S. California’s Riverfront Habitat Disappearing in Unceasing Assault

OCEANSIDE, Calif. —  It was business as usual along the San Luis Rey River.

Like so many property owners before him, H. Von Packard Jr. wanted to make good use of his land, which cozies up to the river as it winds through Oceanside. So he hired a bulldozer and plowed down a dense thicket of willows, cattails and other stream-side vegetation covering part of the 42-acre parcel.

Vic Yoder, a state Fish and Game warden, didn’t like what he saw. No permits had been issued. No permission had been granted. But before the state could take action, the bulldozer leveled more than a dozen acres of prime riverfront habitat that played host to numerous animals and birds, including a tiny, endangered songbird, the least Bell’s vireo.

Packard argued that he simply wanted to farm the land, to plant tomatoes. Authorities were unimpressed. They slapped him with misdemeanor charges of altering a river without first informing the state. They were even less impressed when Packard submitted plans to Oceanside for a 77-house subdivision on the property.

After months of wrangling, a settlement was reached in January. Packard would spend $30,000 to replant 1,000 trees and native plants in exchange for the charges being dropped. For the birds and beasts that had called the ungainly grove their home, peace and order would return.

It was an upbeat ending to a tragic environmental tale, but that small victory in Oceanside is exceedingly rare. Up and down the arid expanse of Southern California, the ribbons of green oases stretching along the banks of rivers and small tributaries are under an unceasing assault by man.

Valuable Acres

Known as riparian areas, these ecologically valuable acres of river bank vegetation have increasingly fallen prey to farmers and developers, to bulldozers and buzz-saws, often making room for concrete channels, shopping centers and houses.

“They’re vanishing rather rapidly, I’m afraid, especially in Southern California,” said Bob Radovich, a state Fish and Game Department biologist. “And the loss only seems to be accelerating.”

In California, only 10% of the riparian areas that once existed still stand, authorities said. The destruction is not abating. Along the coast of Orange and San Diego counties, 40% of the stream-side vegetation that thrived just a decade ago is gone, state wildlife officials said.

Examples are everywhere.

Owners of a thoroughbred horse farm and a sod-growing operation in southern San Diego County have pushed into swaths of riparian vegetation in the Tijuana River, maintaining that they were simply reclaiming land lost to floodwaters years earlier. To the north, a tomato farmer decimated riparian habitat along the San Dieguito River east of Del Mar to expand his field, authorities said.

In Los Angeles and Orange counties, the destruction is far more vivid, albeit decades old. From the largest river to the tiniest tributary, concrete channels long ago replaced river bank vegetation that once brimmed with plant and animal life. But the streams that remain unfettered by such flood-control projects increasingly feel the strain.

National Problem

Troubling as it is, the destruction of Southern California’s riparian areas is only one example of a greater problem--the disappearance of wetlands throughout the United States. From the vanishing Everglades to the dwindling salt marshes of San Francisco Bay to the plains of North Dakota, where farmers are plowing over important wildlife sanctuaries known as prairie potholes, the hand of man is invariably being felt.

“This is a national issue,” said Nancy Kaufman, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official who headed the outfit’s Laguna Niguel office until earlier this year. “While you can look to San Diego County and Southern California for examples, it’s not as if the region is out of step with other sections of the country.”

But while many of those other areas have attracted a vigilant pack of public protectors to do battle against transgressors, the riparian areas of Southern California enjoy few stalwart allies other than a handful of dedicated environmentalists.

“I don’t think people realize what riparian areas are and that they’re threatened,” said Sharon Lockhart, an adjunct biology professor at San Diego State University. “I think it’s really tragic.”

Indeed, few people seem to grasp the ecological significance presented by a scruffy thicket of willows and cottonwoods perched on the banks of a babbling brook.

“They’re like a lifeline, particularly in our semi-arid environment,” said Emily Durbin, a Sierra Club leader in San Diego. “Just as much as aqueducts are lifelines for us, rivers are lifelines for animals and birds.”

Different Roles

Aside from serving as pivotal way-stations for animal and plant life, riparian areas play an important role for man.

Authorities say the streams serve as settling pools to recharge Southern California’s vital ground-water system. Moreover, the vegetation on the river banks acts like a sponge during heavy rains, holding back heavy flows and then later releasing the water slowly.

