The City of Long Beach is preparing for a major stormwater project near Skylinks Golf Course that has been more than a decade in the making. While the project is located several miles from Alamitos Bay, it is part of a much larger effort to improve water quality throughout the Los Cerritos Channel watershed and the waterways it connects to downstream.
For Clean Bay Collective, projects like this are important to follow because they help us understand some of the larger systems influencing the water quality we monitor in and around Alamitos Bay.
Addressing Water Quality Across the Watershed
The Los Cerritos Channel drains a highly urbanized area that includes portions of Long Beach and several surrounding cities. Rain and other runoff from streets, parking lots, neighborhoods, businesses, and other developed areas enter storm drains and channels throughout the watershed.
As that water moves across the urban landscape, it can pick up bacteria, metals, trash, nutrients, and other pollutants. Much of that runoff ultimately travels toward our coastal waterways.
Concerns about water quality in the Los Cerritos Channel have been developing for many years. Beginning in 2008, cities and public agencies throughout the watershed began working together to address water-quality requirements and develop strategies for reducing pollutants in the channel.
That collaboration eventually led to the development of the Los Cerritos Channel Watershed Management Program, which looked at the watershed as a whole and identified projects that could help improve water quality over time.
Skylinks Becomes Part of the Plan
By 2015, stormwater capture at Skylinks Golf Course had been identified as one of the potential projects that could help reduce the volume of polluted runoff moving through the watershed.
The concept was to capture some of the water moving through the flood-control system rather than allowing all of it to continue downstream.
Finding funding for large stormwater infrastructure projects, however, can be difficult. A significant change came in November 2018, when Los Angeles County voters approved Measure W and created the Safe, Clean Water Program. The program provides dedicated funding for projects that capture stormwater, improve water quality, increase local water supplies, and provide community and environmental benefits.
The Skylinks project ultimately received approximately $10.5 million through this program.
Developing the Current Project
According to LA County’s Safe, Clean Water Program, the City of Long Beach initiated the current Skylinks Regional Stormwater Capture Project in January 2021. The project moved relatively quickly into design, reaching the 90% design stage in February 2022.
The project focuses on a channel adjacent to Skylinks Golf Course that receives runoff from approximately 1,665 acres of Long Beach and Lakewood.
The planned system will divert dry-weather flow and stormwater from the channel into an underground infiltration and storage basin capable of holding approximately 2 million gallons of water. Some of that captured water will be able to infiltrate into the ground, helping replenish the local groundwater supply, while another portion will be directed through a vegetated treatment basin before returning to the channel.
The treatment is designed to remove pollutants that the water has picked up as it travels through the urban watershed, including trash and sediment, bacteria, and metals such as zinc, copper, lead, and cadmium. When the project was presented publicly in 2023, project consultants estimated that it could remove approximately 590 pounds of zinc from the water flow and that about 96% of the diverted water would be filtered before being returned to the channel.
Why This Matters to Alamitos Bay
Although Skylinks is several miles inland, the project is connected to the larger watershed system surrounding Alamitos Bay.
Water does not follow the boundaries we tend to use when we think about individual neighborhoods or cities. Rain falling miles away can enter a storm drain, move through a channel, pass through wetlands, and eventually reach coastal waters.
That means the health of Alamitos Bay is influenced by much more than what happens immediately along its shoreline.
Projects like Skylinks are designed to address pollution farther upstream by capturing and treating runoff before it continues through the watershed. The City identifies the project as part of its efforts to improve water quality in the Los Cerritos Channel Watershed and the Alamitos Bay Watershed Management Area.
This is also one reason long-term monitoring through Clean Bay Collective is so valuable.
Our community members are collecting information about conditions in Alamitos Bay at a time when significant changes are taking place throughout the surrounding watershed. Those changes include new stormwater infrastructure, habitat restoration, development, and eventually changes to water circulation associated with the AES generating station.
It would be difficult to attribute a future change in the Bay to any single project. Water quality is influenced by many interacting environmental and human factors. But by establishing a baseline and continuing to collect data over time, we can begin to understand how conditions in the Bay change alongside changes throughout the larger watershed.
The history of the Skylinks project is also a useful reminder of how long these efforts can take. Regional collaboration around water quality began years before Skylinks became a specific project. The project then moved through watershed planning, funding, engineering, community engagement, and environmental review before reaching its current stage.
For those of us monitoring Alamitos Bay, following projects like Skylinks helps us better understand the larger system our data is part of. The water we test in the Bay has a much bigger story, and some of that story begins miles upstream.