Communities

Trying to tame the fearsome 405 *

The Sepulveda Pass—three words that strike terror in the hearts of drive-time commuters everywhere. But an ambitious project funded partly with federal stimulus dollars is aiming to ease the fear factor on the 405.

It won’t happen overnight. By the time it’s completed in the spring of 2013, however, the project will create a 10-mile northbound carpool lane on the 405 between the Santa Monica (10) and Ventura (101) freeways. It will provide a crucial connecting link in the freeway’s carpool lane system extending north from the Orange County line.

Relief can’t come soon enough for the hundreds of thousands of commuters who travel through the pass each day. They currently experience 15,000 “vehicle-hours” of delay daily; Caltrans estimates that unless something is done, the congestion would hit 27,800 vehicle-hours by 2015 and 59,430 by 2031.

“Most of the commute would be at a complete standstill,” says Mike Barbour, Metro’s project director on the 405 work. “If we don’t do this, it will be horrendous.”

The work extends beyond adding the carpool lane. Workers will also realign 27 on- and off-ramps; widen 13 overpasses and structures; build some 18 miles of retaining and sound walls, and remove and replace bridges at the Skirball Center, Sunset Boulevard and Mulholland Drive. Oh, and they’ll be doing some road improvements on nearby streets, too.

It’s a big job—officials say the project will create 18,000 jobs during construction, although not all of those are local. For now, workers in the pre-construction phase are busy surveying storm drains and utilities, and doing the soil testing that is essential to the design process. Project officials also are working with a community advisory committee made up of homeowners and neighborhood councils to get feedback on the design process, and will continue working with the group though construction. A community meeting will be held Nov. 19 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm at the Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N Sepulveda Blvd, Los Angeles.

Signs will be posted to let motorists know when the project is expected to begin and end. Traffic lanes will be reconfigured and a safe work zone set up behind those concrete barriers known as “k-rail.” Once that’s done, officials say, northbound drivers should have the same five lanes available during the project as they did before it started—and will, of course, have a new 6th lane for carpools when it’s done.

“We are doing everything we can to reduce the overall construction time frame,” Barbour says, adding there is an incentive for the contractor to finish early. Barbour urges commuters to check the project website frequently for updates during construction.

The project, a partnership of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), is expected to cost $1.034 billion, with $189.9 million coming from the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) and the rest from state and other federal sources.

Updated, 11/10/09: Just in time for the holiday rush at LAX, Caltrans has opened the new carpool lane on the southbound 405 from the Santa Monica Freeway to the Marina Freeway (SR-90.) The northbound carpool lane covering the same stretch is set to open before Thanksgiving.

“It’s going to definitely alleviate the flow of traffic, especially during the holidays,” when carloads of travelers picking up or dropping off passengers can take advantage of a high-occupancy lane, says Sgt. Jim Holcomb of the LAX Airport Police.

The five-year, $167 million project—which also included work on National, Culver and Palms boulevards—makes it possible to travel via carpool lane on the southbound San Diego Freeway from the San Fernando Valley through Orange County.

Innovative probation/police teams cut valley gang crime

The LAPD and the county’s Probation Department joined forces for the first time more than two years ago to battle the San Fernando Valley’s rising tide of gang violence. The idea: to embed a deputy probation officer in LAPD gang details in six Valley stations to provide a missing dimension to gang enforcement.

The result, according to police and probation officials, has been a significant drop in gang-related violence in the Valley since the Community Impact Teams hit the streets. Valley gang crime has fallen 18 of the 28 months the program has been in existence – including ten of the latest 12 months, ending in June, 2009, for which statistics are available. “It’s clearly trended down and CIT has been a part of that,” says Paul Vinetz, Probation Director for the Third District, who helped design the program.

As members of Community Impact Teams, six deputy probation officers roll with LAPD Valley gang officers to answer emergency calls as well as make proactive community police stops. They focus on assessment and case management of high-risk gang-involved offenders in crowded neighborhoods. The probation officers have conducted thousands of face-to-face contacts, home visits and searches that have yielded hauls of firearms and other weapons. In 2009, CIT officers seized 35 firearms through August, including one June incident that yielded a sawed-off shotgun and two assault weapons.