With stands of cattails, bulrush and other plants and trees, riparian areas contribute air to breathe and also serve as nature’s own sewage system, helping to metabolize certain wastes such as farm runoff and fertilizers.

“These sorts of wetland areas are important not just for wildlife, but for a variety of other things,” Kaufman said. “Society is going to have to pay a great deal of money to compensate for these losses. There’s a lot at stake, and it’s not just endangered species.”

The river stretches also contain more animal and plant life than perhaps any other ecosystem in Southern California, experts say. Opossum, skunks and coyotes frequent riparian areas. Hawks and other birds of prey roost in the trees. The pockets of green also serve as stopping-off points and nesting grounds for a plethora of migratory birds.

“Riparian areas are not as well understood, they’re not as obvious,” said Dave Bontrager, an independent biological consultant and avid bird watcher. “It takes a little closer look. But, boy, once you look!

“Take the Santa Margarita River (on Camp Pendleton). That riparian corridor is just fantastically diverse. We used to joke that everything in Southern California nests there, and if it doesn’t yet, it will.”

Pointing Fingers

Why are they disappearing? Advocates outline a variety of reasons, but typically point to the federal agency they feel is the prime culprit--the Army Corps of Engineers.

Although the state has some regulatory weapons to go after riparian abusers, as it did with Packard, the onus for enforcement typically falls on the corps.

Critics argue that the corps has consistently failed to halt the destruction of river bank habitat. Roundly vilified by environmentalists as “the dam-building agency,” the corps is philosophically misplaced as a guardian of the environment, acting instead as a toothless watchdog, they said.

“The blame lies at several levels, all the way from the cities and counties on up,” Lockhart said. “But I think the corps is one of the greatest disappointments. . . . It’s akin to the fox watching the hen house.”

Officials with the Fish and Wildlife Service said they can point to more than 200 instances in the last decade where illegal grading and fill work occurred in riparian areas of Southern California, but the corps failed to do anything. Instead, the agency typically followed up by issuing after-the-fact permits, they said.

Corps officials said such numbers seem to stretch the truth and argued that their mandate is to carefully balance environmental considerations against other concerns, among them the rights of private property owners to develop their land.

“The Fish and Wildlife people are good folks, but they’re a single-purpose agency,” noted Perry Davis, Army Corps of Engineers spokesman for the Southern California branch. “Their interests are among many we have to look at. We have to look at all the environmental concerns, then balance those to some degree with the economic returns and other things.”

‘Pretty Good Job’

Davis said he is aware of “situations where we have issued cease-and-desist orders on people who were illegally filling and made them not only stop, but go in and return the land to the condition it previously was in.”

“Given the limitations of our staff, I think we’ve done a pretty good job,” Davis said. “I suppose there may be cases where things slip through the cracks, but we try to keep that from happening.”

At times, however, the corps has appeared all too cozy with developers, critics contend. Perhaps the most troubling example occurred in Las Virgenes Creek in northern Los Angeles County.

In 1986, the agency issued a cease-and-desist order to a development company that had ripped out between three and eight acres of riparian habitat to construct a flood channel near an apartment project. Leaders of other federal agencies, however, were angered when they later learned that a Corps of Engineers regulatory official privately told the builder to ignore the order and finish the project, suggesting a permit for the work would be issued later.

But the corps is not the only agency singled out.

Kaufman worries that the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which helps oversee the wetlands, has abrogated too much of its regulatory responsibility to the corps. In only a handful of cases has the EPA stepped in and used its powers to reverse a corps decision, most notably in 1987 by nixing approval of a dam that would have inundated the pristine Pamo Valley in northern San Diego County.

Philip Oshida, regional chief of the EPA’s wetlands section, said the agency has been hindered in the past by staff limitations but hopes that more headway can be made with the George Bush Administration’s appointment of William K. Reilly, a noted environmentalist and wetlands advocate, as top administrator at the EPA.

“It really was a shot in the arm for the wetlands protection program,” Oshida said. “He has already mentioned that wetlands is one of his top priorities.”

Inadequate Regulations?

Radovich, meanwhile, suggests that it is the regulations, and not the regulatory agencies, that are probably most to blame for the unceasing destruction.

“I don’t think it’s the Corps of Engineers or their staff necessarily,” he said. “I just think there is not adequate regulation placed on development in riparian areas in California.”

