ALHAMBRA - The agency most responsible for the concrete-covered Los Angeles River has reorganized in the name of making the river more natural while continuing to avoid floods. If the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works' new watershed management division succeeds, it could change the face of a river now managed to get stormwater out of the watershed as quickly as possible. To do so, it must send that stormwater into the ground instead of the ocean.
"This is phenomenal," Dorothy Green, founding president of the Santa Monica environmental group Heal the Bay, said after county officials explained the reorganization to the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council. "I'm sitting here glowing."
The division is focused not just on keeping Los Angeles safe from floods, but also on retaining stormwater to bolster aquifers and wildlife habitat.
Dan Lafferty, who chaired the public works committee that developed the plan behind the division, said that although over the decades the department has succeeded in building a flood control system that protects the city, "we ignored many other things we wish now we had taken account of at the time."
"This is clearly a revolution," said Arthur Golding, an architect and vice president of the council, a group of government, environmental and business representatives focused on developing consensus for management of the watersheds.
Golding said members of the council might have dreamed of such a plan a few years ago, "but we would have bet 50-to-1 against it."
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