June 1999 Issue of Save All of Ballona

Over the last 20 years, thousands of acres of steep, undevelopable land in L.A. County has been bought by the government to create a ring of parkland surrounding the L.A. urban sprawl. Linking these new parks are the Backbone and the Rim of the Valley Trails. So, while the flatlands of L.A. have been paved over, the mountains between them are being saved. And while these mountain parks are important for the region, very little money has been spent on saving open space inside of the urban sprawl, close to where we all live.

Land developers in the middle of the sprawl say it's better to have more pavement in the sprawl than for it to continue across the State. This assumes that if we in L.A. pave over all of our open spaces and put all new population growth there, politicians outside of L.A. will stop allowing paving of natural lands in their communities. This is what developers call "Smart" growth. Of course, this is really a slick sales pitch to justify the paving over of L.A.'s few remaining open spaces using our tax dollars, such as at the Ballona wetlands, while diverting tax dollars away from rebuilding economically neglected parts of the city. Meanwhile, traffic and smog in L.A. continues to worsen, encouraging us to move away to sprawling developments in Ventura, Palmdale, or San Diego. So because politicians never seem to say no to developers, in our lifetimes we could have a continuous wall of pavement from San Diego to San Francisco. Gone would be our best farmland and wetlands. So "Smart" Growth without a meaningful parkland acquisition program will still gridlock our streets and pollute our air. It's really Dumb growth.

"Buying" Supporters

On the local scene, we've got Playa Vista spending a fortune on advertising trying to convince the public that their project is "sustainable". They have hijacked the sustainable development movement and turned it inside out to suit their cynical aims.

The big picture is that no amount of recycling bins, water saving toilets and solar heated pools in their project can compensate for the paving of Los Angeles' last open space. These pitiful attempts to greenwash a real estate development project as "sustainable" ignore the truth: There are almost no natural lands left within the 450 square mile city of Los Angeles, or in the rest of the L.A. metropolitan area. L.A. City holds barely more than 1 square mile of private-owned natural open space. The Ballona Wetlands are all we've got left.

The question here is not how the Ballona ecosystem should be developed, but how it can be saved.

To help whitewash their project, they are handing out huge amounts of cash: $60,000 a year to the L.A. School District, $110,000 a year to the Friends of Ballona Wetlands, and unrevealed amounts to the American Oceans Campaign, California League of Conservation Voters, Coalition for Clean Air, Santa Monica Baykeeper and the TreePeople, according to their 1998 "Annual Report to the Community". They are spending hundreds of thousands on expensive ads in the L.A. Times, Argonaut, L.A. Weekly and New Times to congratulate themselves for all the money they're giving away. They are practicing a sleazy form of money recycling, in which the government gives them over $600 million in tax dollars, tax breaks and housing and road bonds, and Playa Vista gives a little of it back to demonstrate what good citizens they are, while spending more than that on advertising to congratulate themselves for their "generosity".

"FUTURISTIC"

Playa Vista's so-called futuristic "concepts" in their "residential sustainable performance guidelines" booklet are actually outmoded -- they have been standard for years. Half-measures like water-saving showerheads, low flush toilets, and recycling bins are important, but are required for all new developments anyway. State and city laws already require every developer to recycle wood and concrete waste. We all use low-fume paints, because that's all that's available at the store. A few shuttle buses won't provide much of an alternative to 200,000 car trips a day. There is really very little futuristic about what Playa Vista is promising. Their project will still use up our ever-diminishing water supply, our landfill space, our days of clean air. They have broken their promise to build plants on-site to recycle their sewage and trash. Their slick sales pitch cannot substitute for a functioning wetlands habitat, such as Ballona is, which not only breeds game fish, cleans water, provides bird habitat and biological diversity, but furthermore provides vital open space for cramped city dwellers.

Their ads get a lot of mileage out of the claim "half of the proposed development is targeted for open space, including 340 acres of restored wetlands and 200 acres of parks." Their definition of open space includes 82 acres of a concrete flood control channel, a 48 acre yacht harbor for rich people, and another 50-acre existing "park" composed of steep hillside that was "preserved" to compensate for another development, not Playa Vista. Meanwhile, the wetlands are protected from development under federal and state law, (See Bolsa Chica story on page 1) so the landowners aren't really giving up anything that they could have developed anyway. What they are adding is a street runoff treatment basin that they laughingly call a "freshwater wetland".