Tuesday, September 25, 2007

A million L.A. trees: Will they take root?

Saplings
Robert Gauthier / LAT
SAPLINGS: Recently planted trees line the median along Huntington Drive in El Sereno.
The city is giving them away, but no one knows if they are being planted.
By David Zahniser, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 24, 2007
Monica Barra went to South Los Angeles last month to attend a jazz festival. She went home with a free tree, a one-gallon African sumac that she lugged around on a Sunday afternoon past the shops and restaurants of Leimert Park.

The college senior took the tree on an impulse, though each tree recipient was required to fill out a “pledge to plant,” a form smaller than an index card and a signature feature of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s plan to plant 1 million trees across Los Angeles.

One in a million
At the beginning

Six weeks later, Barra’s leafy friend has yet to make contact with the soil. Because Barra has no land of her own, the tree sits in her apartment in Redlands, roughly 60 miles from Los Angeles.


“I just really like having trees and plants where I’m living,” said Barra, who majors in literature, historiography and urban studies. “And it was free.”

Villaraigosa has trumpeted his Million Trees LA initiative as a cornerstone of his environmental agenda, bringing it up before audiences as far away as London and Hong Kong. Each time, the mayor’s refrain has been the same: “We’re planting 1 million trees,” a phrase that brings to mind a populace working harmoniously to transform Los Angeles into a verdant forest.

The reality, however, is that, in many cases, organizers are not so much planting trees as giving them away, offering them up by the hundreds at fairs, festivals and farmers markets, many of them in the summer in a year of intense drought.

So far, no one has checked to see whether those trees have been planted, are still alive or even are in Los Angeles, one of several cities pursuing massive tree initiatives.

More than two years into his term, Villaraigosa is roughly one-tenth of the way toward his tree-planting goal. Of the roughly 110,000 he lists as planted, more than half — 51% — were given away to the public. Of those given away, more than a third were seedlings: slender wisps that die unless they are planted immediately, tree advocates say.

The giveaway strategy has proved controversial among the city’s environmentalists, who praise the mayor for focusing on trees yet worry that the program has been too fixated on a numerical goal.

“It’s giving away trees to get your numbers up,” said Peter Lassen, a member of the city’s Community Forest Advisory Committee.

The issue is especially relevant now that Villaraigosa aides say they expect as many as 70% of the trees to be distributed to private property owners: 700,000 trees over the life of the program.

With each weekend giveaway, more people have filled out the pledge cards. And Barra’s experience is hardly unique.

Teacher Yvette Davis took an olive tree and an African sumac from a Million Trees booth the same day as Barra. Both went onto a patio.

Then there’s Koreatown resident Keita Mellion, a 26-year-old musician who also picked up a free tree at the jazz festival. Mellion has struggled to keep his seedling alive since August, when he went out of town for a week and a half and made no plans for watering it.

“I don’t think the environment is very conducive to it,” said Mellion, describing the tree that sits on his apartment patio, still encased in its one-inch plastic container. “It looks dried up.”

Although Million Tree coordinator Lisa Sarno said Villaraigosa’s team expects one out of every four trees to die, Lassen said the usual mortality rate for a tree given away at a fair is at least 50%.

The spur-of-the-moment tree adoptions are drawing sharp questions from Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, whose district has the fewest shade trees in the city, according to a city survey. Hahn said visitors to a festival are not necessarily dependable candidates for expanding the city’s urban forest.

“It’s sort of like adopting a bunny at Easter,” she said. “People say, ‘This will be fun.’ And then it falls by the wayside. They don’t have time, they go on vacation, and they’re not really committed to it. Only the problem with [the trees] is you can’t give them back. They just die.”

Villaraigosa’s tree team defended the 187 tree adoption events held so far, saying they are part of a civic engagement process that is essential to the program’s long-term success. They also said they will develop a follow-up system by the end of the year.

“People love things that are free,” said public works commissioner Cynthia Ruiz, the mayor’s spokeswoman on the program. “And when they learn about the benefits of the trees, it’s a win-win for everyone.”

Villaraigosa’s office says the city will be noticeably greener once the project is finished. And although the mayor’s team said in July that it expected to reach 1 million by 2012, Ruiz said that deadline is increasingly less important.

“I’m not so much focused on the time frame,” she said. “I’m just focused on having a successful million tree program.”

In some ways, the Million Trees initiative resembles a larger agenda promoted by Villaraigosa immediately before and after he took office.

