LA Weekly: Lack of money, poor financial planning the 'gorilla in the room' for Discovery Center

Don't miss the LA Weekly's stunning, sobering story on the proposed San Gabriel River Discovery Center: "Pave to Save Whittier Narrows?"

"Funding — including some of the construction money — has not been secured. The Discovery Center Authority does not even have an updated estimate of future operating costs."

While reporter Tibby Rothman looks at the important environmental questions that plague the controversial project, her story focuses on the project's other ongoing green problem: lack of money.

As Rothman writes: "Ultimately, however, the gorilla in the room is not about environmental ethics but about money.

Belinda V. Faustinos, executive director of the San Gabriel River Discovery Center Authority, "concedes that, in fact, that funding — including some of the construction money — has not been secured. The Discovery Center Authority does not even have an updated estimate of future operating costs."

But as Rothman points out -- and as readers of this blog already know -- serious financial troubles have plagued projects too similar to the Discovery Center to ignore or brush off.

"What comes to me is that it's easy to build something [but] it's hard to sustain the operation," says Michael Feeney, executive director of the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County, speaking of Santa Barbara's troubled Watershed Resource Center.

Rothman tells the cautionary tale of Santa Barbara's "largely shuttered" Watershed Resource Center and includes quotes from someone familiar with that troubled project:

"'What comes to me is that it's easy to build something [but] it's hard to sustain the operation,' says Michael Feeney, executive director of the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County.

"Feeney points to the experience of Santa Barbara's Community Environmental Council, which constructed the Watershed Resource Center at a county beach, but no longer owns it.

"'Everyone was excited to build it and there was a lot of enthusiasm at first,' he says. But the officials at the various agencies grew reluctant to devote the funds needed to keep it going."

Southern California taxpayers and ratepayers watched this same sad story play out on at least two other occasions -- first with the Center for Water Education in Hemet, then with the Children's Museum at Hansen Dam -- losing tens of millions of dollars in the process.

Feeney gets the last word in the LA Weekly article, suggesting the fatal flaw of projects that try to graft indoor, entertainment-oriented facilities onto areas where the focus is naturally (no pun intended) on outdoor recreation and education.

"Everyone goes to the beach to go to the beach," he notes. "They don't go to go inside a building."

'Fault that could eat L.A.' runs beneath Whittier Narrows location of proposed Discovery Center

Would you situate a multimillion-dollar building intended to be used by tens of thousands of people -- including children -- each year in a liquefaction zone sitting atop "the fault that could eat L.A."?

That appears to be exactly what the San Gabriel River Discovery Center Authority intends to do with its controversial project.

A story at latimes.com last Saturday reported that the March 16 Pico Rivera earthquake occurred on the Puente Hills thrust fault, which stretches from the Puente Hills through downtown Los Angeles and "is capable of producing a devastating, magnitude 7.5 quake."

This is the same fault, described by a USGS seismologist as "the fault that could eat L.A., that experts believe produced the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake, which killed eight people.

The latimes.com Web site also provides a good map showing the location of both quakes just about in the center of the fault area -- which turns out to be the same spot where one finds the Whittier Narrows, the location for the proposed Discovery Center.

An additional risk factor is that the Discovery Center would be located in a liquefaction zone, a high risk area in which "liquefaction occurs when an earthquake jars loosely compacted, moist earth, causing the soil to lose its stability, often becoming gelatinous."

The authority's choice to approve the Discovery Center apparently before adequately identifying and disclosing seismic hazards is part of the Friends lawsuit against the authority and the project. (You can find a link to the lawsuit here.)

I find it incredibly troubling that the authority insists on proceeding with the Discovery Center when everything seems to argue against the project, such as:

• Earthquake and flood hazards of the proposed location
• Community opposition to the project
• Likely damage to habitat and wildlife
• Inability to secure private or foundation funding

Perhaps its too broad a statement to claim that the whole authority is 100 percent behind the project. At last Monday's RMC board meeting, when the board voted to approve RMC funds to defend against the lawsuit, one board member asked if any of the other authority member agencies were contributing money.

Nope. Just the RMC.

It looks to me like three out of four of the member agencies are either unwilling or unable to pay their fair share.

So much for their "full support" of the Discovery Center.

Act locally this weekend: San Gabriel HS e-waste collection; yard sale for Montebello Hills effort

A couple of events this weekend are giving people in the San Gabriel Valley opportunities to take concrete steps to help the environment.

The San Gabriel High School PTSA is hosting a free e-waste collection 9 a.m. - 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday in the school's south parking lot at 801 S. Ramona St. in San Gabriel.

For more information, call (626) 308-2352.

And the Sierra Club's Montebello Hills Task Force is having its spring fundraiser yard sale 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The location is 337 N. 19th St. in Montebello.

The yard sale goes on, rain or shine.

RMC's 'edifice complex' siphoning millions of public dollars from conservation mission in SG Valley

Remember the movie Contact? Remember when, after the destruction of the first spaceship, billionaire S. R. Hadden reveals to scientist Eleanor Arroway that a second spaceship had been secretly built?

"First rule in government spending," Hadden says. "Why build one when you can have two at twice the price?" But such spendthrift ways don't appear ambitious enough for the RMC.

