Long Beach, firm seal wetlands deal

Long Beach officials on Tuesday announced a land swap with a developer 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.

“Once completed, this will place the largest privately owned coastal marsh into the public trust,” Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster said in a prepared statement. “Los Cerritos is the final piece needed to complete more than a decade-long effort to restore Southern California’s vanishing coastal wetlands.”

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 ago, 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; populations of fish and shorebirds have exploded.

The Los Cerritos is already home to a variety of bird species. Flanked by supermarkets, movie theaters, motels and power plants, the wetlands remain a critical link along the migratory bird route called the Pacific Flyway, which birds travel from North America to South America.

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.

“Right now, it looks very poor, but it has the potential to be a real jewel,” said Long Beach City Councilman Gary DeLong, chairman of the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority. “After the first year, we plan to launch a complete restoration of a total of 350 acres. It 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 two years ago 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. Earlier this year, however, 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.

However, 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 Co. 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, officials said.

Under the pact announced Tuesday, 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.

“It’s a very exciting moment for Long Beach and the state of California because we get the intertidal connection -- or the lungs -- of our local wetlands, without which the restoration of the entire 400 acres out there would not be possible,” said Mike Conway, the city’s director of public works.

“It was a complicated deal,” he added, “and we still have a lot of details to iron out. But we’ve completed step one.”

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louis.sahagun@latimes.com