Calanche’s voice gets dreamy when she talks about the beauty she imagines the new park will bring to their neighborhood, and how the community’s youth can play a role in making it happen: “We’re excited to really partner, not just be a token partner.”

The Green Solutions team and their funders, which include the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the California Coastal Conservancy, made an active choice to work on Ramona Gardens, according to Vargas. “Other projects in other places might be easier to implement, but true sustainability has to include people,” he says.

Vargas is no tree hugger, but he’s seen the results of making this kind of choice to work in a tough neighborhood first hand. He was the lead engineer for the South Los Angeles Wetland Park, now maintained by the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation. This award-winning project transformed a 1930s-2008 maintenance yard for buses and rail cars (a former toxic brownfield) into a lush wetland park in the midst of the infamous “South Central” area. The project pulls about 14,000 gallons of dry-weather runoff (40,000 in wet weather) per day out of an adjacent storm drain and passes it through three constructed wetland treatment cells. It then returns any excess, much cleaner, to the drain before it flows out to the Pacific.

The community was shocked when they saw the plans for the project for the first time. “When we said ‘stormwater treatment’ they imagined an ugly black building with smokestacks smelling of sewage,” says Vargas. Instead the community ended up with a parkland of pools, boulders, bridges, flowers, and cattails and bulrushes now so tall they have to be regularly trimmed. “Every morning when we open the gate at 7 am, people flood in,” says Vargas.

Clearly, creating these kinds of natural oases in metropolitan hardscapes can have a ripple affect on the local health and welfare of surrounding communities. The day I visited this nine-acre patch was filled with red-winged blackbirds singing at the top of their tiny avian lungs. Walkers and joggers of every shape and skin tone passed us, making the circuit of the park on crushed granite pathways. Our guide in an orange vest was Majid Sadeghi, Vargas’ public agency counterpart on the project. Sadeghi described how the system first passes its urban water harvest through a giant filter that captures trash by centrifugal force, which is later whisked away by a visiting vacuum truck. From there, the system has two small water pumps for the dry season, three big pumps for the wet season, and ponds capable of holding both small and large volumes. “We capture all the water from surrounding rooftops and streets, and pass it through this park. Using this natural instead of chemical treatment process is cheaper in the long run,” he says. With all the feathery, fragrant greenery, you’d never guess at the elaborate infrastructure hidden within.

“In a high desert Mediterranean climate like Los Angeles, you get rain for 4-5 months then nothing,” says Sean Vargas. “So our technical challenge was how to find the water to keep our urban wetland alive year round. We developed a water budget that used urban slobber when it wasn’t raining, and also had the capacity to treat that first flush of the dirtiest water when the wet season starts.” The first flush washed off city surfaces after a long dry spell is the one with the most accumulated petroleum products, heavy metals, and brake pad dust. Nobody wants that going into the ocean, especially water quality watchdogs.

The Water Management Disconnect

The regulatory hammer on storm water pollution prevention has been over the heads of California cities and counties since the most recent update of the Clean Water Act. Since then municipalities have been experimenting with everything from porous pavers to low impact development (aka LID) to trash capture in a push to prevent pollution from city streets and hardscapes to rivers, bays and the ocean. In 2014, fueled by the Green Solutions’ vision of multi-benefit stormwater projects, California took it to another level. Senate Bill 985, championed by Senator Fran Pavley, offers a framework and incentives for regional land and water managers to do more complex and connected projects.

“Right now we have a very disjointed water management system, both in LA and in other major cities,” says Feldman. The upper LA River watershed where she’s working, for example, includes 11 cities, 14 water districts, various public works departments, a county, a state conservancy, a conservation authority and a “water master,” all with something to say about water. “There’s still a disconnect between the water delivery world, the stormwater world, the water quality and restoration world, and the climate change world.”

Even when there is a connection, Feldman thinks the way most multi-benefit projects are chosen is still too “opportunistic.” Someone has a development they need to mitigate or a property they want to unload or funds they can only get access to if they do one project versus another. “There’s no particular logic,” she says, referring to some of the impetus behind the development of the Green Solutions tool. “We wanted to come up with a prioritized way to do the best projects and get the most water. We’re also trying to de-silo the funding.”

Feldman is wiry and intense. In the last 20 years, she’s generated more than $3 billion in new public funds for parks, river and infrastructure projects up and down California. Vargas calls her a “firebrand out there trying to make great things happen.” She calls him a “visionary hydrologic engineer.” Others in their group seem to share a passion for working with cities and agencies who actually have to get things built on the ground, not just telling them what they should do but can’t or haven’t yet.

State and local land managers are all for making this push. “We’re learning to design infrastructure that works with, rather than against, natural processes, and we need rapid adoption of these alternative designs,,” says Joan Cardellino, south coast regional manager for the State Coastal Conservancy. The Conservancy was an early and eager supporter of the efforts like the Green Solutions tool, which they see as addressing a critical gap. “The hard part is getting the funding and information to the cities that are planning infrastructure upgrades.”

