The Wrigley community is waiting with bated breath to find out whether the Wrigley Greenbelt—a strip of LA River-adjacent open space that’s been over a decade in the making—will move forward amid expired permits and soon-to-expire grant funding from Los Angeles County.
The greenbelt is expected to include trails, benches and over a hundred native trees in an area with scant green space. Thus far, it remains an undeveloped plot.
The Department of Public Works and the Parks, Recreation and Marine Department are tackling the project on two fronts. Working in tandem, the two are communicating with L.A. County to secure new permits and a grant funding extension for the greenbelt after years of hurdles.
The master plans for the greenbelt date back to 1993. In one document, a trail completion date was set for December 2015. In another, the project completion date was estimated as December 2009.
“Do I have a date? No. I do not have a date yet,” Public Works Director Eric Lopez told the Wrigley Association last month.
Public Works employees said they could not speak to decades-old delays in the project due to ever-shifting project managers, but the department has made recent moves to secure a developer.
The department opened up bids in both 2016 and 2019 for the greenbelt, which has a projected cost of $2 million according to current Project Manager Adrian Puyolt.
Both times, the proposals exceed available funding, Lopez said.
The City has $1.625 million for the project thanks to grants provided by L.A. County in 2008. Public Works struggled to bridge the funding gap until 2019 when a partnership with the Conservation Corps of Long Beach (CCLB) saved the project.
CCLB was able to leverage their own grants for the greenbelt—including $250,000 in Prop 68 funds, $50,000 in Active Transportation funding and an existing CalFire grant.
In the backdrop of that agreement, Lopez said, expiring permits from the County represented a looming threat to the completion of the greenbelt. A flood control permit from L.A. County had “unknowingly expired” in 2018, Lopez said.
Though Public Works had solicited public input on the project in previous years, they decided not to hold another round of community input given time constraints.
“We just jumped on it right away, wanting to start construction, because we knew we had these grant deadlines that were coming to an end, and we did not want to lose the money,” Lopez said. “You know, in retrospect, we missed a couple of things, and I will own up to it and it created lessons learned for us.”
That lack of community input would come back to bite them when residents criticized tree-trimming and tree-removal on the project site in March of this year.
In response to the complaints, an L.A. County inspector halted the project in an abundance of caution, Puyolt said.
Puyolt said that the City believed it was allowed to do maintenance on the site under their land-use agreement with Los Angeles County. The agreement included tree maintenance, irrigation improvement and irrigation maintenance, he said.
So far, L.A. County has not responded to this claim, Puyolt said.
“The inspector said he didn’t really even know. He didn’t really know about the land use agreement,” Puyolt said. “That’s why we said we wanted to just stop and make sure everyone’s on the same page. Let’s get everything under control.”
In late 2018—rather than request a permit extension—Public Works was told by LA County to resubmit its plans. In the years that had passed, permit requirements changed and the greenbelt now requires three permits to move forward.
All three permits are contingent on one another. So far, the plans for two permits have been approved. Public Works is waiting on confirmation of the third permit—related to erosion control—before moving forward.
Puyolt said the City is currently undergoing revisions for the last permit and that all three permits “are expected to be issued soon.”
“I feel good about getting that [grant extension], but if by any chance they don’t approve the extension, we’re going to be in real trouble.”
—Eric Lopez, Director of Public Works
Even if the permits are approved, the $1.625 million in grant funding will expire this month unless an extension is granted.
“In retrospect, you know, it would have been better if we had more time to prepare, more time to spend the funding,” Lopez said. “But there were some real pressures that we were trying to stay ahead of.”
The grants are set to expire July 15, 2021.
“We haven’t got any thumbs up or thumbs down,” Puyolt said of the permits. He said the City is providing an updated project timeline, progress photos and a snapshot of funding to the County.
At last month’s meeting of the Wrigley Association, a majority of members expressed their support of the project and offered to assist Lopez in any way they could. The overarching sentiment: after watching time toil by with no progress on the space, the Wrigley community is ready to see their much-talked-about greenbelt become a reality.
“I feel good about getting that [grant extension],” Lopez said. “But if by any chance they don’t approve the extension, we’re going to be in real trouble.”
Thanks for this article. It’s great to have some additional info beyond what was discussed in the Wrigley Association meeting.