Mountain Communities

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.

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.”

Not so much trouble in Paradise (Cove)

They set out to solve one mystery, but they ended up with another.

First, the good news: An unusual three-year research partnership has found that the water quality at Malibu’s Escondido and Paradise Cove beaches is dramatically better than expected. Now the puzzling news: Nobody knows why.

“It’s like you hired Scotland Yard to solve a murder and three weeks later the dead person walks in and says, ‘Whatcha doing?’ ” says Steve Weisberg, executive director of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, which is running the study with $800,000 in funding from Los Angeles County. “We were hired to find the source of the problem….Where we’re at is a point of frustration.”

When the project started in May, 2006, the targeted beaches stood out as significant problem areas, according to Mark Gold, president of Heal the Bay, which has participated in the research along with the county Department of Public Works.

“Escondido was the most polluted beach we had ever seen,” Gold says. On the group’s annual Beach Report Card, he says, “I think it got a zero one year.” (Now Escondido Creek, just east of Escondido State Beach, and Paradise Cove Pier at Ramirez Canyon Creek mouth are both on the group’s honor roll.)

Back then, Gold suspected that the pollution was coming from “illegal dumping of tremendous amounts of horse manure” and maybe also from waste discharge problems from a nearby restaurant and some mobile homes.

All this added up to an opportunity for some collaborative detective work, bringing together the county and its sometime-adversary Heal the Bay, which has pushed hard for more aggressive government enforcement of clean water regulations.

The Southern California Water Research Project was “brought in as a neutral party,” Weisberg says, adding that he thought the best way to achieve a détente was to have everyone in the field “taking samples together.”

At their disposal was an array of scientific tools – including tests for optical brighteners found in laundry detergent to learn if household wastewater was involved. (For more on those, click here.) Overall, the prospects for finally determining whodunit (or whatdunit) looked good.

“The problem,” Weisberg says, “is that we just have not found strong, recurrent problems at that beach.”

One theory holds that a series of unusually dry winters led to a temporary improvement in the bacteria levels flowing from Escondido and Ramirez creeks into the bay. Another scenario posits that someone was illegally dumping, found out about the study in progress and decided to clean up his or her act. Or maybe different testing methods yield a different result? “We don’t know,” Weisberg says, “but we know it stopped.”

Weisberg says the hunt will continue in the coming year, with some discussion of testing to determine whether “birds pooping on the beach” mighty be to blame for the pollution, rather than problems in the watershed.

Gold, for his part, thinks it’s probably not worth continuing the testing effort unless there’s significantly more rainfall this year, which would bring more runoff to analyze. He does, however, advocate keeping an eye on a restaurant at the “very lowest part of the watershed.”

“You never get to pack your bags and go home,” says Gold, who praises Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky for responding to long-running concerns about the beaches’ bacteria levels and pushing for funds to study the problem. “I’m glad we did it,” Gold says. “I think it put a lot of people’s minds at ease.”

Mark Pestrella, deputy director of water resources for the county Department of Public Works, says he also is glad the study went forward and wants to see it continue for a fourth year. “The supervisors and the constituents out there really want to know that these beaches are safe,” Pestrella says.

“The study helped us set up protocols that were not in place before….Methods of sampling, the health department’s and Heal the Bay’s, were tried side by side,” he says. “It gave us more information on the percentage of the problem we should allocate to humans. Although we didn’t actually break down every source, we eliminated several areas. In Escondido, we were able to say we did not find a human source of indicator bacteria at the beach.”

The bottom line, Pestrella says, is that the study so far has “bettered the county’s understanding of how to monitor and test for indicator bacteria. It very much put science in front of rhetoric.”

Blazing a new eco trail

You might think of them more as tree-savers than tree-huggers. But members of the Los Angeles County Fire Department are getting high marks for the eco-friendly landscaping at Station 65 in Agoura. And that’s just the beginning.

This station, along with another nearby, is about to get even more environmentally friendly with a makeover that will place it at the forefront of the county’s new pollution-fighting, water-conserving policies for new development.

The changes so far are subtle but important.

Grass has been replaced with artificial turf, organic mulch and rock ground cover in the new design, sketched out by Ronald M. Durbin, a deputy forester in the fire department’s Malibu Forestry Unit. There are roses around a memorial monument in front of the station, but the rest of the new planting emphasizes native plants, such as oak, sycamore and walnut trees as well as drought-tolerant ornamentals. The irrigation system is super-thrifty—with water directed at individual plants instead of spraying wide areas.

The new look caught the eye of the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which in June awarded the station its citizen of the month award. “Somebody did a good thing,” says Jeff Reinhardt, the district’s public affairs and communications manager. “You don’t have to have the lush green stuff, you know.”

