Sides Agree on Canal Upgrade, but Not on How

Russell Ruffing, a Los Angeles city engineer, and Marcia Hanscom, an environmental activist, see the same woeful site when they gaze at the southern end of the Grand Canal in Venice: a waterway badly in need of a face lift.

The canal’s dirt banks are crumbling. Million-dollar homes along the canal overlook water that is clogged with sandbags, plastic tarps, discarded clothing and takeout food containers. Concrete sidewalks paralleling the canal are cracked or broken.

Both Ruffing and Hanscom envision a restored canal with new storm drains, native vegetation, improved water quality and fenced, safe walkways.

But their agreement stops there.

The city hopes to transform the Grand Canal into something closer to its cousins to the north, the Venice Canal and its tributaries, whose neatly manicured, mostly concrete banks rarely overflow. The nonprofit Wetlands Action Network, of which Hanscom is executive director, hopes for something more like the Ballona Lagoon to the south, a marine preserve with sloping banks, decomposed granite paths and its own Web site.

The two sides have become locked in a court battle over how the canal should be restored. After the city began installing a bypass line to allow water to flow from the Ballona Lagoon to the canals north of Washington Boulevard, the first step in damming, draining and dredging the Grand Canal, the Wetlands Action Network filed suit against the city and the California Coastal Commission in Superior Court, saying the work would cause “irreparable harm� to the ecosystem of the canal.

The group was later joined in the suit by the Ballona Wetlands Land Trust, the Coalition to Save the Marina and the Sierra Club.

Judge James A. Robertson issued a stay last week ordering that most work on the Grand Canal be halted.

Although Robertson’s order allowed removal of damaged sidewalks and nonnative vegetation and construction of storm drain catch basins and fences to continue, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, who represents the neighborhood around the canal, said the project has suffered an almost irreversible setback.

The $1.5-million project, which would be funded by residents through an assessment program, has been in the works for almost 10 years, on the drawing boards for 25. The 1,000-foot-long Grand Canal is the last piece of a restoration project that includes the Venice Canal network north of Washington Boulevard and the Ballona Lagoon, which feeds into Marina del Rey.

The Coastal Commission, which has jurisdiction over the project, approved it last November after the city made adjustments to its original proposal to further reduce the project’s impact on sensitive habitat areas. A tight timeline established by the commission required that all work on the canal be completed before April 30, when the local population of least terns, an endangered bird, returns to feed. The next hearing on the canal restoration is scheduled for March 12.

“There is no way we can do the project this year,� Galanter said. “For at least another year, the area will remain unrestored, uncleaned up, and it will just be sitting there. I am very unhappy that people will do this in the name of environmental protection.�

Under the city’s plan, the Grand Canal would be drained of an estimated 2,000 cubic feet of debris, trash and polluted sediments; storm drains would be installed; nonnative plants would be removed and replaced with wetland vegetation; access ways would be improved or replaced, and the banks of the canal reinforced. In some areas, concrete “Loffelstein blocks� would be used to shore up the banks.

Most of the disagreement between the Wetlands Action Network and the city focuses on those blocks, which the city has already used along the Venice Canal, and on the draining and dredging of the canal. The blocks, said Hanscom, are nothing more than concrete planters, which would prevent the native plants from taking root.

“I think we have different goals,� she said. “The city’s goal is to have something nice and neat. Our goal is to have something ecologically correct. We are not even sure why they feel they need to rake up the canal.�

“It’s a mess--a major mess,� said Ruffing, who works in the city Bureau of Engineering, Environmental Group. Of the residents who will pay for the project, he said, “We already have 18 people who have paid the full amount. If this process stalls, we have to refund their money. All of this delay creates administrative costs, and the assessment district will pay. You are always going to have people against it. But the fact is that the people who live there want it and are paying for it.�

For Tony Busching, a 70-year-old TV producer who lives on Grand Canal Court in a home facing the canal, all of this bickering is infuriating. He and his wife, Carol, have already paid their $9,800 assessment fee and were looking forward to an improved vista from their patio.

“Between the Coastal Commission and the wetland people,� he said, “it seems as if they have nothing to do but complain.�

Busching is frustrated by the judge’s stay. “The environmentalists are just not practical. They’re doing whatever they can to stop it. If only they saw how bad it is, with the broken concrete, the trash. . . . It’s a pigpen down here, and I don’t see any of these people who are so concerned doing anything about it.