Teaming up with Probation officers give LAPD gang cops a greater ability to identify probationers quickly and make warrantless “probation searches” of cars or homes that can turn up drugs or weapons. Being out with the LAPD officers gives the Probation Department greater street presence to spot problems with individual probationers. Working in dense neighborhoods with significant gang problems, probation officers say that their skills and sensitivity have helped them to flag hot spots and act on crime trends that might be invisible to traditional law enforcement alone. “We bring a different focus that complements what the LAPD officers do,” says Probation Director Jose Jimenez, who heads the Intensive Gang Supervision Program that includes the CIT.

Beyond crime suppression efforts, the embedded probation officers also provide another set of eyes and ears on the alert for youngsters at-risk from exposure to gangs and drugs. Probation officials say officers can then make more timely and effective referrals to the Department of Children and Family Services’ child abuse hotline. They can also refer probations and families to other services, including mental health, education, drug treatment and domestic violence.

Shout it from the mountaintop—it’s Ballard Mountain!

Unexpected coalitions can move a mountain. Sometimes they can even change the mountain’s name.

That much was abundantly clear on a recent sunny Sunday morning at First A.M.E. church in Los Angeles, when an array of people from far-flung corners of Los Angeles assembled to pay tribute to a man, a mountain and a shared purpose that, improbably, had brought them all together.

There was a history professor, a geophysicist, a retired entertainment executive, a Los Angeles County supervisor and a retired city firefighter with much of his extended family in tow.

And there was the leadership and congregation of First A.M.E.—there to celebrate the journey that recently culminated in a new name for a prominent Santa Monica Mountains peak: Ballard Mountain.

Until this fall, it was called “Negrohead Mountain”—a ‘60s-era modification of its earlier name, which contained a racist slur.

Now it honors—by name–John Ballard, one of Los Angeles’ early black pioneers. Ballard first established himself in Los Angeles in 1859, and in 1869 became one of the original founders of First A.M.E. He eventually relocated with his family in the 1880s to the mountain area known today as Seminole Hot Springs, filing a homestead claim in 1880 and receiving his homestead patent in 1900.

“Before it was Negrohead Mountain, it was another N-word Mountain,” Pastor John J. Hunter told the congregation, celebrating the fall of “another symbol of racism” and thanking Yaroslavsky for his leadership.

“Name the mountain for the man, not his race, and that’s what we’ve done,” Yaroslavsky said. “It’s the right thing to do and it’s a great thing to honor a man who’s been gone for almost 100 years.”

Kenneth W. Hudnut, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, presented a map bearing the new name to Ballard’s great grandson, Reginald Ballard, Sr. The United States Board on Geographic Names made the change Sept. 9, at the request of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which adopted Yaroslavsky’s proposal to do so.

Reginald Ballard, 84, retired from the Los Angeles City Fire Department as a captain in 1978. In the mid-1950s, he had been part of a group of firefighters who challenged the department’s segregation practices, eventually prevailing and opening up promotional opportunities and integrating firehouses.

Although Reginald Ballard had been a part of history in that case, he didn’t know much about his own—until recently.

He said his father, Dr. Claudius Ballard, had been a good doctor but not much of a communicator. “I didn’t know anything about my family tree,” Ballard said. “We didn’t sit around the table discussing things.”

But, after reading an extensive article in the Los Angeles Times (here) that detailed the work of Moorpark College history professor Patty Colman on the Ballard family saga—and the efforts of neighbors who started the push to change the mountain’s name—Ballard and his grown children realized they might be looking at a long-lost link in their family history.

They connected with Colman and with neighbors Paul Culberg and Nick Noxon. Eventually, the connection to John Ballard was confirmed through marriage and death records.

Culberg, a retired entertainment executive who lives near Ballard Mountain, helped get the name change underway by telling Yaroslavsky about it at a holiday party last year. Culberg said he and his wife, Leah, were thrilled to have been part of the coalition that made it happen—and delighted to have been invited to First A.M.E.

As for Colman, “the biggest thrill of all for me was when we actually met the descendants. Sitting there chatting with Reginald Ballard, that’s the closest I’ll get to John Ballard.”

In addition to The Times, the story has been chronicled on television and newspapers from the Agoura Hills Acorn to the New Zealand Herald.

