Scott Culbertson is conflicted. Not to mention frustrated. And sad. And disappointed. And, frankly, just fed up.
Angelenos, I suspect many of you can relate.
For almost two years, the executive director of the Friends of Ballona Wetlands has watched with dismay as an encampment of broken down RVs and buses has become a permanent fixture along Jefferson Boulevard, just west of Lincoln Boulevard in Playa del Rey.
When I spoke to Culbertson over the summer, he told me how the few dozen occupants had been making frequent incursions into the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve and adjacent freshwater marsh, leaving mounds of trash and causing brushfires.
Not a whole lot has changed since then. If anything, it has gotten worse, both in terms of the environmental damage and the equally obvious, but far less measurable — and far more important — human suffering. I live nearby and see it every day.
Culbertson had pinned his hopes on promises by the city to do regular cleanups of the encampment. And for the most part, the city has followed through. It just doesn’t look like it.
“Everybody who is living along there, they know the game now,” he told me a few hours after a pointless pre-Thanksgiving cleanup. “As soon as the L.A. sanitation workers leave, everybody puts their stuff right back out.”
These past few months have left Culbertson at a loss for what do next, other than wait for action on a couple of new city policies that could beef up enforcement.
“Even the most liberal folks, like me, have begun to lose patience with the homelessness situation,” he admitted.
