BALLONA LAWSUIT UPDATE

The battle over the California State-owned preserved 600-acre Ballona wetland park in Los Angeles moves to the LA Appeals Court this spring. The case is focused on the CA Dept. of Fish & Wildlife's decade-long industrial-scale bulldozing alleged "restoration" proposal which seeks to scrape bare 75 percent of the site and wipe out three native habitats and replace them with an expensive habitat that was never there before, watered with filthy urban runoff, and with closure of all long-used public trails for 9 years minimum. The lawsuit alleges it has been falsely "sold" to the public as a beneficial restoration when it is really not.

The appellants advocates a simple, inexpensive wildlife-friendly, non-disruptive 1-year TRUE AND ACTUAL RESTORATION to add clean freshwater creeks and clean up weeds and trash without the $200 million cost of the State's plan. Such a truthful restoration conforms to a restoration consensus study, called The Ballona Historical Ecology Study, directed by biology department experts at USC and UCLA. It is readable at ballonahe.org

The opening brief filed by attorney Todd Cardiff on March 8th for the Ballona Ecosystem Education Project (BEEP), which was founded in 1993, covers 5 issues that were rejected by the lower trial court. The project was overturned by that court in May of 2023 on two issues, inadequate analysis of flood control system impacts, and inadequate assurance that project impacts would be fixed. That victory is not affected by this appeal.

You may ask, Why did CDFW choose such a destructive project given that an accurate restoration project would have obviously resulted in so much less impacts? Lurking in the background at project hearings since the early 1990's were representatives of politically influential wetland developers and engineering corporations seeking to use the Ballona Wetlands as a compensatory "mitigation credit site" to replace what is destroyed by their own off-site projects. These exploit a loophole in state wildlife protection law that allows destruction of habitat if it is "replaced" elsewhere, EVEN IF A FUNCTIONING HABITAT IS ALREADY THERE.

The loophole allows existing preserved habitat to be expensively and destructively re-engineered. Mitigation credits projects result in the destruction of two sites with one being developed and the other being converted into the same type of habitat destroyed at the developed site. Mitigation credits create a perverse incentive to do maximum destruction at our state's rare and fragile wetlands .The more costly and destructive the impacts to the "restored" site are, the more destruction "credits" the developer gets and the more development is possible at the first site. This results in more natural habitat loss not less. The State claims it is not seeking mitigation funding sources for their project now. BEEP contends, however, that the State's $200 million non-native Ballona habitat conversion plan mimics other wetland destruction credit projects constructed in Southern California over the last 30 years.

TO READ THE APPPEAL BRIEF: 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nAkkKYsgO0F9UFjR7Fl3N2u7A_zuYAmn/view?usp=sharing