Vigil for the destroyed wetlands energizes city officials, activists alike

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

2H Construction trucks had retrieved every ounce of offending asphalt cuttings by the time Los Cerritos Wetlands Land Trust folks arrived the evening of March 27 to hold a vigil marking the one-week anniversary of the wetlands parcel’s illegal bulldozing.

But they’d also left behind a monstrous calling card: one earthmover, size large, parked just outside the gates to the sad land on the south side of Loynes Drive, just west of Studebaker Road.

“What’s up with that guy?” Land Trust Executive Director Elizabeth Lambe wondered about 2H head Sean Hitchcock, who recently purchased the parcel from developer Tom Dean and graded it March 19 and 20 without securing any city permits.

“It’s a little tone deaf to leave a bulldozer out there when we’re having a vigil,” Lambe said.

And then, just minutes before the 5 p.m. event was to start, there came a semi truck. A driver emerged, drove the behemoth onto his trailer, chained it down and departed.

“It’s so funny—they just happened to come and take it away,” said activist and photographer Diane Rush, who was happy to have documented the machine’s removal. “Too bad they couldn’t have come and taken it away last week.”

That was too bad—just as it was too bad this whole sorry incident ever happened. But the earthmover’s timely departure may also have been a harbinger of bright days to come.

To some of the more than 60 officials, conservationists and outraged residents who held signs and protested for two hours that Friday night on Loynes Drive, Hitchcock’s quick clean-up last week—following outrage expressed by some city officials—signaled the very beginnings of what could be a sea change in Long Beach.

“They want to be green without having to do a lot of work,” said Algalita Marine Research Foundation Captain Charles Moore, an avowed conservationist. “But they’re slowly changing. The talk is changing. Talking the talk is step one. We need to move to step two: walking the walk.”

Yes, the royal we, a number which on Friday included the vigil’s keynote speaker, Fourth District Councilman Patrick O’Donnell, and Eighth District Councilwoman Rae Gabelich—one of two council members who in February voted against trading the city’s public service yard to Dean for some of his extensive wetlands holdings.

Mayor Bob Foster and Third District Councilman Gary DeLong—whose turf includes the denuded wetlands—seemed conspicuous by their absence. But Friday’s turn-out—and words from the elected officials who did show up—served to buoy everyone’s spirits.

“We’re here to send a message that open space in Long Beach matters to us. I have to tell you personally that I’m humbled by this big crowd of people,” said Lambe, a relatively recent Land Trust hire, who previously helped lead the fight to keep a toll road out of San Onofre State Beach.

“I have to thank the city of Long Beach for making my first few months on the job interesting,” she said. “It’s been landswap one, landswap two, earth-scraping—it’s been challenging, but in a good way.”

“I think if you thought activism and democracy were dead in Long Beach, tonight is proof that they are not. The fish that splash and the frogs that croak in the wetlands depend on us to speak for them,” councilman O’Donnell agreed during his remarks in nearby Channel View Park, his wife and young daughters looking on and holding signs calling for wetlands restoration.

“My message is plain and simple: ‘Save Our Wetlands.’ Is that your message too?”

The crowd answered “Yes!” resoundingly.

“That’s our message and we’re not going to back off. What happened last week is a tragedy but out of it will come something good,” said O’Donnell, affirming afterwards that he fully supports having the city council re-examine the wetlands landswap in closed session April 21.

“It is our voices that will make a difference, so please do not walk away from this cause. You’ve got to know that two or three councilmembers can’t save the wetlands alone.”

And with that, protesters shouldered their signs, with slogans reading “Conservation Not Corruption,” “Justice for Wetlands”—even “The Birds,” an Alfred Hitchcock reference—and walked out to Loynes Drive.

Vehicles slowed, most drivers honking and waving their support, and even two carloads of Long Beach police seemed more concerned that protesters not shorten their own lives by standing on the traffic island than about stifling their message.

“If we were standing here at sunset you’d see all this wonderful flying,” said activist Thomas Marchese as we stood at the south railing of the Los Cerritos Channel bridge and regarded the bare wetlands dirt. “Now it’s like a killing field.”

Land Trust member Mary Suttie, whose T-shirt read “Save It/Don’t Pave It,” agreed.

“I know everybody sees oil wells and eyesores, but there’s so much wildlife,” said Suttie as a heckler honked and yelled “Pave it over!”

“I see the ground squirrels in there, I see the egrets and the herons nesting in the palm trees,” she continued. “All these things are our ecosystem.”

Why can’t we all just get along? The councilwoman had an answer for that.

“When you didn’t have the representatives willing to talk openly in February, that tells you something. I felt like it was a done deal,” Gabelich said of the council’s one-night-only public consideration of the land swap.

“The night we voted on it, [Dean representative and city lobbyist] Mike Murchison told us ‘Get this done. There’s a bigger project on the horizon.’ Because of this it’s going to make whatever that is [require] much greater transparency to the public,” Gabelich said, lending some credence to speculation that Dean engineered the sale and destruction of this land to hasten his own wetlands deal with the city.

“I think Tom [Dean] shot himself in the foot on this one,” she said.

Tags: California, Long Beach, Southern California, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas, wetlands vigil