Long Beach will look at ways to hold towns along the Los Angeles River accountable for trash and other debris that flows down the channel and ends up on the city’s beaches and in its waterways, officials said this week.
The City Council on Tuesday, Oct. 14, directed the city manager and staffers to look into such solutions, as well as to research how Long Beach can help other cities improve their watershed debris mitigation efforts to help reduce trash and debris that ends up in Long Beach.
“Our goal is simple, a Los Angeles River that’s treated as a shared regional asset, not a shared regional dumping ground,” Councilmember Kristina Duggan said. “We know that to get there, we need buy-in from a broad coalition of people, and all voices are welcome.”
The Los Angeles River stretches 51 miles, beginning in the San Fernando Valley, flowing southeast through Los Angeles County and emptying into the Pacific Ocean at the San Pedro Bay.
From 2020 to 2024, Long Beach collected more than 25 million pounds of trash and debris that was carried downstream from the L.A. River into its waterways and beaches, costing the city nearly $12.3 million from the Tidelands Fund, Duggan said during the Tuesday council meeting.
During that time, no cleanup orders, abatement actions or settlement offers were issued for violations, despite state law requiring a zero-trash standard for more than two decades, according to a staff report.
Long Beach, officials said, continues bearing the financial and operational burden of managing and cleaning up the pollution generated by upstream jurisdictions. Local communities also bear the brunt of unabated environmental inequities — not just those along the coastline but also along the river.
“The issue here is one that impacts every corner of our city, and especially so in the north, as well as the west,” said District 8 Councilmember Tunua Thrash-Nutk, “where the L.A. River runs directly through our neighborhoods, so coastal stewardship is something that’s important to all of us.”
Trash remains the most significant barrier to revitalizing Long Beach’s waterfront, officials said.
During an inaugural summit earlier this year — dubbed the “WOW! World of Waterfronts Summit” — participants identified the continuous flow of debris from the Los Angeles River as the primary obstacle to transforming Long Beach’s coast into a resource centered around recreation and environmental restoration, according to a staff report. The Marine Advisory Committee also recently issued a memo highlighting trash and debris as a central threat to the city’s marine and coastal health.
Councilmembers also acknowledged continuous efforts from Long Beach’s Marine Bureau maintenance team and community organizations – including the Surfrider Foundation’s Long Beach chapter, Algalita, the Moore Institute, and Justin Rudd and his nonprofit Community Action Team, among others – to keep the city’s beaches clean.
But councilmembers also said that those efforts are not enough, and upstream communities should also do their part to reduce the trash and debris that enters the watershed.
“It’s overwhelming the amount of trash that has to be cleaned up,” Councilmember Cindy Allen said. “I’m sick and tired of cleaning up other people’s trash and you should be too.”
Long Beach and Los Angeles County maintain catch basins and trash booms across the river as a last line of defense before debris enters San Pedro Bay. There is now a renewed effort to supplement these systems, according to a staff report.
“Each city along the Los Angeles River has to play a role in mitigating its own trash, improving waste systems and investing in capture technologies,” Allen said. “I think we have to get more aggressive, and prove the effectiveness of existing trash boom systems and explore additional capture technologies.”
The city, with support from Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn’s office, is exploring a partnership with The Ocean Cleanup – an environmental engineering nonprofit that develops and deploys technology to extract plastic pollution from oceans and rivers – which identified the L.A. River as one of its “top 30 global priorities.”
This collaboration will bring private capital investment dollars to design and construct new trash booms along the river, officials said.
City leaders also want to engage with the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board on stormwater regulations, through multi-agency watershed groups that coordinate to meet regulatory requirements, and see if there are opportunities to deepen collaborations with other regional government entities, as well as environmental and civic organizations.
There will also be a way for community members and the city to urge the water board to create stronger standards for keeping trash out of the L.A. River, Duggan said.
The water board’s 2020 conditional waiver, which regulates “nonpoint” trash — debris blown into waterways during storms, meaning it has no specific origin and is difficult to regulate — expired in September and a new proposed set of requirements was released last week. A 30-day public comment period is now open, with the conditional waiver scheduled for consideration by the Regional Water Board in December. The regulations adopted through this process will govern trash in the L.A. River for the next five years, Duggan said.
This is a critical opportunity for Long Beach, Duggan said, to advocate for outcome-based metrics, public compliance tracking, proactive enforcement and shared accountability across the watershed.
By coordinating cleanup operations, standardizing monitoring practices and aligning funding commitments, councilmembers said, cities and agencies can reduce duplication, share data and distribute costs more fairly, so that the burden of river maintenance no longer falls primarily on downstream communities like Long Beach.
City leaders have also identified a series of strategies at the local, regional and state levels that staffers can explore and pursue, according to the staff report.
Those efforts aim to align jurisdictions, deepen collaboration, improve accountability and secure the resources needed to stop trash before it reaches Long Beach’s shoreline, officials said.
Some of the local and regional strategies include exploring other regional cost-sharing agreements based on upstream population and watershed areas; partnering with county agencies and local jurisdictions to identify and provide outreach services to large homeless encampments along the riverbanks; and encouraging cities that drain into the L.A. River to consider adopting local policies limiting polystyrene foam and single-use packaging and items within city facilities, among others.
Strategies at the state level include partnering with the city’s legislative delegation to identify and advocate for funding opportunities available through initiatives such as Proposition 1 and Proposition 68; engaging in public comment and grant guidelines development processes to ensure new state resources continue to prioritize the efforts of highly impacted communities like Long Beach; and exploring and advocating for legislative opportunities to strengthen the tools and capacity of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, among others.
“We have a responsibility to future generations to protect the river, our coastline and our community,” Thrash-Ntuk said. “I believe we’re taking a stand for environmental justice, fiscal responsibility and regional cooperation.”