Los Cerritos Wetlands (Long Beach, California)

 nature conservation park / area  Add category

Dismissed by some as a weedy oil field, the wetlands sustain a surprisingly vibrant ecology. Burrowing tiger beetles thrive on its salt flats and brackish ponds edged with saltwort and pickle weed are rife with horn snails and minnows. Osprey feast on fish, and coyotes prey on rodents.
Rejuvenating the area bordered by Pacific Coast Highway, Studebaker Road and the Los Cerritos Channel would cost millions of dollars, but city officials hope to see the effort partially bankrolled by the Port of Long Beach as mitigation for expansion projects elsewhere in the city.
A complete restoration of a total of 350 acres will involve removal of nonnative vegetation and allow for surges of tidal flooding.
The future of the wetlands has been contested for decades.
A century ago the wetlands stretched over 2,400 acres at the mouth of the San Gabriel River.
Today state officials call the remaining 400 acres straddling the Los Angeles-Orange County line in southeast Long Beach a "degraded wetlands."
In 1982 the state Coastal Commission approved a plan calling for development of houses, commercial buildings and some light industry on 112 acres in the area. In return for those development rights, 129 acres of wetlands were to be reestablished in areas damaged by oil operations.
That plan was never realized.
The area gained unprecedented attention in 2006 because of local developer Thomas Dean's controversial proposal to build a 16.5-acre Home Depot Design Center retail complex on the east side of the wetlands. The development threatened to trigger yet another prolonged tussle for control of the land. However, in 2008 a federal judge tossed out the developer's environmental impact report.
In 2006, the wetlands authority bought a 66-acre chunk of the area called the Bryant Property, but city officials said negotiations to buy a 175-acre parcel in the wetlands' core went nowhere because the parties were unable to negotiate a price. That property, known as the Bixby Ranch Company parcel, was bought by Dean in 2007.
Dean expressed a willingness to consider a land trade rather than an outright sale for 52 acres of city-owned land that are currently vacant, or operated by its public works department and oil and gas company.
Under a plan announced in November od 2008, Dean would continue to control mineral rights and to pump oil in the 175 acres of wetlands, but the land would be protected from commercial and residential development in perpetuity.
That would preserve 175 acres of hotly contested urban salt marsh, some of the last remnants of a once vibrant wetland at the mouth of the San Gabriel River.
Under terms of the deal, 52 acres of city-owned land would be traded for acreage lying in the heart of the Los Cerritos Wetlands. The city would then sell the marsh to the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority for about $25 million.
The city would use the proceeds to acquire and develop about 20 acres of property a few miles to the west along the Los Angeles River for recreational space.
The land swap is the latest in a series of efforts to preserve wetlands that were once a thriving part of Southern California's coastal ecosystem. Two years earlier, as part of a $147-million restoration project, barriers were removed to reconnect portions of the Bolsa Chica wetlands in Orange County with the ocean.
Since then, the populations of fish and shorebirds have increased substantially.