Invasive Flora, Opportunistic Fauna

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LOCAL TRAVELS

On a recent weekend, the Insider staff decided to get away and enjoy the wonderful spring weather in San Gabriel Mountains. We drove out past Wrightwood on the Angeles Crest Hwy. and found a relatively easy path that joined up with the Pacific Crest Trail near Vincent Gap.

The trail had a pretty good elevation gain up through an oak forest for the first mile or so, then it leveled out and followed a ridgeline dotted with pines. As we walked along, we noticed, nestled in a shaded pine needle bed, a group of what looked like bright red and pink hyacinths without any green leaves. As we got closer, we saw that they were supported by thick candy cane stalks.

We returned home and later consulted the old man of the mountains. We described the fantastical plants to him, and he told us in his gravelly voice, "When we were kids, we called that snow plant."

Snow plant, we've since learned, is a fungus-like parasite called a "mycotrophic wildflower" that gets its nutrients from tree roots.


CLOSER TO HOME

One is never quite sure what one will find when one wanders into the local mountains and foothills. A couple weeks after our mountain adventure, we decided to stick closer to home and explore some of the flatter alluvial areas around northeast Claremont. The undeveloped alluvium is home to the plant and animal community called riversidean alluvial fan sage scrub habitat, or RAFSS.

RAFSS is rapidly dwindling in southern and Baja California. Ten years ago, there was only about 2,000 acres of it left in California. It's disappearing because most of the stuff happens to be located on real estate coveted by developers (that is, until the real estate market tanked).

RAFSS is an odd sort of habitat. It's not at all liked a picturesque English woodland. Instead, if you go during the summer, you're likely to find it brown and sere. That is, in fact, why the city of Claremont had its commissioners trucked to the Padua Park site in July, 2000, to ensure that all they saw was what looked like a weedy lot desperately in need of improvements. About half of the 20-acre main park site consisted of RAFSS.

If the city's commissioners had gone to the same spot three or four months earlier, they would have seen it alive with greenery and flowers. All of which serves to underscore how diligently our town works to manipulate perception to get its projects done.

In any case, when we ventured out to take a look at an area near where the sports park has been installed, we found it teeming with wildflowers. Water percolated up in places from artesian springs (the cienegas that Claremont doyenne Marilee Scaff yearns to build below the dam near the Thompson Creek trail).

As we walked along, a couple quail that had been foraging in the brush, and they scooted off, chittering alarm calls as they took flight. We wondered about rattlesnakes, but it wasn't terribly hot the day we were out, at least, not hot enough to get the snakes stirred up.

Purples, blues, and lavenders seemed the dominant color that particular day. We saw blue-eyed grass and lupine (photo, right) with their five-lobed leaves. There was showy penstomen (below) as well, sitting in large groupings of blue jets arrayed along long, thin spears.

The generous storms of January and February brought so much water that the plain held an abundance of chamise, buckwheat, and bronze-green castor bean, too. Other flowering plants hadn't quite come into their season yet. White sage and short coastal prickly pear cactus looked as if they would burst into bloom any minute.


INVASIVE EXOTICS: STRANGE FLORA, STRANGER FAUNA

As we got closer to the park site, approaching it from the east, we noticed that the soil was considerably disturbed by the construction equipment. Black mustard and other invasive exotics had taken over those disturbed, more open areas. We could see the strangely out of place weeds mixed in and projecting above the RAFSS:



As we got closer, we saw that they had overrun the area completely:


















And, along with the weeds that choked off the local coastal sage habitat, some even more more opportunistic and parasitic fauna appeared, blindly devastating up entire plant and animal communities from Claremont to Whittier Narrows:



From "Pave to Save," LA Weekly, April 22, 2010:

Shepherded by a group of unwieldy bureaucracies that include two water districts, the San Gabriel & Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountain Conservancy and the County of Los Angeles, the San Gabriel River Discovery Center is designed to replace the aging 2,000-square-foot Whittier Narrows Nature Center, buildings including a garage, and "non-native landscaping" with a 14,000-square-foot museum of interactive exhibits for children that would explain the existing state of the watershed, show what the natural rivers were once like and feature a covered, outdoor classroom.

