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2003: Victories & Milestones
The Angeles Chapter’s actions last year resulted in creation of
new parkland, riverside trails and funding for nature centers. We helped
preserve coastal wetlands and fought to save threatened open space in
Orange County’s Coyote Hills, the Santa Monica Mountains and elsewhere.
Three campaigns highlight the success that focused activism can achieve.
San
Gabriel River
The highly successful, Chapter-priority San Gabriel River Campaign is
actively restoring today’s bleak urban flood-control channel to
a life-supporting river, running clean and green from the mountains to
the sea. During 2003 Sierra Club-sponsored projects connected with the
San Gabriel River campaign won nearly $7 million in funding, including
$4.3 million in state funds to purchase the Woodland Farms Duck Farm and
another $1.23 million for a San Gabriel River Discovery Center. Amigos
de los Rios, a nonprofit group stemming from the project and founded in
2003, has already obtained $750,000 in contracts for community outreach
and riverbank parks.
Ballona
Wetlands
For more than 15 years, the Chapter’s Ballona Wetlands Task Force
and predecessor groups have led the fight to preserve the Ballona wetlands,
a unique coastal marsh near Marina del Rey. The efforts paid off in November,
when the state of California approved a widely publicized purchase agreement
that will result in public ownership of about 623 acres of marshland in
an area coveted by developers. The acquisition adds to 600+ acres saved
in an earlier public purchase.
Native
American Sacred Sites
More than 90% of Orange County’s archaeological sites have been
destroyed or paved over. The energetic actions of the Native American
Sacred Sites Task Force during 2003 are helping to ensure that remaining
sites get the protection they deserve.A major milestone of the task force,
as part of a multi-organization California Cultural Resource Preservation
Alliance (CCRPA), was a listing of 12 high-cultural-value Native American
archeological sites at risk in Orange County. The published list, representing
sites in all regions of the county, includes sites spanning some 10,000
years of pre-history; all the sites are unique or the best extant examples
of their type. Developers and government agencies contemplating projects
that would threaten these 12 sites now know that such action will trigger
a response from the Sierra Club and the CCRPA.
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