Source of this article - Los Angeles Times, July 12, 2007
By Stuart Silverstein
Times Staff
Writer
The long legal battle stemming from Los
Angeles' diversion of the Lower Owens River nearly a century ago took a historic
turn Wednesday as an Inyo County judge declared the waterway restored.
"I
can now officially declare that the Lower Owens River is a river," Superior
Court Judge Lee Cooper said at a hearing.
Cooper also approved an
agreement and order lifting the $5,000-a-day fine he imposed on Los Angeles in
September 2005, to compel the city's Department of Water and Power to restore a
62-mile stretch of the river. The new pact, negotiated by Los Angeles with
environmental groups and government agencies that had pressed the city to
rehabilitate the river, will halt penalties that amounted to $3.3
million.
Los Angeles still faces possible sanctions if it fails to
maintain the required flow of water and monitoring of the river. It also faces
other lawsuits filed by environmentalists.
But officials with both the
DWP and Inyo County, one of the parties that fought for the river's restoration,
characterized Wednesday's developments as landmark achievements.
"If
anybody were to look at the history of the relationship between Los Angeles and
the Owens Valley communities, it's really been marked by suspicion and
litigation, and we're really getting away from that in a very meaningful way,"
said H. David Nahai, president of the DWP's board of commissioners.
He
called the work "probably the most significant river restoration project in at
least the Western United States, if not the entire country."
Greg James,
a lawyer for Inyo County, said the pact approved by Cooper "provides a very
strong protection for the river, so that it will flow in perpetuity."
After decades of political bickering, water was directed back into the
riverbed in December, and the area has unexpectedly quickly become home again to
various fish and other wildlife.
Still, just four months ago, Cooper
found that the DWP's restoration efforts were still falling short. At that time
he lauded the city for establishing a steady flow of water of 40 cubic feet per
second, a standard that it must continue to meet, but faulted the city for
constructing too few water-monitoring stations — a situation the DWP has
corrected.
The so-called Lower Owens River Project was conceived in 1991
to remedy excessive groundwater pumping by the DWP that destroyed habitat in the
Owens Valley from 1970 to 1990. The DWP agreed in 1997 to restore the aquifer
and create and sustain diverse habitat for fish and other wildlife.
But
in 2001, a lawsuit was brought by the California Department of Fish and Game,
California State Lands Commission, Sierra Club and Owens Valley Committee,
accusing the DWP of deliberately missing project deadlines.
The judge
later imposed the $5,000-a-day fine, ordered the DWP to cut by one third its
pumping of water out of the Lower Owens Valley and threatened to ban its use of
the so-called Second Los Angeles Aqueduct, an $89-million facility that has been
exporting millions of gallons of water to Southern California each day since
1970.
The legal dispute has underscored the acrimony in the Owens Valley
since the early 1900s, when the city had agents pose as farmers and ranchers to
buy land and water rights in the valley, then built an aqueduct to slake the
thirst of the metropolis more than 200 miles to the south. The river was reduced
to a trickle in 1913 when the Owens River Aqueduct began delivering water to Los
Angeles.