Ryan Ballard, Reginald Ballard Sr.’s youngest child and the great-great-grandson of John Ballard, took a special joy in bringing his wife, Nicole, and their two young sons to the service.

“As a father, it’s quite significant,” said Ballard, 37, a special education teacher at Locke High School. “You’re always thinking of what you’re going to leave to your kids. Who’d have thought that this would be left for them as part of their legacy?”

The family hasn’t hiked up to the Ballard Mountain—yet.

“You know the plan is already underway,” Ryan Ballard said.

7 things you should know about the Westside Subway

With the Metro board’s recent approval of long range transportation projects for the region, the Westside Subway extension is embarking on an important new stage in its journey. With Santa Monica envisioned as the line’s ultimate destination, there is currently $4.1 billion in local funding, mostly from Measure R, to get it as far as Westwood. Federal dollars will be essential to finish the job.

Some critics of the proposed line argue that it will take too long to build, divert resources from other parts of the region and tunnel through some geological challenges. But proponents, including Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, an MTA board member, say the subway’s projected ridership success makes it the best bet for getting federal dollars, particularly since Measure R already is funding projects such as Expo Phase II, the Gold Line/Foothill extension and the Crenshaw Transit Corridor.

Key decisions are still to come on design and technical matters; community meetings are taking place to help determine the placement of stations, and there’s a new video to promote the project (thanks to Steve Hymon for flagging this at Metro’s new blog, The Source.)

So even though the first phase of the project—to Fairfax–won’t be completed until 2019, it’s not too early to know what’s driving the train.

It will go where jobs are.

The Westside has hundreds of thousands of jobs in a relatively concentrated area—currently 429,000 of them, according to the latest mid-year forecast by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.– and commuters who live in outlying areas where housing is more affordable will be able to take advantage of them. That will be a boon to area business owners who’ve long complained about difficulties in hiring and retaining workers frustrated with time-consuming commutes, says Jack Kyser of the Kyser Center for Economic Research, one of the forecast’s authors. A bonus: those jobs are the highest-paying in the county—averaging $66,497 a year. The area also is home to UCLA, the 7th largest employer in the region, with more than 28,000 faculty and staff members.

It will create jobs.

Thousands of jobs will be created. As a rule of thumb, the building trades industry estimates 6,000 construction- and construction-related jobs per $1 billion invested in a project. The exact number of jobs in the long run, however, is hard to predict because those initially hired could stay with the project for multiple years, thus driving down the overall job count.

It will benefit commuters throughout the county.

Metro estimates that 64% of the line’s benefits—a federal formula measuring ridership and time saved–would go to those outside the Westside, with the greatest benefit (22 percent) accruing to the San Gabriel Valley. Metro research shows that more than 310,000 people travel into the Westside from across the region each morning, while 137,000 others leave it and 88,000 travel within it. Meanwhile, UCLA, California’s largest university, is a major area-wide draw with nearly 38,000 students, and the subway extension also has the potential of boosting cross-town access to a variety of major cultural venues, from Disney Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Royce Hall.

It will save thousands of hours in commuting time.

A hypothetical twice-a-day commuter from Koreatown to Westwood would get back the equivalent of eight days in saved commuting time each year by using the subway, according to Metro estimates. Someone commuting from Pasadena would save even more time–12 days a year. To put it another way, that Pasadena commuter currently spending 82 minutes to get from Pasadena to Westwood on public transportation would be able to make the one-way trip in just 50 minutes. “It actually shrinks the city, in a sense,” says David Karwaski, planning and policy manager in UCLA’s Transportation Services Department.

It will help LA to get a greater share of federal transit dollars.

Putting this project in the pipeline sets the stage for Los Angeles to get an allotment that’s more like the New York/New Jersey behemoth, shown in this Metro graphic representing 2010 federal funding for new transit starts. A far more robust showing is possible in the future now that the board has adopted its long range projects priority list. Move over, New York and Salt Lake City. Hello, Los Angeles.

It will help relieve overcrowding on the region’s busiest bus corridor, Wilshire Boulevard.

The Wilshire corridor is the most heavily used bus corridor in the County of Los Angeles, with some 70,000 boardings every weekday from downtown to Santa Monica. With tens of thousands of office workers pouring into the area each day, and bumper-to-bumper traffic at peak hours not only on Wilshire but on the Santa Monica Freeway, the project provides a new option for bus riders while also easing the overall traffic crunch.

