The Fish of Steel : A Species With Political Muscle Has Sunk Projects That Were Threats to Its Habitat

VENTURA — Only its most devoted apostles have much of a chance of ever spying the sleek-muscled glint of one of Southern California’s few remaining steelhead trout.

The fish watchers race out in the predawn hours to check reports of a rare steelhead sighting in Malibu Creek.

They peer for hours into the roiling murk of a $2-million fish ladder in Ventura County.

If they’re lucky, they see one or two adult steelhead a year swim upstream along the Santa Clara River near Saticoy, the primary focus of the state Fish and Game Department’s trout watch. And they count maybe 100 smolts, or juvenile steelhead, swimming back down, perhaps never to be seen again.

Still, defenders of the steelhead trout push their cause in hearings and lawsuits, touting the species’ ironclad right to spawn unmolested in Southern California’s rivers.

The result is one powerful fish:

The trout that permanently stalled flood control work that would have protected homes near Ojai.

The trout whose name has been invoked in environmental battles across Southern California, from a Ventura ballpark to the massive Ahmanson Ranch housing development.

The trout that--after the National Marine Fisheries Service nominated it last summer to the endangered species list--is fast becoming Southern California’s spotted owl.

“It appears that the trout is rising to the surface of public awareness, and it’s becoming a bellwether and a rallying point for protecting the rivers,” said Jim Edmonson, executive director of California Trout.

Nowhere is the focus greater than in Ventura County: after Malibu Creek and the Santa Ynez River, the only other three steelhead habitats surviving in Southern California are the Ventura River, the Santa Clara River and the Sespe Creek.

The species once ranged as far south as Mexico. Now it is extinct in Orange and San Diego counties and nearly all of Los Angeles County.

“I’ve had the chance to give numerous presentations [on the steelhead] in Ventura County over the years,” said Edmonson, whose group lobbies for trout protection.

“And my sense is that if you want to touch a nerve in Ventura County, all you have to say is, ‘Do you want your rivers to look like the L.A. River?’ and there’s an immediate reaction. They say, ‘No, we don’t want to be like L.A.’ ”

The steelhead trout has gained political clout ever since the Legislature and Gov. George Deukmejian nine years ago ordered the Department of Fish and Game to develop a strategy to bring the steelhead back.

Although the Deukmejian plan was not finished and signed by Gov. Pete Wilson until last February, plenty has been done in Ventura County since then to help the steelhead:

The United Water Conservation District spent $2 million in 1991 to build a fish ladder. The complex of concrete water channels, ramps and metal traps carries steelhead and other fish up over the 20-foot high Freeman Diversion Dam to spawning ponds upstream.

State Fish and Game biologists are three years into a five-year fish watch at the dam to learn whether the species--now numbering barely 500 in Southern California--can regain the strength it enjoyed earlier this century, when an estimated 55,000 steelhead trout thickened the waters of Southern California’s rivers.

The Ventura City Council is contemplating giving $20,000 to a new joint agency that will create a recovery plan for steelhead trout in the Ventura River.

And environmentalists lobby hard against each new development that they see as a threat to steelhead recovery.

The most recent target was the Olivas Park Drive extension and levee in Ventura.

Many trout-savvy environmentalists saw it as a Trojan horse to allow development of farmland bordering the Santa Clara, allegedly a major steelhead thoroughfare. They lobbied heavily against it, arguing that the levee would make the river’s flow too powerful for trout to navigate.

For that and other reasons, the project, which included a sports and entertainment center called Centerplex, all but fell apart. And the Ventura City Council recently voted to postpone the road and levee indefinitely.

“I think everybody would like to see the steelhead trout population thrive,” said Allen Camp, President of Swift Financial Corp., which owns 30 acres of potentially lucrative land in the area. “But I have a hard time believing that a levee on the periphery of a river such as the one on Olivas Park Drive has got anything to do with trout spawning.”

The question is whether any of the trout lovers’ labors can turn back the clock on steelhead channels that have been choked nearly to death by dams, excavation and chemical runoff.

“It’s impractical--and to landowners extraordinarily unfair--to want to roll back the clock to a point where the landowners are not afforded the opportunity to reasonably protect their property,” Camp said.

But environmentalists say fighting for the trout could actually help the rivers:

“It requires such a high-quality habitat that the steelhead are considered an ‘umbrella species,’ ” said Maurice Cardenas, a Fish and Game biologist who studies the steelhead. “If you protect the steelhead, you protect almost everything under it in the aquatic realm.”

