While most environmental exchanges between California and the federal government these days are adversarial, one process has been quietly underway for two decades and is just now ripening: an examination of whether the government should manage Los Angeles County beaches.
The National Park Service held a first public meeting Wednesday to help determine whether most of the county coastline should be part of a “park unit.”
There are 28 park units in California, including the Santa Monica Mountains Recreations Area, Channel Islands National Park and Yosemite. Management is flexible. It can mean ownership with management, management only or co-management with a nonprofit.
Most people at the meeting, held over Microsoft Teams, expressed excitement at the potential for conservation in an area stretching from Will Rogers State Beach to Torrance, plus 200 yards inland. The designation would mean no change for the hundreds of private property owners in the zone. One person at the meeting asked if the park service could prevent oil and gas projects, including an upgrade of an underground gas storage facility around the Ballona Creek Ecological Reserve. Some were concerned the federal government would take the land or prevent access.
At this point, the park service is merely studying the idea, and the study could lead to no action at all.
It looks at four questions: Does the area have national significance — historical landmarks or archaeological sites? Does it represent a natural or cultural resource not already represented in the park system? Is it feasible to include, and is it clear that the national park system is the best manager of the area?
The acquisition of the county beaches was first conceived by Marcia Hanscom, director of Los Angeles Coast Forever!, a nonprofit that has advocated for federal management of the fragile ecosystem for years.
According to Hanscom, she and her husband were looking at a map of the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area and saw that the Santa Monica Bay watershed actually extends down to the county beaches and up to Baldwin Hills, via Ballona Creek.
The Ballona wetlands had just been designated a state ecological reserve in 2005, but at the time there was concern the area wouldn’t be managed properly. Hanscom thought maybe the federal government would do a better job.
“There’s a lot of biodiversity and special places here along the coast that most people don’t ever pay much attention to,” she said. “People get off the plane at LAX and get right on the freeway, often not seeing the L.A. coast,” she said.
She and others talked to area politicians, and they bought in. So did Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Los Angeles), who authored legislation in 2015 and got it passed in 2016. Funding for the initial study didn’t come in until last year.
