Ballona Wetlands: Our Long Road Trip Together

Part 1

Few of us - young, brave and unattached - have ever set out on an auto road trip without a destination.  Those rare adventures left great memories, but usually ended sooner than expected, short of gas, food and cash and far from where we thought we were headed.  As less romantic, sensible adults, we decide upon a destination up front, map out a route, including options for bad weather or other constraints, check off a multitude of ways and means to travel the preferred path, and then make the trip.   

If you set a goal and develop and execute a plan for getting there, you have a good chance of reaching your destination.  If you don’t have a plan, or even an end goal, you’ll likely end up anywhere, far from where you truly want to be. 

Much recent discussion about restoring the Ballona Wetlands has focused on the mechanisms of the work or how much land to buy, absent conversation about the desired goals. For the road trip analogy, this is like focusing on whether to travel by car or bus, or what brand and size of car to drive without really considering a destination, or even the roads available to get there.  This disconnect is understandable, given the firm positions taken by some due to long-standing disagreements, political considerations and litigation history.  It’s complicated. 

Fortunately, California has a time-tested legal and regulatory structure that separates all this chaff from the wheat of project development.  The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) forces us to pick a destination first (and a reason to go there), plan various routes to get there, and detail the preferred manner by which we will reach that journey’s end.  Not by design, but due to years of case law mandating a careful, open public process, CEQA can make the journey take much longer than we prefer, but like democracy, ensures an end result that, while rarely pleasing everyone, is fair to all concerned.  Most importantly, it enables justifiable projects to actually happen, rather than getting caught in an endless loop of disagreement.

Part 2 in my Next Blog:  Regional Goals Must be Clearly Articulated, But Need Not Enjoy Unanimous Consensus