Los Angeles County began clearing out nearly 180 oak trees this morning in an 11-acre area of the Arcadia foothills south of Wilderness Park that is owned and maintained by the County and off-limits to the public. Local TV news station helicopters covered protestors sitting in trees and at entry points, sparking the County Sheriff Department to dispatch some officers to the area. The work comes after last-minute pleas by environmental activists and some Arcadia residents during the public comment portion of a regular meeting of the County Board of Supervisors Tuesday night. The County took no action on any of the comments. Those concerns, including a petition, are related to plans long in the works by the County’s Public Works department called the Santa Anita Dam Riser Modification and Reservoir Sediment Removal Project to remove the trees to make more space for debris and sediment collected from the Santa Anita Dam reservoir and about seven other nearby debris basins as required by the state to ensure the seismic integrity of the dams built for flood control, and to protect the dams’ capability to store sufficient water supplies. Almost all of the drinking water for Sierra Madre and a portion of Arcadia’s comes from the Santa Anita Dam. Arcadia City manager Don Penman sent a letter to the County Tuesday raising several questions about the necessity of the project based on a supplemental report made public Friday that was prepared by the County Public Works department at the request of the Board of Supervisors relative to issues raised by environmentalists and others in the past weeks. He said in his letter that the report indicates there is already adequate capacity to handle the sediment that is planned to be removed in the current Santa Anita Dam project. Creating several hundred thousand cubic yards of space for the debris of Flood Control locations throughout the broader region was not discussed with City staff and is not a part of the Environmental Impact Report for the project, he wrote.
The original plan dealt specifically with finding somewhere to put the sediment from the Santa Anita Dam. Since there is not currently enough capacity to store the removed sediment, there were two options presented: thousands of truck trips to carry the sediment through Arcadia residential areas to other locations, or clearing 11 acres of the “woodlands” to make room for the sediment from the Santa Anita Dam. Although the City of Arcadia expressed concerns that the mitigation relative to the tree removal was not sufficient (some form of replacement or environmental compensation), city officials much preferred that option to the thousands of trucks, which was not acceptable.
Penman said that the latest County report appears to indicate there could be a broadening of the basins that would use the area to dump sediment, which could have lead to thousands more truck trips to haul in hundreds of thousands of cubic yards sediment from other dams and flood control areas rather than preserving the site in Arcadia for future Santa Anita Dam sediment removal projects. But he told ArcadiasBest.com Wednesday that County officials have since indicated that they will limit the use to the same local basins that have always utilized the area.
— By Scott Hettrick