Critics grouse, but quietly, for fear that they will be seen as opposing the protection of an endangered species.

“I’m not going to say something that’s going to make me appear to be someone who opposes environmental causes,” said Ventura Councilman Jim Monahan. “But I feel that some of the environmental causes have been very extreme, and one day the pendulum will swing the other way.”

After floods in 1995 swamped homes near Casitas Springs, Ventura County public works officials proposed to gouge silt and debris out of two miles of the San Antonio Creek’s banks, to prevent future flooding.

However, environmentalists argued that the project could hurt the steelhead and other species.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers refused to grant a quick permit for the flood work because it could not declare the project safe for the ecosystem. The county shelved the project rather than undergo the lengthy process of acquiring a state permit.

That kind of opposition, say critics, is overkill: a less-than-certain battle to save a fish should not outweigh projects that would save human property and perhaps lives.

“Take the people on San Antonio Creek,” said Swift Financial’s Allen Camp, who has also worked as an attorney for developers such as the Ahmanson Land Co. “It’s pretty extraordinary when an environmental faction is preventing them from trying to protect their homes. . . . It’s kind of the worst example of extremism. You’ve got to be balanced in these things.”

Steelhead-backers insist they are being more than fair.

“The flood control plans for the San Antonio Creek were projected to protect something on the order of 12 parcels of property, that’s number one,” Edmonson said.

“Number two, the rivers and the fish and the wildlife that are in them belong to all of the public,” he said. “And the public has consistently voted for elected officials who want to maintain viable populations of that valuable natural resource.”

The environmentalists agree that the steelhead will thrive only if its habitat survives.

Reviving the trout is not as simple as planting hatchery-raised rainbow trout--the freshwater genetic twin to the steelhead, said Jim Kentosh, the operations engineer who oversees the fish ladder at the Freeman Diversion Dam.

“Most of the trout you plant, in a week get pulled out on a cheese ball and a number 5 treble hook,” he joked. “Also, their numbers crowd out the mature fish.”

The fish ladder is one of the steelhead’s big chances for revival, Kentosh said. Biologists worry that the low steelhead count may mean the ladder is not working, he said.

But they take heart in that every year they count an average of 1,600 lamprey--another ocean-dwelling species--moving up through the fish ladder to spawn in the same freshwater as the steelhead.

And they say 1997 could be the year that all their work pays off.

They hope to see smolts that were spawned in 1991 swim up through the ladder again, home in on their native spawning grounds and breed a new generation of steelhead.

“If we see some good numbers of trout coming back, it will be a very positive sign that what we’ve been trying to do is working,” said Martin Golden, steelhead coordinator for the National Marine Fisheries Service.

“If we don’t see the large numbers coming back up, it’s not necessarily an indicator that things have failed,” he said. “But it means we’ll just have to wait another year to see what happens. . . . It’s not a real easy determination to make.”

But the fish-backers speak of the steelhead trout’s future with optimism.

“Each time that I had the duty to go over and check the trap at Malibu Creek at 3 o’clock in the morning, there was a sense of excitement or mystery,” said Edmonson. “Would I see one? Is it a ghost? Does it still exist? They have a legendary, charismatic quality about them.”

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A Trout With Clout

On the brink of winning endangered-species status, the steelhead trout has managed to help stall numerous projects in Ventura County, from an Ojai-area flood control project to a ballpark behind the Ventura Auto Mall. But even biologists who study the steelhead full time admit they seldom see more than one adult steelhead a year heading upriver to spawn in Ventura County.

Worth the Cost? Critics say that biologists and environmentalists need to strike more of a balance between society’s needs and what they see as an expensive--and often obstructive--campaign to reintroduce a strong steelhead population to Southern California’s rivers. But researchers predict 1997 could see their efforts pay off with a marked rise in steelhead numbers.

Southern California Habitat: Santa Clara River, Ventura River, Sespe Creek, Malibu Creek, Santa Ynez River. Extinct in the rest of Los Angeles County and Orange and San Diego Counties.

STEELHEAD TROUT

Species: Salmo Gairdnerii , the sea-run version of rainbow trout

Description: Silver in the sea, darker and spotted with reddish-pink stripe when migrating upstream to spawn. Up to 45 inches and 40 pounds. Average is under 10 pounds.

Spawning: Young live in freshwater streams for up to four years, then at sea for two to three years. They return to their birthplace to spawn and, unlike salmon, often survive to do it again.

Source: National Marine Fisheries Service