Environmentalists were elated when the state made a blanket decision to save an all but extinct coastal plant.
But their joy evaporated when officials decided that the best way to preserve the endangered Ventura marsh milk vetch was to cover a corner of the Ballona Wetlands in Playa del Rey with an actual blanket.
Scientists at the state's Department of Fish and Game say a 200-foot-long tarp over the wetlands was necessary to kill off nonnative vegetation and create an open area to transplant the endangered, yellow-flowered milk vetch.
Horrified conservationists complain that the covering is killing frogs, squirrels, wetland mice and other animals along with the targeted weeds and ice plant. Some have threatened to rip off the covering if authorities refuse to do so.
On Thursday they appealed to the California Coastal Commission to halt the eradication project and to order the tarp's removal, while a new milk vetch rescue plan is worked out. Commissioners meeting in Oceanside took no action, however.
Vandals attempted Thursday to remove the covering, prompting Fish and Game officials to step up patrols around the Culver Boulevard site.
Officials, in the meantime, have revoked Ballona Wetlands access permits for several conservationists who have voiced opposition to the vegetation eradication effort.
The ruckus concerns a fragile, silvery-leafed plant that was once thought to be extinct -- that is, until two clumps of the plant were discovered 11 years ago near Oxnard by a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist. Although the milk vetch is known to have flourished in the Ballona Wetlands area as early as the 1880s, the plant had disappeared by about 1950, when the historically marshy area was drying up.
Ironically, the milk vetch preservation effort is a spinoff of a lawsuit filed five years ago by environmentalists protesting the Coastal Commission's approval of development plans for the Oxnard site.
Activists Marcia Hanscom and Roy van de Hoek, co-directors of the Ballona Institute, lost in a lower court and settled the lawsuit when the Oxnard developer agreed to help pay for the reintroduction of the plant in wetland areas at Playa del Rey and Orange County's Bolsa Chica.
Hanscom and van de Hoek said they protested to local fish and game officials when they learned of the Ballona blanket plan. Van de Hoek said he also confronted workers when they showed up last week to stake down the black plastic tarp.