Since his election in 2005, the mayor has retreated from his plan for seizing control of the Los Angeles Unified School District, settling for a few dozen “partnership” schools. Despite his promise to get more money out of Sacramento, Villaraigosa watched helplessly this year as state lawmakers raided local transit funding to balance their budget.

Still, few programs had as much difficulty gaining traction as the tree initiative, which has been repeatedly reworked. When the program was launched, Villaraigosa originally promised to add 300,000 new trees in the city’s parks. As of July, the Department of Recreation and Parks had planted 4,200, according to the mayor’s office.

Although Million Trees was billed as a $70-million program when it was rolled out last year, the mayor has raised just $3.2 million in private donations so far; $11.2 million has come from public agencies, four-fifths of it from the Department of Water and Power and the Port of Los Angeles.

Backers of the program point to its tangible successes: rows of sycamores, oaks and citrus trees added to neighborhoods that include Cypress Park, El Sereno and Boyle Heights.

Furthermore, nonprofit groups involved in the program say it should be judged not only on the numbers but also on its other benefits, from tree-care workshops to classes that will teach 8,000 students the value of having shade to cool the city.

“If you have a kid that walks home from school with a seedling and learns about what the tree can contribute to the environment, there’s a value there that transcends the tree’s actual survival,” said Larry Smith, who heads the nonprofit North East Trees.

Behind the scenes, environmental groups long resisted the 1 million goal, saying such a number is arbitrary and could lead to hastily offered plants and fewer long-term benefits.

Tree advocates recommended that Villaraigosa take 10 years, not four, to reach his target, Smith said.

Meanwhile, one group decided it would rather hold just one tree giveaway each year: a massive citywide adoption of fruit trees in January, the height of the rainy season.

Andy Lipkis, president and founder of Tree People, said his group is pursuing the slower, more painstaking work of showing residents how to plant and care for a tree over the long term, even if that results in fewer new trees.

“We didn’t want to buy into a numerical goal, not because numbers aren’t important but because we’ve seen that whenever they’re locked into a numerical goal, no matter what their higher goals were, at some point, they focus just on getting the numbers,” he said.

Tree People embarked on a campaign similar to Villaraigosa’s nearly three decades ago, asking Angelenos to plant 1 million trees in preparation for the 1984 Olympics.

But unlike the mayor, Tree People did not consider a giveaway tree as planted unless the owners went to the trouble of mailing back a postcard stating it had gone into the ground.

Villaraigosa’s Million Trees program was formally launched one year ago, after 12 months of planning with half a dozen tree organizations. The mayor said it would beautify the city while creating shade to cool its low-income neighborhoods.

The concept was based largely on a “canopy analysis,” a study that examined the places that had the fewest shade trees. Not surprisingly, the survey found that neighborhoods with large, mature trees — the kind that form a soaring arc over a street — were usually the ones with the greatest wealth. Consider the giant jacarandas that tower over sections of Sherman Oaks or the camphor trees that line the streets of Hancock Park.

With tree cover the thinnest south of the 10 Freeway, the Million Trees initiative has gone to such places as the jazz festival in Leimert Park, Ralphs supermarket on Crenshaw Boulevard and the farmers market in Watts.

On a hot day in July, the Koreatown Youth and Community Center — one of the groups carrying out the Million Tree program — provided 174 trees to patrons at the Watts market, held each Saturday in the parking lot of Ted Watkins Park.

Two-thirds of them were seedlings.

Yet seedlings are the most hotly contested component of Villaraigosa’s arboreal initiative.

Smith predicted that no more than one in four will survive.

The tree could dry up “just between the time you put it in your car and you take it home,” Smith said.

Sarno, Villaraigosa’s top advisor on the trees program, said the mayor plans to reduce the program’s reliance on seedlings. But that decision was made after more than 20,000 seedlings had been given out.

In May, tree groups distributed 2,300 seedlings at the two-day UCLA Jazz & Reggae Festival. And in June, organizers gave away 338 outside La Curacao, a department store in Pico-Union popular among Central-American immigrants.

The seedlings demonstrate how difficult it is to add trees in a city with a high concentration of renters and low-income residents.

Million Tree participants would much rather give away trees in one- and five-gallon pots, said Dore Burry, environmental manager for the Koreatown Youth and Community Center. The problem, he said, is that the people who approach his booth at festivals and fairs frequently want something they can pop into a shopping bag.