It beats taking the 10.

Need we say more?

Check out this Metro-produced video on the Westside Subway

A creek runs through it

Bringing a creek back to life isn’t a job – it’s a commitment for all seasons.

And for the biologists, environmentalists and volunteers who’ve made it their mission to restore Topanga Creek, removing 26,000 tons of concrete and debris last year was just the beginning.

This fall, they’ve moved into planting mode, laying the groundwork—literally—for a rebirth of not just a creek but of an entire ecosystem.

The oaks, sycamores, cottonwoods and other California native plants are still going into the ground, but Rosi Dagit, the driving force behind the project, has seen enough to declare the process a success.

“Beyond our wildest dreams, it worked,” says Dagit, senior conservation biologist with the Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains. Dagit has spearheaded the creek restoration effort with a huge and varied array of supporting players that includes the Mountains Restoration Trust, the Temescal Canyon Association, TreePeople, the California Conservation Corps and a Sierra Club trail crew.

“It’s huge,” says Jo Kitz, co-executive director of the nonprofit Mountains Restoration Trust, praising Dagit’s tenacity. “I don’t know how many agencies she had to go through to get where we’ve gotten. Once it’s done, it’s just going be one of the brightest spots in the mountains.”

Although the project has been years in the making, progress has been dramatic lately. The first big test of the restoration effort came last winter, with the downpours of December.

Would Topanga Creek return to its natural flow, now that a 1,000-foot-long mound of debris had been leveled? Would the creek once again become a birth canal of sorts for endangered steelhead trout that once flourished in its waters?

Dagit and her team crossed their fingers, jumped in their cars and headed to the creek to see whether their carefully crafted plans would unfold in the natural world as they’d envisioned. They were awestruck.

“It was the coolest thing ever,” says Dagit. “We couldn’t cross the creek because the water level was so high. I was a little weepy.”

The massive project had, in fact, worked to send water racing again through a stretch of the creek that had been rendered largely dry by the concrete berm, originally built four decades ago to protect homes from canyon flood waters. Over the years, residents just kept piling it higher and higher. Tons of backed-up sediments from the berm had literally driven the stream underground. Over the course of the next few years, winter rains will continue the clean-up process, washing sediment out to the shore, Dagit says.

And the steelhead trout, which live in both fresh and salt water, will have a straight shot from creek to ocean—and a swimming chance to repopulate in far greater numbers. What’s more, new habitat has been created for other at-risk creatures, including pond turtles, two types of garter snakes, the California newt and an assortment of frogs.

In all, during three months last fall, 26,000 tons of dirt and debris were hauled away—all of it recycled except for 94 truckloads of hazardous soil. Native plants and trees were protected, and native lupines were planted. The total cost was about $3 million in government grants, including $450,000 from Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky’s Third District funds.

Over the past year, monthly workdays have drawn volunteers to plant, water and weed. The Conservation Corps recently swooped in to pick up 30 tons of left-behind concrete and 10 tons of asphalt. A Sierra Club trail crew has chopped away invasive non-native plants like arundo.

“It’s an extremely big deal,” Ron Webster, leader of the Sierra Club’s Santa Monica Mountains trail crew, says of the project. “The creek is an incredibly important resource. It’s so rare to have a year-round creek running through the mountains and to the ocean.”

With the creek finally reconnected, the biologists are turning their attention not only to planting but to the progress of the steelhead trout.

Late last year, Dagit and her colleagues tagged 75 to 100 of the endangered fish to track their movements. An antennae was placed in the stream to register each time one of the tagged steelhead passed by on its way to or from Santa Monica Bay. (A warning to would-be poachers: there’s a $25,000 fine for removing steelhead from the creek.) This November, Dagit and her 10-person team are going to hand-capture fish and compare scale samples with those taken last year — an unprecedented way to document the age and growth rate of steelhead in this location.

Eventually, the heavy work of planting will be completed and the focus will shift to another huge undertaking: the clean-up of Topanga Lagoon. But there are moments, as the seasons march by, when Dagit can’t resist stopping to savor the satisfaction of all that’s already been accomplished.

“I actually can’t believe we really did this,” she says. “I’m still pinching myself.”

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