Yesterday two big steps occurred for bringing the endangered Southern California Steelhead back to the waters of Southern California:

First the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the San Gabriel and LLA River and Mountains Conservancy (RMC) established a cooperative agreement for the creation of the Los Angeles River Fish Passage Program. It seeds that program with $13 million of funding from Proposition 1 bond monies.

Second, from the same meeting,  a Trout Unlimited proposal for a conceptual design of the lower river channel access adjacent to Dills Park, bordering Compton and Paramount through the Los Angeles River Fish Passage Program also received more than $300,000.

I’ll be writing a broader piece about what this means for conservation in the coming weeks, but I wanted to spread this good news right now.

See you on the river, Jim Burns