WHAT’S THE PLAN?

Twenty-seven years after Inyo County and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) agreed to restore vegetation across portions of the Owens Valley, 11 revegetation projects remain unfinished, and negotiations over how to complete them have stalled.

The projects, stretching from Laws to Independence, were created under the 1999 revegetation plan to offset groundwater pumping impacts by restoring native plant communities capable of stabilizing soils, reducing dust, and sustaining themselves over time.

But whether those sites have actually achieved that goal remains unresolved.

According to Inyo Water Department Director Holly Alpert, the county and LADWP have long measured two of the plan’s three performance standards, vegetation cover and species composition. The third, long-term sustainability, has never been formally quantified.

“We’ve been in talks with LA about how to come up with methods to measure that,” Alpert said. “But we don’t have methods right now.”

Under the plan, at least 25% of a site’s vegetation is supposed to consist of naturally established plants at least three years old, demonstrating that the restored community can reproduce without continued human intervention.

But without a way to measure sustainability, Inyo considers every project incomplete.

That interpretation differs from LADWP’s.

“Some of these LA calls complete,” Alpert said. “Some of them they call implementing ongoing or implemented but not meeting goals. But all of them we would call implemented but not meeting goals because we don’t have that sustainability piece.”

The disagreement extended beyond the missing metric.

Each revegetation project was designed to recreate a different native plant community using a recommended list of species. Over time, however, many sites have developed in unexpected ways. Some have become dominated by invasive plants. Others have far fewer native species than intended. Still others fluctuate dramatically depending on snowpack, rainfall and groundwater conditions.

Lynn Boulton, conservation chair for the Sierra Club’s Range of Light Group, cautioned against judging any one parcel from a single visit.

“It’s complicated to assess these projects,” she said.

After reviewing the county’s 2025 monitoring data, Boulton said most of the projects also fail to meet both their vegetation cover and species goals.

She singled out Black Rock 16E, where alkali meadow was supposed to become the dominant plant community but perennial pepperweed has taken hold instead. Five Bridges, she added, has become “a pepperweed disaster.”

“I don’t know that Five Bridges is fixable,” she said.

Lauren Rose of the Eastern Sierra Water Alliance argued the problem is not passive recovery but insufficient water delivery to the parcels.

“There’s not enough water being given to these parcels,” she said. “That is why they are not recovering and recruiting and redeveloping the sort of diverse ecosystem that we’re looking for.”

The commission spent as much time discussing process and communication with LADWP as they did the vegetation itself. Maybe more.

Alpert said technical-level meetings between county staff and LADWP had been ongoing for roughly three years but stopped about six months ago, before several parcels could be reviewed.

That pause has become a point of frustration.

In order to get the conversations started again, Chairman Paul Huette suggested narrowing the county’s focus to one or two projects that could serve as a starting point for renewed negotiations.

Nor Baskevitch, also with the Eastern Sierra Water Alliance, said the ultimate goal should remain restoring all 11.

“The ideal would be for all of them to meet the goals because that is what needs to happen,” Baskevitch said.

Huette agreed in principle but argued that an incremental approach may be necessary to restart negotiations.

“This was from 1999,” Huette said. “How long are we going to keep waiting and waiting?”

The commission briefly considered pursuing a formal dispute if the revegetation projects fall under the Long Term Water Agreement, though Commissioner Randy Keller cautioned against escalating too quickly.

“It’s not a small thing to dispute,” Keller said.

Instead, commissioners gravitated toward a more friendly first step.

Several speakers, both in attendance and on the commission, noted that LADWP Commissioner Nurit Katz had recently expressed support for restarting the technical discussions.

With this optimism in mind, the commission landed on asking LADWP to produce a written plan explaining how each of the 11 projects will eventually meet their revegetation goals.

So, after nearly three decades of incomplete mitigation projects and months of stalled negotiations, the next step is simply asking LADWP what its plan is.