local streets to shoehorn in the project's expected 200,000 more cars. This was cited as a developer-financed benefit to the community when Galanter and Riordan had OK'd the first phase of development at Ballona back in 1993.

Sacred Land

"You are on our land; we never gave it up," says Vera Rocha, ancestral chief of the Shoshone Gabrieleno Nation. Her tribe once occupied much of the L.A. basin before white men conquered and enslaved the Native Americans. Rocha says the Spielberg development will be cursed, much as were the hapless characters in an early Spielberg film called "Poltergeist", who built a home on Native's graves. The Playa Vista site contains 10 native village and burial sites, even by the developer's own admission. Indeed, the curse may already be effective. Since announcing his plans to locate at Ballona, Spielberg's DreamWorks has had only one success, "The Lost World", though making much less than expected with its $85 million production costs, and had costly bombs with "Peacemaker", "Amistad", and Ted Danson's sitcom "Ink".

Spielberg has been considered a trophy tenant for Playa Vista, one capable of bringing in other investors to a project which has seen no construction in 20 years. But Spielberg's negotiators are playing hardball. They reportedly want the site of their future studio for free. Others are making similar bids to get the studio, such as the City of Burbank and Universal Studios.

Tying things up further are two lawsuits in federal court, based on wetlands and endangered species protections laws, backed by the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity, California Public Interest Research Group and the Wetlands Action Network of Malibu. Both are being heard by Judge Ronald Lewd, who so far hasn't been very sympathetic to the issue in earlier court hearings.

In the meantime, "BEEP" and the group "Save All of Ballona", have planted wildflowers and adopted Lincoln Blvd., cleaning up litter there. They lead nature walks on the 2nd and 4th Saturdays of the month at 10:00 A.M., leaving from their office a block south of the wetlands at 8320 Lincoln Blvd. in Westchester. They also have a continuously-updated events hotline reachable at 310-572-6491.

While diehard activists waved at the motorists on Lincoln Boulevard Friday afternoon, four tall white egrets waded in the proposed home of 1,800 condominiums, where the Playa Vista developer says there are no wetlands. The birds know better. Hollywood's magic is no substitute for the real thing.

Rex Frankel is publisher of the Ballona Free Press. His email address is ballona.free.press.@juno.com

Call or write Steven Spielbeg (818) 733-7000. Tell him we want DreamWorks in Los Angeles, but not as part of the massive Playa Vista mega-city. Tell him we need his help to convince President Clinton to create the Ballona National Wildlife Refuge. Write Mr. Spielberg at DreamWorks SKG, 100 Universal Plaza, Bungalow 477, Universal City, CA 91608.

Call or write L.A. City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter (310) 524-1150. Galanter is the developers' most ardent supporter on the City Council. Tell her you want to see all of the Ballona Wetlands Ecosystem saved. Tell her you don't approve of the proposed $70 million+ tax break for DreamWorks SKG. Galanter's address is 716 W. Manchester, LA, CA 90405. Or write/call the City Councilperson for your district.