tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63753245067574277752024-03-13T01:20:26.938-07:00LACreekParks.blogspot.comRex Frankelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02628414635820202044noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6375324506757427775.post-2673689603410735772016-10-11T12:43:00.003-07:002016-10-11T12:56:40.975-07:00Our Vision for the Next ten Years<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Rex Frankelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02628414635820202044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6375324506757427775.post-56690626793754515712015-10-04T09:13:00.001-07:002015-10-06T11:14:47.700-07:00October 20th, 7:00PM, Learn What You Can Do!<div class="base-card-body" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1443974888402_4373">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>COME LEARN ABOUT THIS MASSIVE PROJECT. FIND OUT HOW YOU CAN MAKE IT BETTER
FOR L.A.'S NEIGHBORHOODS AND FOR PARK USERS, NATURE LOVERS AND TAXPAYERS</b></span></div>
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Rex
Frankel will speak about the largest public works project in Los
Angeles' history, the $20 Billion beaches, rivers and creeks stormwater
pollution cleanup plan (known officially as the Enhanced Watershed
Management Plan). This plan will have huge impacts on every river and
creek in our County. Two proposals are under consideration. Frankel will
describe the two plans: one uses natural methods to clean up water
pollution by unpaving, expanding and restoring our County's rivers and
creeks and planting natural pollution-filtering vegetation. The side
benefit of this plan is the opportunity to convert concrete, fenced-off
storm drain channels into park greenways with
trails and bike paths which will connect L.A.'s existing ring of
mountain parks that surround our developed metropolis to our communities
in the flatlands. For example, what if Ballona Creek's nature trails
extended all the way to Griffith Park, as they once did? </div>
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This
greenway plan has had many names through the years, starting first
with the Olmstead Plan,
<a class="yiv3594034915" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/cityprojectca/sets/72157601130687757/" id="yiv3594034915yui_3_16_0_1_1443589606446_3466" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.flickr.com/photos/cityprojectca/sets/72157601130687757/</a>
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then the Rim of the Valley plan,
<a class="yiv3594034915" href="http://ballona-news.blogspot.com/2015/05/what-l.html" id="yiv3594034915yui_3_16_0_1_1443589606446_3470" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://ballona-news.blogspot.com/2015/05/what-l.html</a> , and also the Mountains to the Sea plan and
the Emerald Necklace.</div>
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However, elected officials so far are favoring a plan that will not
acquire and create new parks, but will instead require the digging up of
virtually
every street, park and school playground in order to construct water
capture and filtration facilities for this pollution. And it will cost
$20 BILLION in tax dollars over 20 years to construct, according to the
County's planning department report. This plan has been also estimated
by the L.A. County Public Works department to cost twice as much as a
"natural" plan. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the
L.A. City Council early this summer endorsed the no-new-parks plan with
virtually no public notice. Frankel's organization, the Friends of L.A.
Clean, Connected Creek to Peak Parks, has filed a lawsuit to overturn
these quiet approvals and to require a full revealing of the costs and
impacts to our communities. </div>
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YOU CAN HELP CHANGE THIS PROJECT!</div>
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However,
the final decision has not been made! An additional government agency
must approve the plan before it can happen. (The Los Angeles Regional
Water Quality Control Board, which has previously endorsed a "natural"
cleanup plan, will make its decision at a public hearing in Spring of
2016.) The people who will have to pay for this project, we taxpayers,
can tell our elected officials that we want a natural parks- and
wildlife habitat-creating plan to clean up our polluted beaches and
creeks.</div>
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<u>THE BATTLE IS NOT OVER</u>.
SEND EMAILS TO L.A.'S REGIONAL WATER QUALITY CONTROL BOARD. <span style="color: maroon;"><b>TELL
THEM TO CONTINUE THEIR SUPPORT FOR THE “NATURAL” EWMP PLAN. TELL
THEM TO OPPOSE THE PLANS ENDORSED BY THE L.A. COUNTY AND LA CITY
GOVERNMENTS</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: sans-serif, Arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Samuel.Unger@waterboards.ca.gov</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: sans-serif, Arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Losangeles@waterboards.ca.gov</span></span></div>
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Rex Frankelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02628414635820202044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6375324506757427775.post-13375083816217899712015-10-02T23:07:00.001-07:002015-10-02T23:07:28.061-07:00What It's All AboutEXCERPTED FROM:<br />
<a href="http://www.laweekly.com/news/the-lost-streams-of-los-angeles-2146181">http://www.laweekly.com/news/the-lost-streams-of-los-angeles-2146181</a><br />
By Judith Lewis, 11/8/2006<br />
<br />
...Few know better how hard it is to unpave paradise than Rex Frankel.