"First rule in government spending," Hadden says. "Why build one when you can have two at twice the price?"

Well, it appears the Rivers and Mountains Conservancy saw Contact and decided even Hadden's spendthrift ways weren't ambitious enough: within only two or three miles of each other, the RMC wants built not one, not two, but three interpretive centers -- and all, one can assume, to be built with our tax dollars.

The Friends published a press release recently connecting the dots on the RMC's intentions. And although it might sound absurd, it's all true.

The RMC and its partners want the San Gabriel River Discovery Center at the Whittier Narrows Natural Area. They want the "Duck Farm on the San Gabriel River" less than three miles up the river from the natural area. And they want a Whittier Narrows "welcome center" on Rosemead Boulevard, again only a couple of miles from the site of the Discovery Center.

Friends board member Gloria Valladolid called the plan “indefensible and obscene” when placed in the context of the budget cuts that are eviscerating state, county and local services.

Spending $30 million on a "watershed education facility" (the Discovery Center) and who knows how much more on the Duck Farm and Whittier Narrows welcome center seems especially scandalous -- Can it get worse? you ask -- when you learn that the RMC simply gave itself $3 million for the Discovery Center without vetting the grant through its competitive grant process.

The RMC spends tens of thousands of dollars -- maybe into six figures -- developing its grant guidelines and then simply ignores those guidelines, doesn't even bother with a grant application, and writes itself a big, juicy check for what can only be considered a pet project.

It all reminds me of a line from another movie:

"It's good to be the king."

Montebello recall election this Tuesday

The City of Montebello is holding a recall election on Tuesday in which voters will decide whether to oust city council members Robert Urteaga and Kathy Salazar and replace them from a field of seven candidates -- four running for Urteaga's seat and three for Salazar's.

According to a pamphlet printed by the League of Women Voters of Whittier for the candidate forum on Feb. 11, each voter, even if he or she votes not to recall an incumbent, may also vote for candidates in case one or both incumbents are recalled.

You can find information about the recall and the seven candidates at SmartVoter.org.

According to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, the recall "was touched off when the two incumbents were among a majority in 2008 that voted to grant Athens Services a 15-year exclusive contract to haul all the city's garbage.

"'In some surrounding cities where the contract went out to bid, Athens is charging less than half for the same service,' said Mayor Bill Molinari, who was re-elected in November and opposed the Athens contract."

One of the issues that was raised during the candidate forum was each participant's position on the proposed development of the remaining Montebello Hills. The local Sierra Club chapter, which has a task force dedicated to preserving the hills as community open space and wildlife habitat, has endorsed two candidates: Larry Salazar (if Urteaga is recalled) and Alberto Perez (if Kathy Salazar is recalled).

Because this is a city election only, Montebello residents may want to consult their sample ballots before heading out to polling stations--they might be different from the ones you're used to.

It's conventional wisdom that its local elections that have a real impact on the day-to-day lives of people. This vote could have a dramatic impact on community parkland, resident health and property values.

Remember, su voto es su voz.

Agency ignores community, ok's unpopular project

Ignoring the growing chorus of opposition to the proposed Discovery Center, the Rivers and Mountains Conservancy and its partners voted to bulldoze wildlife habitat and an existing nature center and replace them with a project few people actually want.

But the project still needs county board of supervisors approval and -- the real challenge -- to scrape together $30 million for construction.

The project has about $10 million committed to it, and authority board member Sam Pedroza said at last week's meeting that fundraising difficulties could derail the project. Of course, he said the same thing to the Los Angeles Times a year and a half ago when the authority had raised only -- $10 million.

"Was the center planned to be built 'regardless' of what the actual citizens in the region want? Was the request for public comment simply (and cynically) an effort to make people believe they actually have a say-so about such things?"

If you're interested in a recap of the meeting at which this took place, please see the Pasadena Star-News story, "Officials OK new river center at Whittier Narrows site."

The story gives a good sense of the opposition that was expressed at the Jan. 21 meeting, but it doesn't place it into the context of the opposition that's been building for some time. (Have a look at the reader comments for an idea of the growing anger over the waste of the public's money.)

If you take last week's meeting and the public hearings on the project's draft environmental impact report last summer, this is who you see lining up against the project:

- Numerous residents of the local communities that are the ostensible beneficiaries of the project
- Local members of environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and Aububon Society
- Latinos ranging from high school and college students to professionals and retirees
- Numerous educators, including a past vice-president of Rio Hondo College

But who supports the project? you ask. A very small, very narrow slice of society, to judge from the handful of voices speaking in favor of the project at the same hearings and meeting. And few, if any, of these drawn from the communities of the Whittier Narrows area.

But none of this seems to matter to the RMC and the water districts that apparently can't wait to take advantage of the marketing and meeting-space opportunities the outsized building promises.

It makes one wonder if the environmental review process was undertaken in good faith, or as one observer of this matter asked: "Was the center planned to be built 'regardless' of what the actual citizens in the region want? Was the request for public comment simply (and cynically) an effort to make people believe they actually have a say-so about such things?"

The project must be serving someone's interests. But whoever that someone is, it's clearly not the community.

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.