The disappearance of the rich river bank groves has occurred mostly on a piecemeal basis, fueled by state and federal laws that put few roadblocks in the way of landowners eager to clear vegetation on parcels of 10 acres or less, authorities said.

Although federal rules often call for the replacement of riparian areas lost to development, such mitigation sometimes falls through the cracks on smaller projects, officials contend. Even when requirements for replacement habitat are set out, the regulatory agencies often fail to follow up and ensure the job is done, Kaufman said, estimating that 80% of the mitigation work is never performed.

Some destruction isn’t even covered under the regulations. A property owner can typically skirt the rules by clearing trees and plants with a chain saw, taking care to avoid filling the stream channel, which is protected under federal guidelines.

Moreover, Lockhart argues that the regulations are biased against the arid West. Many riparian areas in Southern California, she said, fail to pass “the wet tennis shoe test” (if the ground is wet enough to squish up around your tennis shoe, you’re in a wetland). In the eyes of federal regulators, these are not true wetlands, no matter how great their value as environmental sanctuaries, and are summarily rejected for protection.

Farming is often allowed to encroach on the riparian areas, even though the rules allow growers to till only land that has historically been in agriculture. Kaufman said the loophole is sometimes exploited by developers. A builder clears a river bank for farming, then a few years later can more easily push through plans for a subdivision or shopping center because the land is no longer considered a riparian area.

Reasons for Destruction

Property owners offer a variety of reasons for destroying prime habitat. Often they contend that they are reclaiming land seized by the river, such as the landowners on the Tijuana River. Others suggest that they were unaware of the regulations.

But even landowners who know the rules sometimes go ahead and bulldoze the trees and bushes, anticipating little more than a slap on the hand from lax regulatory agencies, critics contend.

“You have people who just don’t care,” Lockhart said. “Because the corps doesn’t do anything to people like them, they go ahead and do what they damn well please.”

All that grading and filling and cutting can create a variety of problems.

Construction of flood channels, for instance, typically halts the flow of sand down rivers to replenish Southern California’s eroding beaches, many experts contend.

Moreover, heavy development along a river decreases the land’s ability to soak up rainfall, causing increased runoff into streams. The bolstered flows dislodge silt that can settle in areas of tangled river bank vegetation, choking out all life.

“At some point, you will have a failure of these environments if enough of their component pieces are missing,” Kaufman said. “It is true that we will never know what good something is if it’s not around anymore.”

Typically, city leaders in Southern California have not been allies in the fight against riparian destruction, but that may be changing, particularly in San Diego County, considered by many the last bastion for unfettered river bank habitat.

Spearheaded by San Diego City Councilman Bob Filner and county Supervisor Brian Bilbray, officials are gearing up to spend $10 million in state funds to purchase riparian areas along the Tijuana River.

A special task force is also engaged in an ambitious effort to restore habitat for the least Bell’s vireo, which is on the U.S. endangered species list. In addition, various officials are pressing an ambitious effort to form a park along the San Dieguito River Valley in north San Diego County.

Public Awareness

What else can be done? Radovich suggests increasing public awareness: People must learn to value riparian areas so that they will support tighter restrictions on river bank encroachments.

“It boils down to a political process and increasing public concern and increasing protective capacity for the areas,” he said. “It has to be far reaching. It doesn’t mean just drawing a line along the side of a stream. We have to look at whole watersheds and manage them appropriately.”

Oshida of the EPA said the agency hopes to increasingly work with local governments to plan around riparian areas and have an influence on zoning decisions, which can affect the development potential on river banks.

Indeed, he suggested that riparian protection efforts do not have to occur just on the federal level. California could make its own regulations tougher than federal laws, he said, and the regional water quality control boards that blanket the state could handle the task of enforcing the new rules.

Lockhart, meanwhile, maintains that the most profound impact could be made by giving the EPA the responsibility and the staff to regulate the federal wetland rules.

With riparian areas disappearing fast, changes need to be made soon, experts contend. The future of numerous species of plants, birds and animals could depend on reversing the current destructive trend.

“In terms of what good any particular species is, there are all the great old stories, you know, you don’t take your engine apart and say this piece looks insignificant and throw it away, because your engine probably won’t work,” Kaufman said. “As a human being living in this environment, I know my options are being extinguished along with these species.”