News of the Arroyo
Title: | Pasadena Mayor Bogaard and MWD plan celebrates milestone restoring Arroyo Seco |
Subtitle: | |
Date: | 2008-08-22 |
Summary: | August 22, 2008 - The Star-News editorializes in favor of stream restoration in the Arroyo Seco and for recycled water throughout Pasadena. |
Author: | Editorial |
Publication: | Pasadena Star-News |
Content: | ON Wednesday of next week, various worthies - including Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard and Metropolitan Water District board Chairman Tim Brick - will gather to celebrate the completion of yet another milestone in the decades-long effort to restore a healthy watershed in the city\'s Arroyo Seco. The Central Arroyo Stream Restoration Program is considered a model for cleaning up urban waterways, and that success will be marked on Wednesday, Aug. 27, at 4 p.m. west of the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center, 360 N. Arroyo Blvd. The good news includes water quality islands to filter oil and grease from parking lots, removal of invasive plant species, planting native California trees, reconfiguring the streambed to foster reintroduction of the native Arroyo Chub fish, and installation of more than 400 trash capture screens to prevent litter and debris from entering the Arroyo Seco stream. The long-term goal for many of us would be even grander - as in dynamiting the concrete wash that contains the stream for most of its course through Pasadena - but that presents along with many opportunities a few problems, and may be realized in our grandchildren\'s generation. And while it\'s good that ever-cleaner water will be flowing through the streambed, concretized or not, many a Brookside golfer, runner, stroller and bicyclist has looked over the bridges into the stream that flows fairly high even in mid-summer and wondered the obvious question: Why are we using Advertisement expensive, imported, processed, chlorinated potable water to irrigate the fairways and fields around here when local water flows by, seemingly for the taking? We\'d leave plenty for any chub that wanted to come back, right? And there would still be plenty of what flows from Devil\'s Gate Dam to essentially eliminate Brookside\'s expensive water bill. Ah, if only Southern California water politics were ever that simple. Suffice it to say that so many agencies lay claim to that steady trickle through the Los Angeles County Flood Control right of way that it might also be in our grandchildren\'s generation that the city could legally run a siphon into the wash and use what passes by. But another group of Pasadenans is this summer presenting its plan to use recycled water from a different source. The citizen Water Reclamation Task Force this week presented a plan to use what it calls \"an untapped source\" - charming punsters, these local volunteers - by creating infrastructure to pipe in an annual 6,000 acre feet of recycled water from the Los Angeles/Glendale Water Reclamation Plant near Scholl Canyon. The recommendation went to the new Environmental Advisory Commission and will be forwarded to the City Council for action. Pasadena is late to this party. Many other Southland water users, including the cities of Los Angeles, Glendale and Burbank and county parks such as massive Whittier Narrows Recreation Area have long used recycled water. The task force notes that Orange County has for decades been at the forefront of a much more aggressive groundwater recharge program than up here. And over 15 years ago Pasadena began to help pay for the recycled water produced at Scholl Canyon. The problem is getting the water down the hill. Three years ago, the city completed a study for the distribution system that would do so - a complicated and expensive proposition. But not nearly so expensive as the future price of water in a dry region. Built in phases, the project would first deliver water for landscape irrigation to Brookside Golf Course, Brookside Park, the Rose Bowl and other nearby city parks. Phases two and three would begin to take that water all over the city and to the county\'s Altadena Golf Course and into San Marino\'s Huntington Gardens for irrigation. Total cost over the years: $37 million. Yet that\'s a bargain, compared to the alternatives. Congratulations to task force water masters Joe Coulombe, Richard Davis, Don McIntyre, Dennis Murphy and Margaret Sedenquist for presenting a practical, very green solution that would dramatically change the area\'s supply picture during this era of looming drought. |
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