|
Saturday, September 16, 2000 Wilson: Restore wild
space NOW From the EDITOR'S DESK By Larry Wilson MORE than 15 years ago, when I was a slip of a lad and a reporter here in town, citizens and City Hall began talking about Arroyo Seco revitalization. By 1985 they'd even started planning for it. The visioning process, as they say in touchy-feely bureaucratic circles, began for the Devil's Gate/Hahamongna area above the dam and below JPL with earthwork artists and continued on in less purely beautiful but perhaps more practical ways. So here we are way down the line in 2000, with plenty of time to have rung the changes and saved and restored and improved on this great big ditch of superb open and wild space for the benefit of us all. So how are we enjoying the fruits of our labor from over the decades? Oh -- we're not enjoying them? Nothing's happened, Hahamongna-wise? Oh. How mightily disheartened the young man that I was back then would be to hear the news. The news is not quite true, you might say. Why, we got rid of that commercial gravel and rock quarry in the Upper Arroyo. And you'd be right -- we did. And . . . and . . . while it's not exactly Haha news, we got those nice trash-can containers in the central part of the canyon made out of arroyo stone. Uh-huh. We did. And BFI, in a swap for using another, faraway canyon as a landfill, paid for the partial stream restoration and indigenous plants down by the casting pond. Definitely a nice piece of work. But the news that makes us all look awfully stupid and ineffectual is that Hahamongna itself, which due to plentiful county park-bond funds and the long-accomplished shoring-up of the dam should by now have been our recreational pride and joy, has gone nowhere, still resembling a Dust Bowl landscape. The latest reason: City Council and community squabbling over how many soccer fields to put in. Soccer people, in essence, want the whole thing turned into an irrigated pitch. Environmentalists note that the chemicals it takes to keep a California lawn artificially green are not welcome in the topsoil of the aquifer that gives the city 40 percent of its water. Meanwhile, nothing happens. Nothing at all. Look, folks -- we're not getting any younger here. Put in a couple of soccer fields and leave the rest the verdant, accessible open space that the Arroyo Seco actually has precious little of. And then, City Hall monitors of the public good and treasury, wallow in apology to us -- and pay us the full interest -- for the scandal uncovered this summer: the case of the missing arroyo millions. As Staff Writer Elizabeth Lee reported in our paper Aug. 19, over $3.2 million in Brookside Golf Course revenues that were supposed to be used for Arroyo Seco improvements in the last 14 years were in fact never set aside for that purpose and remained unknown to park advocates while arroyo projects languished for "lack of money." Much of the money that was spent in the arroyo went to Brookside Golf Course improvements. As bored family, friends and employees know, I bow to no one in my adoration of each blade of grass on Brookside's 36 holes. I spend more time on fairways there than anywhere in Pasadena but home and work. But neither the golf course nor the equally groovy Rose Bowl are what we mean when we talk about the crying need for arroyo restoration. Make up for lost time, Pasadena. A generation has already missed out on the full glories of what could be the greatest urban-surrounded wild space in the West. -- Larry Wilson is editor of the Pasadena Star-News. |