After federal turf battle, Park Service proposes 'skim-milk' national recreation area for local area

The National Park Service announced April 10 that it was recommending to Congress that it adopt a "national recreation area" designation for the San Gabriel foothills, San Gabriel River, Rio Hondo, and Puente Hills. Missing from the recommendation were the hundreds of thousands of acres of the San Gabriel Mountains/Angeles National Forest--an area that more than 95 percent of public comments received for the San Gabriel Watershed and Mountains Special Resource Study recommended including in the NRA.

 As the Pasadena Star-News' Steve Scauzillo reported, the "Forest Service won the jurisdiction battle. The largest urban-interface forest in the country still would be managed only by the U.S. Forest Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture."

The Los Angeles Times' Louis Sahagun summed up the larger effort and the way it fell short: "The National Park Service spent nearly a decade researching alternatives, conducting public hearings, developing a 316-page report and evaluating 12,000 public comments that led to Wednesday's announcement."

Including the national forest, he said, "would have emphasized recreational use and brought new environmental protections to a region now designated as a national forest charged with managing multiple uses including mining, hunting, logging and other activities. The 655,000-acre portion of the Angeles National Forest suffers from illegal campfires, crime and pollution."

Whatever your feelings about the proposed national recreation area--and we at the Friends continue to have significant concerns about the authority that agencies other than the park service would have under the new designation--it's pretty clear that the park service has proposed (to borrow from a Supreme Court justice) a skim-milk national recreation area for the San Gabriel Mountains and Valley.

But the process isn't over. Former Secretary of Labor and U.S. Rep. Hilda Solis, who launched the study in 2003, said that the NRA boundaries could change as the proposal works its way through Congress. We hope that also means that the roles of various partners could be clarified and the overall values that would guide management of the national recreation area would be made clearer.

No, not over by a long stretch of the imagination.
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Useful links

• San Gabriel Watershed and Mountains Special Resource Study
• National Park Service recommends scaled-down recreation area for San Gabriel River, Puente Hills
• Details about new plan for San Gabriel Mountains raise questions

Protecting corridors there, threatening them here

The Whittier Daily News and other Los Angeles-area media are reporting that the U.S. Forest Service wants to bring lands that stretch from the Santa Monica Mountains to the San Gabriel Mountains "under federal protection and would study the possibilities of trail development, land acquisition and preservation of wildlife corridors that connect different sections of open space in the area."

At a recent event at Pasadena's Eaton Canyon Nature Center, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff said: "These are incredible wild areas that are loosely connected corridors that allow for wildlife to pass through. If the areas become disconnected we lose those corridors."

The five-year study that was recently initiated to look into creation of the "Rim of the Valley Corridor" is not without its critics, but there still appears to be much to recommend the idea.

The agencies and water districts pushing the proposed San Gabriel River Discovery Center should take a page from these efforts. The Discovery Center, Lario Creek and other related projects, instead of enhancing the Whittier Narrows wildlife sanctuary and habitat connectivity, promise to destroy habitat and likely threaten habitat connectivity. (See the accompanying connectivity map, taken from the San Gabriel River Corridor Master Plan, and note where most corridors intersect .)

It's tragic that a few organizations charged with stewardship of our evermore scarce resources -- financial, ecological, recreational -- can be blind to reality and deaf to reason. But it's heartening to see that at least a few officials, such as Mr. Schiff, appear to be working for the good of the community and the environment.