"You're going to bring awareness of the sense of place where the kids sense that they're part of something much bigger," declares Sam Pedroza as he reels off interconnections between man, river and sea. "Everything that we do from the mountains and the inland cities affects the ocean. It's as small as throwing a wrapper in the street or in the parking lot — that can all end up in the ocean."

Pedroza, a Claremont city councilman, chairs the San Gabriel River Discovery Center Authority's Stakeholders Committee. "I know that we look like the Goliath here," he tells the Weekly, but "by every definition this is an environmental project that's aimed at protecting the watershed."

Others aren't so sure.

Teresa Young, who studies insects in habitats near the existing nature center, shares Pedroza's concern for the remaining open space. But she does not agree that the construction of a large building and parking lot somehow improves the environment.

Save by destroying, and then put up a commemorative bronze plaque to describe for future generations that which we've plowed under. It's a truly bizarre logic we've become accustomed to in Claremont, the City of Trees.

Bulldozing Reality

The January 19 Claremont Courier had a Tony Krickl article about Claremont Community Services Director Scott Carroll leaving Claremont to take a job as general manager for the Costa Mesa Sanitation District.

(Sorry, no link to the actual article, which is archived behind the Courier's paywall.)

December 31 was Carroll's last working day. The article detailed some of Carroll's more notable accomplishments, such as his negotiating a deal to have Claremont's trash taken to an Orange County landfill, a move that saved the city $200,000.

The article also also touched on the 2008 bulldozing of the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park that was one of the low points in Carroll's Community Service tenure. You might recall some of the damage done by the contractor the city hired to clear brush mechanically, rather than hiring crews to do the work by hand as Claremont had promised to do under its own Vegetation Management Plan for the park. Here's what the park looked like in the summer of 2008 shortly after the brush clearance:

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After the damage occurred, the city faced scrutiny from county, state, and federal agencies. As part of the City's penance, Claremont was supposed to monitor the area to see what grew back and then was supposed to come up with a plan to replant the area with native plants to restore the area to its former state.

The City made a lot of representations to the public and to the various government agencies it was dealing with. But did they follow through?

You have to remember that, this being Claremont, once the spotlights go off, then the real work of holding City Hall to its word begins. In the Courier's article on Carroll's departure, Carroll addressed the Wilderness Park damage:

"That was really unfortunate," Mr. Carroll said. "But I took full responsibility for what happened and was determined to resolve the issue. We got the approval of different interested parties involved and fixed the problem before the rainy season began. Now if you go up there, it looks the same as before the damage was done."

Really?

We didn't recall any of the promised revegetation happening, so we went up to the park a few weeks ago and snapped this photo:

The photo was taken facing north from the S-curve at Via Padova. All you have to do is compare the right side of the photo (the damaged east side of the canyon) to the left or west side. The creek runs down the center of the canyon, and that is marked by the trees. Although the damaged areas are now green, what has grown back are non-native grasses that will have be cut back each year. Those golf course fairways on the right side of the photo should actually look like the hills on the left side.

None of the revegetation has occurred. Not that it matters. The California Department of Fish & Game and the Army Corps of Engineers have gone away without any apparent follow-up enforcement. Ditto for the press. Hence the Scott Carroll farewell quote.

And that, dear readers, is how public perception is shaped. One thing hasn't changed a bit, as was demonstrated by the inadvertent felling of the elm tree at Tenth St. & Indian Hill Blvd. in December, Claremont's trees and city-hired construction machinery don't mix.

Deja Vu All Over Again

The recent news concerning the City's inexplicable action in bulldozing acre after acre of the Wilderness Park left us with the nagging feeling we'd seen it all before. Sure enough, a quick rummage through the Stack Of Old Newspapers led us to the January 22, 2003 number of the Claremont Courier. Page 9 was graced with an advertisement reading, "Bulldozer Replaces Tree as City Logo". It's a nice touch that the graphic shows the City pushing a tree down the hill. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Prescient.

