Forward Altadena....

Well, you'd think I'd have given up by now, but I'm in my 19th year on the Altadena Town Council. All those years ago, I thought Altadena just needed a tweak or two and it could become the most perfect place on earth. I figured I'd join the Altadena Town Council, help make some change and be done in five or six years.

Maniacal laughter can be heard as I express that thought. I had no idea just how divisive sane reasonable ideas could be in Altadena and how difficult the slightest progress could be made by those afraid of change or financially interested in community failure.

Last night I attended the meeting of the Altadena Crest Trail Working Group. We were discussing various trail entrances and the subject of the City of Pasadena's Hahamongna Watershed Park came up. That was a project Tim Brick, myself and a couple other guys came up with over breakfast of mimosa and fresh fruit at Lucy Howell's house when we were serving on Pasadena's Strategic Planning Committee, a mere twenty five years ago....It was a simple idea then- Must have been that third mimosa....

Fix Devils Gate Dam so we can hold water in back of it

Pump the local water into the local aquifer so it wont go to waste,

Get rid of as much of the non native invasive plants as possible and restore the trail heads

See simple. Anybody can understand that. Clearly it is the right thing to do. Well a funny thing happened on the way to the Forum..... the Project went to Pasadena's City staff where it has had barnacle after barnacle glued to it. A road here, a multilevel parking lot there, thirteen soccer fields, imported high saline MWD Colorado River water and hundreds of miles of pipe, dozens of pumping stations, and a small power plant, a Indian museum, a medicine wheel, almost any kind of special interest rancid pork fat you could load up in back of Devils Gate. Twenty five years of hearings, revisions and baloney. The easy part was actually getting the County of Los Angeles to fix Devils Gate, the hard part is getting the City of Pasadena to only pump in the local water and only remove the non natives and restore the trail heads. It seems something so right and simple, so elegant, can not be tolerated.

I don't mean to pick on Pasadena here, the County of Los Angeles has its own methods of preventing simple progress.

As I walked out of the meeting last night with Lori Paul, I said to her "You know Twenty years ago I'd attend meetings and there were these 50, 60 and 70 year old folks there. I'd bring up a subject and they would start eye rolling and telling me why that couldn't happen and giving me the history of how that idea had been killed several times since say, 1938. They used to piss me off, but I've come to understand they were trying to protect me from becoming them, tired, angry and disillusioned." Yeah", she said, "I'm tired, progress seems to move more slowly than a glacier around here." We looked at each other and we smiled, her eyes twinkled."Yeah, but hopefully there are a couple young wild hearted folks who are coming up. I can tell them how I failed, how Oscar Werner failed, how many other fine people failed. Maybe they can pull it off. Eventually we are gonna get our trail, a shopping district, and this community will function as a place with a proud identity." We smiled again. We Laughed. We went home hopeful. Someday there will be an old Altadenan who will only know that some now forgotten smart people made the water safe pure and clean for the future, that the trails are enjoyed and loved as they always have been, that life is good, just, and peaceful in Altadena.