As director of the Ballona Ecosystem Education Project, he has long
fought — futilely, in some respects — to preserve the Ballona Wetlands,
90 percent of which has been compromised by development. He has come to
realize that the Ballona Wetlands’ health would improve if the county
and city could fix the urban-runoff problem. And so he has also worked
hard to put together the numbers to demonstrate that daylighting creeks
and restoring wetlands may actually make financial, as well as
environmental, sense.<br />
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The way Frankel sees it, Los Angeles has
three options available to it for cleaning up pollution caused by urban
runoff. It can install small-scale systems that capture as much
pollution as possible close to its source — filtration devices that
either stop garbage from flowing downstream or divert water to existing
parks where it can percolate into the ground. “That’s the city’s one,”
says Frankel. “They think it’s the cheap way of doing it.”<br />
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The
second option, also proposed in the city of Los Angeles’ Integrated
Resource Plan, is to divert the water to regional treatment plants,
facilities that will treat urban runoff like sewage, and cleanse it of
nutrients before it hits the beach. “And the third way,” he says, “is to
unpave our rivers as much as possible, acquire any potential vacant
land along the rivers and use them as part of an expanded green-space
network.”<br />
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Frankel, a boyish-looking 42-year-old, almost always
dressed in short-sleeved shirts and shorts, sits in his office on L.A.’s
Westside where the walls are lined with maps — maps of the Los Angeles
basin, of the Ballona Watershed, of a proposed greenway system that
would connect all of the local area’s open space with contiguous parks,
daylighted streams and restored wetlands. “You can’t stop the public
from doing dumb things,” he says as he talks about the reasons
individual efforts, though crucial, aren’t enough to solve our pollution
problem. “Our existence every day produces trash and pollution, and the
most concerned citizen can’t always prevent it. You need a system
that’s a fail-safe to deal with it. You can’t count on education; you’ve
got to have the infrastructure. And it’s going to be incredibly
expensive to do it either of the first two ways.”<br />
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The
first option is based on the city’s proposal to use some 30 publicly
owned sites to reclaim water and use it for landscape irrigation around
the region of Los Angeles known as the Santa Monica Bay Watershed —
Venice, the Los Angeles Airport area, Pacific Palisades and El Segundo,
from which all runoff drains into the ocean. It’s a nice idea, says
Frankel, but according to his calculations, “They were only capturing
about 2 percent of the runoff that the city says it needs cleaned up to
meet Clean Water Act standards. The number of days they’d violate health
regulations wouldn’t decrease at all.”<br />
By the city’s own
estimates, the project will cost $30 million. “If that’s $30 million to
clean up only 2 percent of the runoff,” says Frankel, “that means you
have to multiply that $30 million by 50 to get 100 percent compliance
[with EPA standards].” On top of that, the Santa Monica Bay Watershed
constitutes only 10 percent of the land area in the city of L.A. “So you
have to multiply that cost by 10,” says Frankel. “That means that to
enact this plan for the whole city would cost $15 billion.”<br />
Treatment
plants, he estimates, could come to $15 billion too. “It’s not just the
treatment plants,” he says, “it’s getting the water to the treatment
plants. You have to do a lot of digging up of old systems and building
new ones.” An underground water tank, or cistern, costs $1 to $1.50 per
gallon. “So if you wanted to catch the city’s entire runoff, the amount
to comply with [EPA rules] would be $14 billion.”<br />
<br />
For that money, however, Frankel admits, “You’d also add another 9 percent to the city’s water supply.”<br />
<br />
But
to Frankel, that’s not necessarily such a good thing. “Isn’t that
giving every developer in the city a water permit? The only thing
stopping developers from going crazy is that Los Angeles doesn’t have
enough water to accommodate all their plans.”<br />
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“And in this case,”
Frankel continues, “river restoration pencils out to the most economical
choice.” It is expensive — he suspects it might be more than $15
billion. Daylighting streams and restoring wetlands would mean buying
huge tracts of private property, ripping out its impervious surfaces and
making sure those waterways have room to flood. “But once you’ve spent
the money to acquire the land,” Frankel points out, “it’s
self-maintaining. Unlike a treatment plant, it doesn’t require power and
tens of millions of dollars to maintain. If you’re just worrying about
your taxes, this is the best deal. Even the Coalition for Practical
Regulation people, if they saw the viability of the river-restoration
approach, they wouldn’t oppose it. And think of all the parkland we’d
create!”<br />
<br />
Any
way you do it, Frankel says, “We’re facing the biggest public-works
project in the history of the city. You’re basically retrofitting a city
that was developed in the wrong way. Los Angeles was not planned by
visionaries. Back East, people knew they could neither pave over the
streambeds, nor channelize streams; there was just too much water. Here,
because the creeks were either dry or flooded so much of the year, we
just said, ‘Screw it. Let’s get rid of them.’ ”<br />
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Frankel knows he’s
proposing a radical solution. “It’s about changing the way we develop
in a way that creates more parks and cleans up pollution,” he says.
“It’s retrofitting the city in an environmentally sound way, as opposed
to engineering in the old way. I would love to see the politically
courageous elected officials in Los Angeles advocate for the third way.
They need to see it’s been as beneficial economically as I say it is.”Rex Frankelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02628414635820202044noreply@blogger.com1