The landscaping makeover is a small part of a bigger environmental push. Next up for station 65 and nearby station 67 are low-impact development retrofits—the first such makeovers to test-drive new water-saving, pollution-fighting requirements mandated for new development in the county. (Learn more about LID here.)

The goal of the program, essentially, is to keep rainwater from running off the property to replenish ground water supplies and, when possible, be reused for onsite irritation. That means creating a new “bioswale planting area” and adding permeable paving, a planting area for gray water use, a cistern and even a rain barrel.

The LID improvements, to be funded with $872,000 in county funds appropriated under the leadership of Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, are expected to be approved by the Board of Supervisors on November 17 and should be in place by next year.

The Fire Department understands the need to be a positive environmental role model, says Durbin, who also has degrees in landscape architecture from Cal Poly Pomona.

“We’re in the public eye every day, so we need to set an example,” Durbin says.

That’s why the water district was eager to seize on the fire station as a public statement of water-thriftiness, done in an attractive way.

“It’s adjacent to the Paramount Ranch area but it’s also adjacent to some estate properties, and the folks who drive by there every day are going to see that,” Reinhardt says. “The statement it makes has got a lot of impact. It’s not only saving water but it blends more with the area. You’ve got this very water-wise projection into the community.”

Of course, as drought penalties for overuse kick in, the district also can get profligate users’ attention the old fashioned way. “About three weeks ago, we sent out a bill for $12,100 for a two-month billing cycle,” says Reinhardt of the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District. “The old model is just not sustainable.”

Malibu octogenarians get their goats—and safer homes

Just what was that herd of goats doing munching grass on the steep hillsides of Malibu’s Horizon Hills earlier this year? They were hired hooves.

Venturing easily to slopes too vertical for weed-whacking men to climb, the sure-footed grass-eaters were hired as part of a fire grant program engineered by an unlikely trio of retired 80-something neighbors in Horizon Hills. The men were determined to reduce the danger of a wind-driven brush fire devastating their 40-home neighborhood, tucked into the Santa Monica Mountains.

The retirees—an Auschwitz survivor, a former Luftwaffe private and a World War II Army paratrooper—formed a “fire safe council,” a volunteer non-profit group dedicated to improving local fire readiness. They won nearly $120,000 in federal and state grants, using the funds to cut trees, trim bushes and even attack acres of grass with the voracious goats.

They set up their Horizon Hills group under the umbrella of the California Fire Safe Council, a clearinghouse for fire education and state and federal grants. Los Angeles County has 25 similar local organizations, according to L.A. County Fire Department Forester J. Lopez, who worked closely with the men in the Horizon Hills unit. “This is a great way to empower neighbors to solve their own fire issues,” says Lopez, who also serves as vice chair of the statewide group’s board.

The fire-conscious octogenarians made improbable allies.

As a teen and Polish Jew, Herb Kolischer, now 85, had survived more than two years at Auschwitz before immigrating to California and launching a career as an architect.

Physicist Wolfgang Knauer, 83, twice conscripted in the German air force as a teen, worked for decades as a scientist at the Hughes Research Center. Knauer and Kolischer first became acquainted decades ago at neighborhood meetings. After initial wariness, Knauer says of their different backgrounds, “we put the past into the distant past.” They’ve been friends and ski buddies ever since.

The two men got on the fire safety bandwagon thanks to a third friend, Dr. Ernest Masler, 86. The retired psychiatrist, a U.S. Army paratrooper in World War II, became a fire crusader after his old Malibu residence burned down in the 1993 Topanga fire and he moved to Horizon Hills. Masler had spent a few years in a fruitless letter writing campaign urging federal land officials to reduce fire danger with controlled burns in the brushy federal parklands that surround the neighborhood on three sides.

Frustrated, the men decided that if they couldn’t change federal burn policies, they could effect change closer to home by reducing the danger of fires in their own neighborhood.

They formed the Horizon Hills fire safety council in 2005 and soon won a $52,000 grant to hire a tree trimming firm to reduce hazards near homes. “It’s relatively simple to set up, but you have to be persistent,” says Kolischer.

They were certainly persistent with their Horizon Hills neighbors, making house-to-house visits in an effort to persuade them to let tree trimmers lop off branches and remove whole trees. Their secret weapon was the Fire Department’s Lopez, a forester who provided technical expertise and proved a very good negotiator to boot, the men say.

“We did everything we could to persuade some neighbors we weren’t terrorists” for wanting to cut down their beloved trees, jokes Masler. In time, the trio won over most of their neighbors, a task made somewhat easier by the fact that the work would be paid for by the grants.

A $15,000 state grant helped bring in the grass-eating goats. The council won a second federal grant of $52,000 to cut back chaparral and more trees in 2008 and early 2009. The box score: 100 trees were cut down, another 100 were pruned and 15 acres of grass and brush were trimmed.

“We improved the situation a great deal,” says Knauer, “but there is more we need to do.”

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