Wave newspaper gets it: discovery center’s environmental impacts aren’t its only costs

With the expected release later this month of the draft environmental impact report on the San Gabriel River Discovery Center, it makes sense that focus would naturally gravitate toward the project’s serious environmental flaws.

A project that would destroy some of the most accessible acres of the Natural Area, the discovery center would be 15 times bigger than the current nature center. It would more than triple the size of the current 40-car parking. And it would build an artificial wetland only a five-minute walk from the real San Gabriel River—a truly odd component, considering the project takes its name from the river.

But the environmental costs aren't the only costs, and people are starting to talk about the grave financial and social impacts the discovery center would have on the surrounding communities.

Los Angeles Times journalist Louis Sahagun started the conversation in the media with his recent Greenspace blog post. And this article in the LA Wave newspaper continues that conversation.

As Jim Odling, chair of the Friends of the Whittier Narrows Natural Area, explains in the article, the Discovery Center Authority is taking a huge risk with taxpayer and ratepayer dollars—the only dollars the project’s been able to attract in nearly 10 years of work—at the worst possible time.

With the recent tax increases and with more tax and water rate increases on the way, the DCA is risking a lot of our money on an oversized science museum recent history shows might never open its doors.

Just look at the failed Children’s Museum of Los Angeles and the failed Center for Water Education if you want a frightening vision of what’s in store for the Natural Area if the discovery center gets built.

In some ways, construction is the easy part. The real test comes when the yet-to-be-created nonprofit that's supposed to run the place tries to raise enough money to pay for maintenance, staffing and programming costs on an 18,230-square-foot LEED platinum building. (A platinum LEED rating might mean a “green” building, but it definitely means another kind of green: dollars spent to cover expenses.)

But none of this even begins to touch on another severe impact of the project: the social costs of replacing access to nature with an unnecessary, money-sucking project that has grown ever larger because, as the county Sanitation Districts’ Sam Pedroza said, “more and more agencies want to make sure their stories are told there.”

Clearly, community needs are taking a back seat to ambition.