Greenwashing Coastal Development

L.A.'s newest water feature sits placidly at the intersection of Jefferson and Lincoln Boulevards in Marina del Rey, across the street from the burgeoning Playa Vista development. It is tastefully landscaped, dotted with islets, ringed by a trail and helpful interpretive signs. It stares blandly back at visitors, with no hint of the storms that raged around it for more than a decade before its birth.

It was born last month. If you were Playa Vista, the developer of the city rising from the Ballona Wetlands, you spent Earth Day flying in celebrated poets to extol in verse the virtues of your new storm water detention basin, aka "fresh water marsh," and you called it an "Ecopoetry Celebration."

For my part in that celebration, I accompanied a woman dressed as a turtle who was handing out flyers expressing disapproval of said marsh, the developer, and the celebration.

Playa Vista's engineered marsh is there to catch the development's urban run-off -- a legal requirement in order to permit the construction of the extremely unattractive new buildings now hulking over the other side of the intersection of Lincoln and Jefferson. The California Coastal Commission allowed the coastal wetlands area designated for the catch basin to be bulldozed and dredged -- usually a significant legal no-no -- as the result of a sleight-of-hand trick of the type that historically seems to accompany matters involving water, politics, and Los Angeles. When the developer went to the Commission in 1991, omitted from his permit request was a recent EPA report that the area contained far more extensive natural wetlands -- and extremely rare, saltwater wetlands at that -- than the developer was claiming. The Commission fell for it, and the permits were granted. Twelve years and several court fights later, the natural salt water marsh area has been scraped and graded and replaced by the development's landscaped run-off basin. As the L.A. Weekly put it in 1995, the marsh construction plan was the developer's "primary sales technique...to stop opposition to the development.... It didn't have to be designed as a real, functioning coastal ecosystem. It just had to look like a marsh, to have some plants and birds. The current plan for a few acres of Playa Vista is a wetlands theme park."

Ten years after that 1991 permit hearing, the omitted EPA report was brought to the Coastal Commission's attention by the Wetlands Action Network. A Commissioner lamented of her forebears' decision to issue the '91 permit, "I can't believe that they would not have voted differently if that information was provided, because you would not turn a salt water marsh into a fresh water marsh.... It's utterly pathetic that we don't have a procedure for changing something that we know is wrong."

Which is not to say there is no way to fix the problem. "I have spoken with Playa Vista's engineers," says Robert van de Hoek, chair of the Sierra Club's Ballona Wetlands Task Force, "and they tell me that the drainage gate for the detention basin can be re-engineered quite easily to reverse the flow of water and allow tidewater to naturally flow in again. This would facilitate genuine restoration of the salt marsh."

When the detention basin/marsh made its public debut on April 19 (with the L.A. Times reporting the event in glowing terms that made no mention of the decade of environmental warfare over the project), little shuttle buses from the Playa Vista sales office down the street, where the invited poets were reading on the lawn, spent the morning and afternoon picking up and dropping off guests at the marsh's traffic cone-designated entry point on Jefferson Boulevard. Lola the turtle lady took up position next to a trail sign and was doing land-office business with her flyers, which gave the low-down on the developer's eco-poetry event and urged acquisition by the state of all remaining open land at Playa Vista. People were curious to get the background on the issues and we were both glad to oblige.