“In South-Central, you don’t have sprawling estates where they have open space,” he said. “But they’re willing to plant a seedling, because they have 10 to 15 years before they have to worry about it.”

Hahn said she picked up three seedlings at various events over the years, none of them affiliated with the mayor’s initiative. Two died and one never made it into the ground, she said.

Even the mayor’s employees have been slow to get seedlings into the soil. One fragile seedling, which has a Million Trees sticker on its plastic pot, sits on the carpet on the mezzanine of City Hall.

david.zahniser@latimes.com

Posted by M at 04:59:17 | Permalink | No Comments »

Unlike its neighbor, L.A. goes with the flow

As Long Beach enacts restrictions on water use in advance of a potential crisis, the DWP takes a wait-and-see approach.
By Steve Hymon, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer September 24, 2007

Long Beach has a population of almost half a million, making it the second largest city in the county of Los Angeles and the fifth most populous in the state.

As you may have read, water officials there recently looked at the prospect of tightening water supplies and decided the outlook was bleak enough to impose restrictions.

The new rules are hardly draconian, but they do have some bite. Lawn watering is now allowed only three days per week, the time that sprinkler systems are allowed to run has been limited and daytime watering has been prohibited.

Long Beach’s decision is intriguing, in part, because the largest city in the county, Los Angeles, has not imposed such rules. Instead, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa asked residents this summer to voluntarily cut their usage by 10%.

Long Beach residents already use less water on average than L.A. residents — 121 gallons per day versus 141 in 2006. Which leads to the question. . .

Is Long Beach jumping the gun, or is Los Angeles sticking its head in the sand?


This is hard to say without the ability to predict the weather. In the winter of 2004-05, for example, the city of Los Angeles had its second-wettest year on record. Last winter was its driest. This year: Who knows? Despite the rainy weekend, forecasters are saying it could be a drier-than-normal year in the Southwest.

In Long Beach, officials insist they’re simply trying to prepare residents for a time when water resources grow more scarce and thus more expensive. Besides the ongoing drought, they also point to projections of a diminishing snowpack in California and the West, courtesy of global warming.

There is also the prospect that the amount of water pumped into the California Aqueduct from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta could be curtailed to protect the endangered delta smelt.

“We are preparing our customers for a water supply emergency,” said Ryan Alsop, spokesman for the Long Beach Water Department. “It may happen, it may not happen. But we think it’s likely, and we wanted our community to be the absolute best-prepared community in Southern California to deal with it.”

Alsop added, “We should be doing these things year-round. Water is a finite resource as it is. . . . We’re owning up to the fact that we’re wasting water.”

Although the city can issue citations to violators, it is not planning to do that, nor is it known if the new rules will become permanent. Alsop said the goal, for now, is to educate residents. He also said he doesn’t believe the watering restrictions will send anyone’s landscaping off to the gallows.

The city is encouraging residents to report those who are wasting water. The Long Beach Water Department has even produced two YouTube videos. One of them shows a man leisurely hosing down a sidewalk — a no-no under the new water restrictions — and provides a phone number ([562] 570-2455) residents can call to rat each other out. A complete list of restrictions is at www.lbwater.org.

And what are Los Angeles officials saying?

“I think there are a number of factors on the horizon and they will come to a head very quickly,” said David Nahai, president of the Department of Water and Power board. “At that point we’ll be able to make a decision. If all of a sudden we get mounds of snow in the Sierra or we get a great deal of rainfall, imposing an additional, onerous burden will be uncalled for.

“And what will we do next time? Will we be taken seriously?”

Nahai said he believes the call for voluntary conservation in L.A. is analogous to what Long Beach is doing, since Long Beach is not fining violators. Nahai said too that the supply situation is different for Los Angeles.

Both cities rely on groundwater wells and water purchased from the Metropolitan Water District, which imports water from Northern California and the Colorado River. But Los Angeles also owns a pair of aqueducts to import water from the Eastern Sierra.

Most provocatively, Nahai said that he’s open in the future to using higher water rates as a way to “encourage” people to stop wasting water. That’s not something you hear often from high-ranking water officials.

As for imposing restrictions, he said that is something the DWP board would do only after consulting with the mayor, who appoints its members.

Attentive readers may recall that when The Times earlier this summer asked Villaraigosa about his big water bills at his Mount Washington home in 2006, the mayor invoked the Caddyshack Doctrine and said that gophers chewed into the sprinkler system and caused leaks.

How bad is the water situation at the moment?

