Is Discovery Center to be capitol of RMC empire?

Throughout history, empires have announced and reinforced their power through architecture meant to dominate. Be it Rome or London or Madrid, or the capital of any other current or former power, these places announce the hegemony, past or present, of the men and women who built them.

The proposed San Gabriel River Discovery Center seems exactly this kind of announcement of empire, with the empire-builder this time being the Rivers and Mountains Conservancy.

The RMC building an empire? you ask incredulously. Come now, you can't be serious.

Well, how else to explain the fact that an agency created primarily to "provide open-space, low-impact recreational and educational uses, water conservation, watershed improvement, wildlife and habitat restoration and protection and watershed improvement within its territory" is focused so intently on putting up a building -- over the objections of so many -- that would harm many of those same values?

"They've placed themselves too high." -- Sally Havice on the RMC

How else to explain its use of the "joint powers authority" across the San Gabriel Valley and southeast Los Angeles County? Could it be the RMC's way of getting around the prohibition against its use of eminent domain and of cementing its influence in areas that were previously and largely the responsibility of local governments?

How else to explain the RMC inserting itself into the management of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-owned Whittier Narrows Recreation Area? In 2008, one of these JPAs, the RMC-led Watershed Conservation Authority, launched a Whittier Narrows Master Plan development project that, to all appearances, was the real thing. But in late 2009, we learned that the project "is not a formal update to the existing USACE Whittier Narrows Master Plan. . . ."

What is it then? And how much is it costing the taxpayer?

On a recent Sunday afternoon, former state legislator Sally Havice visited with the Friends and other critics of the Discovery Center. Havice, co-author of the legislation that created the RMC more than a decade ago, said that, at the time, "there was no discussion about bricks and mortar and buildings," though there was to be start-up money for various projects. "But no empire building," she said.

The goal was, Havice said, "to preserve, enhance and create parks, green space and habitat."

But of the RMC today she said: "They've placed themselves too high. They're too far removed."

Somewhere along the road, the RMC lost its way. As it grows more powerful, cities and communities grow less so, and we all start to look more and more like petitioners, or, for the "lucky" few, like princes at court abasing themselves before the monarch.