Greening the Grey River

The day that I visited, Feldman got behind the wheel of my car and drove us all over Los Angeles to see the projects mentioned above, as well as several others. But the one she’s clearly most excited about right now is the LA River Greenway Trail. She was on and off the phone most of the day fielding construction questions (the project opened to the public June 3). When we finally arrived at the edge of the river in Studio City, she got out of the car, moved an orange cone so we could park, and strode quickly down to the hardhats to check in.

Any project near the LA River is a priority for the Green Solutions team, but there’s nothing natural about the river, it’s more concrete than earth. The only place the river meanders is between two concrete walls. Most of the year the only water in the LA River derives from a storm, dry season runoff, or the treatment plant upstream.

We slip past a striking metal gate, a welded work of river art, and down a path the Green Solutions team has created along the river. This half-mile project connects two other popular riverside trail projects to create four miles of continuous bike and walking path. For years it was the “missing link,” says Feldman, because it was such a challenging stretch of riverbank to drain and plant. On the opposite bank, all we can see is rocky armor. But this bank is green. Here the team is capturing urban runoff in new underground infrastructure and a bioswale, percolating the runoff through soils and roots before it enters the LA River. They have also planted the steep earthy incline with more than 3,000 native trees, shrubs, and flowers.

The team doesn’t use just any plants, they use a very specific mix, density, and spacing of native species modeled on local habitats long since paved over. By organizing them into something they call “habitat tiles,” this planting design offers a scalable unit of upland and riparian species. The unit can be applied to any parcel and then quantified, in terms of the amount of greenhouse gas each tile’s 105-251 trees, shrubs, grasses, and perennials can trap and store. Plants and trees absorb CO 2 and release oxygen through photosynthesis, and sequester carbon in their leaves, trunks, stems and roots.

To get these numbers, the Green Solutions team began by computing the impact of a single tree, and then layered it into the appropriate species mix and spacing across 5,000 square feet. “The habitat tile is a useful communication tool to help people understand how we’re breaking down this problem of quantifying greenhouse gas benefit into a replicable unit,” says Tim Kidman of WSP.

Kidman and co-consultants from ESA Associates were responsible for developing all the metrics necessary to calculate the carbon footprint of each potential Green Solutions project. Calculations looked not only at sequestration in plants, but also water delivery distance and onsite energy use for irrigation. Kidman points out that each parcel is unique in terms of water moving costs, as each of the 14 water districts in the upper LA River watershed has its own unique “supplier specific energy intensity factor.”

“At the end of the day, it’s the weighting of all the metrics, and the chance to create an intersection of this information for decision-making, that’s innovative about our tool,” says Kidman. The hope is the strong metrics will help these kinds of ultra urban forestry projects become candidates for cap and trade credits in the climate change mitigation market.

The day we walk the new greenway, the most striking elements are the orange poppies and blue-hearted jimsonweed flowers climbing the banks, and the metal artwork adorning the fence between the walkway and the river. We are one block from busy Ventura Boulevard but I don’t hear a single horn.

Undaunted by Scaling Up

Our last stop offers a contrast to the narrow edges Feldman’s working with in Boyle Heights and Studio City, and shows her ambition. It’s a classic old city park with lots of grass and random trees sprawling over 56 acres. At one end, there’s ballfields, a duck pond, and clusters of concrete picnic tables that must be too hot to sit at in mid-summer. What’s exciting is the size of the undeveloped margin on either side of the LA River channel, lots of space for green solutions like bioswales, treatment wetlands, riparian islands, and river terraces in the suburban sprawl of the San Fernando Valley. “It’s a highly visible and symbolic site to showcase our ideas,” says Feldman.

One reason Reseda Park is a high priority project identified by the tool is there is enough room to widen the concrete lined banks of the LA River here by up to 350 feet. The project would pump stormwater and dry season runoff from the LA River over an enhanced new flood plain and wetlands, sustain native plants, and recharge groundwater (via a an 8-foot deep, 3.4-acre instillation gallery underground). The site also stands next to a science magnet high school that could learn from an educational circuit through the park.

“I predict that in 10 years, doing a project of this size and scale will be normal,” says Feldman. The idea is to multiply this approach for every watershed in the county.

The way Vargas sees it, “The old way of doing things, with developers bulldozing sites and ramrodding subdivisions through permitting, just can’t happen any more. Not in California’s urban spaces. People are smarter than that. We can’t look at environmental or economic sustainability in a vacuum anymore, it’s not a fad. Our attitudes are really changing, as we see the cost of water rise, as we see the amount of money available to public works departments to do projects diminish, as we see activism and environmental sensitivity grow. All these things intersect, and that’s the happy place we need to do our work.”

CONTACT

Esther Feldman, efeldman@conservationsolutions.org ; Sean Vargas, svargas@vs2consulting.com; Lou Calanche lou@legacyla.org; Tim Kidman, Tim.Kidman@wsp.com

Related Links

Green Solutions Tool

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