Generally speaking, many of the largest reservoirs in the state are at levels below where they usually are at the end of summer.

Let’s take a look at some numbers: Lake Shasta in Northern California, the state’s largest reservoir, was only 43% filled as of Wednesday — about 72% of its average capacity this time of year.

Oroville and San Luis reservoirs — which serve Southern California via the California Aqueduct — were at 46% and 28% of capacity, respectively, and are both well under their averages for this date. On the Colorado River, Lake Mead and Lake Powell were about half-filled, thanks to eight years of drought in the Rocky Mountains.

The DWP’s Crowley Lake in the Eastern Sierra was at 57% capacity through August, about 81% of its average for that date. On the other hand, the MWD’s massive Diamond Valley Lake was almost at 90% of its capacity.

Still, one reason that the region isn’t in deeper water trouble is, since there are so many reservoirs, the state and region have effectively built a multiyear buffer against drought. Equally important, it also has helped Los Angeles that conservation has taken hold in recent years.

As the accompanying chart illustrates, in 1980 the average Angeleno used 178 gallons of water each day. After rising in the 1980s, that number has fallen and was 141 in 2006, thanks to water-saving technology such as low-flow toilets, officials say. That’s a number that compares favorably with many other cities in the state — residents in the San Diego area used 173 gallons a day last year.

But here’s the problem: Per capita use may be down in L.A., but because of population growth, overall water use is up — from 192.7 billion gallons in 1980 to 193.6 billion in 2005 and 200.7 billion in 2006. If the population is going to keep growing — and if history is an indicator, it will — then per capita usage has to keep falling for total demand to stay flat.

If demand doesn’t, cities will either have to build more dams — ignoring the environmental consequences and that most of the best sites have been taken — or pray that the predictions about global warming are wrong and the snowpack actually increases in the 21st century.

Or, elected officials can draw a line in the sand and say, once and for all, that in a semi-arid climate, wasteful practices simply will not be tolerated.

Posted by M at 04:58:01 | Permalink | No Comments »

In growing cities, a loss of students

Schools aren’t sure why enrollment is down. Some experts cite rising fears among illegal immigrants.
By Faye Bowers | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the September 24, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0924/p02s01-ussc.html
PHOENIX

Where did the students disappear to?

Public school officials in several districts in Arizona, California, and Texas – particularly those with a high share of Hispanic students – are seeing a drop in enrollment this school year over last, and many are at a loss to explain it.

The drop is noticeable but not huge – in the range of 1 to 4 percent – and some administrators shrug it off as normal fluctuation or say the missing students, whose families tend to be transient, may yet enroll later in the year. Other analysts posit that the abrupt end to the housing boom has seen construction jobs dry up in these areas and people have simply moved elsewhere for work, kids in tow.

 

But Miriam, a single mother from Mexico who lives in the Phoenix metro area, offers a different explanation. Five families who lived in the same apartment complex as she does have recently packed up and returned to Mexico, and between them they had 10 children who used to attend a local elementary school, she says. They were “panicked” about a new Arizona law that cracks down on employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants, says Miriam, who would speak only on a first-name basis even though she says she is in the US on a “visitor’s visa.”

There’s some anecdotal evidence that what Miriam has seen is occurring elsewhere in Arizona and in out-of-state communities with laws unfriendly to illegal immigrants . The declining school enrollments could be the strongest proof yet that the frostier climate is driving at least some undocumented workers out of the US – or deeper underground.

While many factors are probably contributing to the enrollment dip, most experts agree it is due at least in part to the federal government’s high-profile raids at job sites to snag undocumented workers, as well as to some 1,200 initiatives introduced at the local level to target illegal immigrants.

Legal status not a prerequisite

Children are not required to show that they have legal residency to enroll in public schools, due to a landmark 1982 US Supreme Court decision, Plyler v. Doe. But parents or guardians increasingly worried about detection or deportation may be disinclined to send their kids to school, analysts say.

“The downturn in the economy, especially the housing industry, as well as … workplace raids and tightening up on Social Security numbers, are having their desired effect,” says Michael Olivas, an expert on immigration law and policy at the University of Houston. “They not only get the people they target, but others [legally in the US who leave because they feel unwelcome]. They put the fear of God in some of these folks.”

Whatever the broader economic impact of the battle against illegal immigration, schools can immediately measure the budget consequences of lower enrollment.

