This time, public pressure loses to cooler heads.

Here’s a bit of good news about something that isn’t going to happen.

The news is that Caltrans, the state transportation agency, will not spend almost a quarter-million dollars to automate the sprinkling of native vegetation on the north side of the Ventura Freeway in Eagle Rock.

The reason that shouldn’t be done, if it isn’t obvious, is that the brush, being native, will do just fine without water. Watering could cause it to grow fast, then die, leading to erosion and fire danger. Also, it just isn’t good imagery for one public agency to be turning on the spigot while another is preaching water conservation.

Even so, it almost happened. And the reasons for that are not especially reassuring.

In building the Ventura Freeway back in 1974, Caltrans cut off several ridges between the Glendale Freeway and Figueroa Street. Then the agency planted native buckwheat to keep the steeply cut surfaces from eroding and installed manually operated sprinklers to nurture the saplings. After two years of watering, Caltrans left the brush on its own.

But the residents, apparently not understanding that watering ultimately can increase fire danger, got Caltrans to resume the watering weekly about two years ago.

Still unsatisfied, they recently called their local representatives, Los Angeles Councilman Richard Alatorre and Assemblyman Pat Nolan (R-Glendale). Their offices talked to Caltrans. Though the agency is running tight on landscaping money right now, it found just enough to automate the irrigation system, which would have made it easy to water more liberally.

It would have been done, no doubt, had there not been dissent in the Caltrans work force, for the reasons stated above. An anonymous worker brought a memo to The Times with the written protests of two engineers, both apparently ignored by their superiors.

In response to my questions about it a few weeks ago, Caltrans district landscape architect Bill Koval stuck by the project, though rather tepidly.

“I’m not sold that it’s an obvious good idea,” Koval said. “However, there are certainly benefits to it, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea.”

Obviously, the prevailing opinion in Caltrans and the Fire Department was that it was more bad than good. The problem was getting out of the promise to the residents.

Koval found a way. It happens that he is a neighbor of Bob Haueter, Nolan’s chief deputy in the district. One weekend at home, the two talked about sprinklers and automation.

The conversation led Haueter to the Los Angeles Fire Department, which told him what it had been saying all along, that there was no justification for watering native vegetation and that it could make matters worse.

Haueter, a politician of good sense, immediately scuttled the project by speaking to Caltrans higher-ups. All that was left to do was break the news to the Eagle Rock residents.

Two Los Angeles firemen and two Caltrans officials, including Koval, took on that task at a community meeting Thursday evening in the Eagle Rock municipal building.

It should have been fun. There is something perversely appealing in the sight of stiff-lipped professionals submitting passively to the abuse of an angry mob.

As it turned out, though, the residents of Eagle Rock hardly made up a mob. There were about 30 of them, decidedly on the gray side. They proved quiet, attentive and polite.

“Home-grown people,” Alatorre deputy Shirley Minser called them, and she was right.

They took the bad news placidly. Only one man made anything of a ruckus, and even it wasn’t much. He just kept asking over and over why Caltrans couldn’t put rocks beside the freeway for safety and beauty.

Above all, it was obvious, these people adored their firefighters and weren’t going to say anything caustic in their presence.

Toward Caltrans they showed less deference. Almost everyone had a gripe about the sprinkling system south of the freeway.

A woman said that water ran down her street day and night and that no one she called had been able to stop it. A man said he knew of a sprinkler blocked by undergrowth and another that squirted straight into the air.

Soon supervising transportation engineer Stan Lisiewicz, a man of military tautness, was besieged by complaints. He pressed his lips together grimly, wrote down notes and said again and again, “Someone will be there tomorrow.”

Only near the end did a white-haired man get up the nerve to ask the toughest question. Is it true, he wanted to know, that a certain property owner who habitually neglects to clear his brush is, in fact, a fireman, as people say?

Capt. James Haworth fielded the question. It is true, he said crisply. He said the department had fined the man each year for the transgression but only recently, because of calls from neighbors, recognized him as one of its own.

“Now he’s under disciplinary action,” Haworth said.

Given a nudge, the system works.