Kiss Me Dogly

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MS. SISYPHUS SENDS HER REGRETS: Maybe the sky should have opened, the seas parted, or Charlton Heston could have risen from the dead to play Moses one last time. Or at the very least, someone should have hoisted long-suffering Santa Barbara city engineer Pat Kelly on their shoulders, and whisked him off to Disneyland. Naturally, nothing like that happened. In fact nothing at all happened. Which is probably appropriate. Last Thursday, the California Coastal Commission voted unanimously — though without a single syllable of discussion — to bestow its final, final, final approval on plans to transform the lower stretch of Mission Creek, from the ocean to Canon Perdido Street, into a combo flood-control project and creek restoration effort. For the past 15 years, this project has been Kelly’s curse as much as it’s been his job. For those accustomed to the excruciating pace of government in action, the Mission Creek saga sets new intergalactic land speed records for slowness. After all, we’re talking about a project first unveiled in 1962, one year before John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Of course, the creek plans have been the subject of much constructive screaming and shouting since then. They’ve gone through all kinds of changes. And gotten immeasurably better.

Angry Poodle

At least on paper.

I know some regard the Mission Creek deliberations as the ultimate triumph of bureaucratic dithering, but they’re missing the point. To see how far we’ve come, you need to remember what was first planned. Imbued with that wonderfully arrogant idealism of engineering efficiency, the Army Corps of Engineers initially proposed solving the flooding problems that occasionally afflict the lower 1.2 miles of Mission Creek by encasing the whole damn thing in concrete. From Canon Perdido to the ocean, the Army Corps would straight-jacket the creek channel, which over archeological spans of time would otherwise switch and sway like the tail of a twitchy cat. Imagine a concrete box 40 feet wide, 10 feet deep, and all perpendicular lines. Imagine a chain-link fence sprouting up on both sides. As late as 1985, that was the plan embraced by City Hall, County Flood Control, and a passel of people who should have known better. Sure, it was ugly, they acknowledged. But the Army Corps was paying for it, so the Army Corps could call the shots.

For those who looked at creeks as living, breathing things rather than glorified urban garbage disposals, the Army Corps proposal was worse that electroshock; it was an ice pick to the brain. Into this breach emerged the most impossible of heroes, a blind cabinetmaker named Bruce Munson and his wife, Sarah, who lived in a house they’d built along the creek. Apparently nobody bothered to inform the Munsons you can’t fight City Hall. Or County Flood Control. Or the Army Corps of Engineers, a federal agency then feared almost as much as Yahweh from the Old Testament. By all accounts, the Munsons — Bruce especially — were completely impossible and totally unreasonable. Still, they rallied neighbors. They got more dignified and respectable enviros, like Bob Sollen, involved. With willpower and passion, they prodded groups like the Urban Creeks Council and the Environmental Defense Center into the fray. And all this persuaded politicos like Harriet Miller, Tom Rogers, and Naomi Schwartz — sober-minded realists despite their environmental sympathies — to ask a few tough questions about the basic science on which the Mission Creek project was premised. More studies would be required, more consultants hired. Based on their work, even the Army Corps itself began to worry its project might be flawed. In 1993, the Army Corps took the unusual step of subjecting its plans to rigorous testing and modeling studies at a specialized lab in Vicksburg, Mississippi — started during WWII to keep Nazi prisoners of war busy. Much to the Army Corps’ great horror, the Mission Creek proposal did not work. In fact, it would have made matters far worse.

With that, it was back to the drawing boards. This time, however, the enviros would have a seat at the table. While the Munsons would leave town, and Bruce would die, others equally stubborn — like Brian Trautwein — would step forward. The proposal that would emerge respected the creek as a living thing. Gone was the concrete bottom and the concrete walls. Gone were the chain-link fences. The new plans called for a wider, natural-bottomed creek with gradually sloping banks from whence an urban forest of oaks, sycamores, and cottonwoods might one day commence. Accommodations would be made for steelhead trout and tidewater goby, two endangered critters that historically called the creek home. None of this just happened. Everything was dragged out and studied to death. In the meantime, much hair was pulled, fingers pointed, and tempers lost.

During the presidency of George W. Bush, Santa Barbara learned the hard way that the Army Corps of Engineers would become more of a Deadbeat Dad than the big-spending Sugar Daddy to whom we were so willing to sell out in the ’80s. The War in Iraq and tax cuts for the rich drained dry the federal coffers; if the feds could turn away from disasters like Katrina, then Mission Creek’s more modest flood-control plans stood no chance. If we wanted anything done, we’d have to do it ourselves.

Last week’s Coastal Commission vote was necessary to put Santa Barbara — city and county — back in the driver’s seat. Now that we’re there, it means paying for it, too. Total project costs remain ever elusive, but they were last estimated in the neighborhood of $60 million. That’s from $30 million three years ago. But County Flood Control has $20 million in the bank and City Hall is banking on federal grants to cover 85 percent of the cost of replacing the bridges in that lower stretch. If the creek should flood between now and then, we always have one fallback. Between 1962 and the present, we’ve generated massive quantities of paperwork on the subject of lower Mission Creek. That should be sufficient to absorb the contents of Lake Cachuma, let alone a 100-year flood. Failing that, we can all pray that Heston rises from the grave, staff in hand, to part the roiling waters one more time. Sure, that sounds crazy. But no crazier than a blind cabinetmaker saving us all from the Army Corps of Engineers, County Flood Control, and City Hall.

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