CALIFORNIA - The San Gabriels

As a Californian who once lived near the San Gabriels, I agree.

"National monument status is best for San Gabriels:  Editorial" Pasadena Star-News 9/24/2014

National monument status is the best way right now to ensure needed resources to protect the San Gabriel Mountains.

Not someday.  Not whenever it is that the U.S. Forest Service is allocated enough money to pay for more rangers and trail maintenance.

In these hot years, in this almost permanent wildfire season, almost all of its budget goes toward fighting fires.

A new status as the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument will put a spotlight on the grand mountain range and its recreational possibilities as real wilderness, the closest to any mega-city in our nation.

These magnificent mountains that loom over our region — buffers from the desert, funnelers of whipping winds, place where we hike, fish, ski and hunt — were not created by any government.  They are for the ages; the federal government has tried to protect them for a mere century.  But it is county, state and federal government that built the trails and highways into them, and provided what resources they have beyond their flowing waters and wildness.

The proposals to bring them additional protections beyond the national forest status that they have began 11 years ago through the offices of Hilda Solis, then the member of Congress for the central San Gabriel Valley.  They have continued under Rep. Judy Chu, D-Pasadena, who has sought the status of National Recreation Area for the mountains and a region downstream along the San Gabriel River banks.

That status as an NRA isn’t happening anytime soon in the current congressional quagmire.  So Chu has made a controversial request to President Obama for him to use his executive powers to declare the mountains a national monument, as 15 presidents before him have unilaterally declared other wild and scenic areas as monuments.

In reality the reason the executive-order request is controversial is that the President has been exercising the privilege perhaps too often on other, entirely unrelated matters.  Does that have any effect on whether monument status is a good idea for the San Gabriels?

It does not.  Neither does it matter here whether some people don’t like President Obama and therefore don’t want to approve of him taking action.

The reason his taking action is a good idea is that the San Gabriels see a tremendous number of visitors and yet the Forest Service doesn’t have the resources to handle them.  The budgets for the Angeles and San Bernardino National Forests are not separate line items in federal spending; they are tiny parts of the vast USFS budget, and can’t be increased by lawmakers or even by private philanthropy, which just goes into the big pot.  A national forest is that vague thing, a “land of many uses”; national monuments — which, for instance, the Grand Canyon and Joshua Tree originally were — are created specifically to welcome visitors.  Once the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument is created, a visitor management plan follows, and financial resources would shift to repair the signage, restrooms, picnic tables and trails that are now in such disarray.

The private cabins on leased land, the Adams Pack Station, the current rights of off-road vehicle use — none of these would be adversely affected by a monument.

We urge President Obama to take executive action for the park-poor people of Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties so the tremendous possibilities of the San Gabriels can be fully realized.