The state of Arizona, for example, funds schools at the rate of $4,000 to $6,000 per student per year, depending on certain criteria. For Mesa, which saw public school enrollment citywide drop by some 1,400 students this year to 72,525, that could mean at least $5.6 million less funding.

Likewise, several of two dozen school districts in Phoenix – particularly those serving Hispanic neighborhoods – are reporting lower enrollments. Four weeks into the school year, Isaac Elementary School District in west-central Phoenix, where most of the student body is Hispanic, had 4.3 percent fewer students than at the same time last year, dropping from 8,561 to 8,190.

Gabriel Garcia, principal of an elementary school in the Isaac district, says he sees the enrollment fluctuation as normal because people living in the district tend to be on the move. “We’re in a high rental area,” he says. “We have two apartment complexes that have 300 to 400 apartments each, so the mobility is pretty high.”

Administrators at other schools in Phoenix cite high mobility, too, saying many people travel to Mexico at the end of summer and don’t return to enroll their children until after Labor Day.

But enrollment at Roosevelt Elementary School District in Phoenix, where 8 in 10 students are Hispanic, remains down 1.4 percent after the week that included Labor Day, according to figures from Ken Garland, interim director for support services at Roosevelt.

In Tempe, Ariz., 13,082 schoolchildren were enrolled in kindergarten through Grade 8 as of Day 25 of this school year. That’s 416 fewer – or about 3 percent less – than the same time last year.

“We’re looking into doing a marketing study to contact families who left us,” says Monica Allread, spokeswoman for the Tempe district. “We want to find out why they left and what could we have done differently.”

Miriam’s report

If anything, the enrollment numbers can be expected to drop further this fall, according to Miriam, a mother of three school-age children. Almost daily, she says, she hears from friends about others – many of whom have lived in Arizona for 15 to 20 years – who’ve left or are planning to return to Mexico in December, before the new employer sanctions law goes into effect and before the start of the next school semester in Mexico, when parents can again enroll kids there. They are also worried that a neighbor, landlord, or co-worker will call a hot line recently set up by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office to report possible illegal immigrants, she says.

Moreover, says Miriam, people seem more inclined to return to Mexico than to move to other states in the US. She recently visited a trailer park in Queen Creek, a small community on the southern fringe of Phoenix, where residents were packing up to leave. There are 10 to 15 trailers in the park, she says, and the people there – mostly construction workers – all told her they’d had enough of Arizona and were leaving for Mexico.

Declines in Texas and California, too

Some school districts in California and Texas that serve large, mobile Hispanic communities have reported declines in enrollment, too.

In southern California, the Anaheim City School District, the largest of six districts serving the city, saw its enrollment drop 4 percent this year over last, the second consecutive annual decline. The district had seen such a rapid rise in enrollment through the 1990s that its 24 schools had to shift to a year-round program to educate its mostly Latino student body. The enrollment drop allowed the district this year to take 17 schools off the year-round track.

“We’ve worked with a demographer,” says Suzi Brown, director of communications for the Anaheim City School District. “Our birth rates have declined a bit, but it’s also people who can’t afford to live in southern California. We’re transferring a lot [of former students] to Riverside [County and] San Bernardino County, which has less costly housing … and a lot to Arizona.”

In Texas, Harlandale Independent School District in San Antonio has lost nearly 200 students – or 1.3 percent of the total – this year, according to spokesman Pete Barcenez.

“I don’t think this is a coincidence,” says Joe Vail, director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the University of Houston, of the many reports of lower enrollment. “I think people are fleeing the state and local ordinances that have been putting pressure on local immigrant communities.”

The anecdotal evidence is that immigrant families are feeling that pressure. Last week, sheriff’s deputies in New Mexico’s Otero County nabbed several illegal immigrants and then accompanied them to local schools to pick up their children, says Art Ruiloba, communications coordinator for the Gadsden Independent School District in Sunland, N.M.

“Otero County sheriff’s deputies … picked up a handful of parents, brought them to our schools, and the parents asked to remove the kids from school because the parents or legal guardians were being deported,” Mr. Ruiloba says. Six children were removed from the schools to go with their parents. Several other parents have phoned in since then, expressing concern that law-enforcement officials will show up the school to remove undocumented children. Some said they weren’t bringing their kids to school for the time being, he says.

It’s too soon to have numbers indicating what impact this latest removal of children from the schools has had, Ruiloba says, but “there’s an impact of some sort.”

Posted by M at 04:56:34 | Permalink | No Comments »