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Paving Paradise

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City of Trees I

Saturday's Claremont Courier had an article by Tony Krickl about the city of Claremont bulldozing several acres of its Wilderness Park, including a large section running along Thompson Creek:

The city decided to bulldoze the land in an attempt to save money on an unexpected project. City officials acknowledged they made a big mistake.

“I admit our actions were wrong,” said Community Services Director Scott Carroll, speaking at Tuesday night’s council meeting. “I’m deeply sorry for putting the city [in this position]. Our intent was to comply with [the county regulations] and protect the homes on Via Padova.”

Bare terrain is all that remains next to these Padua Hills homes after a bulldozer was used to clear the area as part the city’s fire abatement plan.

The decision to bulldoze caused irreparable damage to the land, said residents and ecological experts, and will end up costing the city upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix. The exact price tag has not yet been determined.

Back in July, the city was notified by the Los Angeles County Fire Department that the territory had been surveyed and the brush needed to be cleared behind the homes. This year has been particularly dry and prone to fires, so the extra safety precautions were necessary. The city had already set their budget for the next 2 years, and the unexpected abatement expenses had not been planned for.

But fear of liability was an overriding concern for City Manager Jeff Parker in case a fire did break out. He did not want to be in the same position as the previous city manager back in 2003 when fire ripped through Palmer Canyon, destroying homes and leading to a $17.5 million lawsuit settlement.

“I told [Mr. Carroll] to get it done,” Mr. Parker said.

Community Services Department staff came up with a plan that was quick and cost-effective. In mid-August, the bulldozers were brought in to complete the work.

Residents are now concerned that the area is prone to erosion, excessive dust and the invasion of non-native plants. With fall and winter rains around the corner, time is limited to repair the damage.

One thing we're being told by readers who seen the area is that you really can't appreciate the extent of the damage unless you walk down inside that canyon running along the east end of the Wilderness Park. It's apparently very difficult to get an idea of the scope of the damage from the road. The Courier photos do show how wide the swath was, though.

Another thing readers are telling us is that while the ground in the photos looks like hard-packed clay, most of it is really a fine powder several inches deep that gets picked up and blown all over by the wind - remember the Dust Bowl? Once the soil goes, whether by wind or rain, it's going to drive up the cost of fixing the damage.

The silence from groups like the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club, whose newsletter editor Robin Ives teaches math at Harvey Mudd College, strikes us as particularly odd. The Angeles Chapter is involved enough in Claremont local politics to have endorsed Sam Pedroza in the last city election. Why no involvement in this issue?

Or what about Claremont Heritage, which has a particular interest in the Padua Theatre? That same bulldozer ran up the canyon all around the Theatre, causing damage there. You'd think the people interested in preserving the Theatre's structures would be concerned about the ground under the buildings being undermined by erosion or that the view of the Wilderness Park would be marred by that bulldozer blade scraping great red gashes in the canyon. Is historical preservation something that's confined to the built environment, or does it extend to the the natural environment as well?

If a private landowner had done what the city did, these groups would be all over the hapless private party. But since it's the city creating the damage, they hold their tongues, giving tacit approval to the actions with their silence.

Odd indeed. But then, that's Claremont in a nutshell.

* * *

One reader who wrote in commented on the Courier article's grammar:

SUBJECT: Courier editing staff
DATE: Saturday, September 13, 2008 11:05 PM
TO: Claremont Buzz

Over the past couple weeks I have noticed a couple of jaw-dropping printing errors in the Courier. But somehow this headline from the Courier website reminded me of you, dear Insider: "In the eastern portion of the Claremont Wilderness Park, plots of baron [sic] land covered with tire tracks can be seen behind dozens of Padua Hills homes."

Who knew that Claremont had a real-life aristocracy?

We caught that bit too, but with our occasional typos and misspellings, we're hardly in any position to criticize the Courier.

And then there was this reader who thinks we need a plaque on Thompson Creek to commemorate the damage:

SUBJECT: bulldozed
DATE: Saturday, September 13, 2008 1:07 PM
TO: Claremont Buzz

Someone with a couple hundred dollars to spare should put up a commemorative plaque with the names of city officials at the site of the bullzdozer massacre. A great piece of political theater, for people who follow Claremont politics and get the joke.