30 Years of Impact:
Leading the Way to a More Resilient Water Future in LA
For the past 30 years, LA Waterkeeper has fought for the health of our region’s waterways, and for sustainable, equitable and climate-resilient water supplies. Through our unique blend of advocacy, litigation, coalition building, and community engagement, we have accomplished a lot – but there’s still much work to do.
We organize our work through the lens of three key initiatives: Pollution Prevention, Healthy Habitats, and Systems Change.
We envision the LA region as an international leader on integrated, sustainable, and equitable water management; as water self-sufficient; and as a region where all waterways throughout the county are safe and healthy with plentiful public access.
Highlights from our first three decades as an organization include:
Reducing sewage spills in the City of Los Angeles by 90% since 2000 through legal action.
Changing the way roads are built to reduce toxic runoff by 360 million gallons a year, through our settlement with Caltrans.
Compelling regulators to adopt cleanup plans for local waterways to reduce bacteria, metals, trash, and forever chemicals like PCBs and DDT to keep people and wildlife safe.
Bringing our LA River back to health, including stopping polluting development projects, promoting the effort to bring the river back to its natural state where feasible, and raising up community voices to share their vision for the river.
Patrolling Marine Protected Areas, often with underserved and at-risk youth volunteers, to prevent abuse, gather data, and educate community members.
Promoting sea otter population recovery in Santa Monica Bay.
Helping to bring about Measure W and the Safe Clean Water Program, which provides $280 million every year for multi-benefit stormwater projects, including parks, open space and green schoolyards. This program aims to dramatically reduce municipal runoff pollution – the region’s #1 source of pollution.
Reinvesting $30 million in pollution-impacted communities, funding restoration projects such as Watts Re:Imagined, through supplemental environmental projects (SEPs) in partnership with 55+ local groups.
Saving our coast and climate from damaging ocean desalination, in favor of better local alternatives like wastewater recycling and groundwater.
Throughout these efforts, we have engaged the community in our work, activating tens of thousands of volunteers to conduct cleanups, water quality monitoring, kelp reforestation, and more.
Impact in Dollars: As a result of seven of the top legal actions we’ve taken, $51.6 to $70.3 billion in economic value and 331,000 to 429,000 jobs will be generated in LA County over the next 25 years.
Collaboration is Our Core Value: Virtually all the work we’ve done was accomplished with a myriad of nonprofit, community, labor and other partners.
