| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Habitats Salt From Old Wounds At stake is one of the most significant wetland habitat restoration projects ever: the purchase of up to 19,000 acres of the Bay Area’s south bay salt ponds, and the return of much of it to tidal marsh. Such a large environmental renewal in so densely populated an urban setting would be inconceivable, except for the peculiar, double-edged history of salt production in the Bay Area. Since the gold rush era, lands around the estuary have been used to pond and concentrate bay water to make salt. Although many people resent that so much marsh is tied up by industry, if salt makers hadn’t occupied the land it would have been drained and developed decades ago. And though there are big challenges to restoring salt ponds to a tidal marshland, they are child’s play compared to restoring any wetland that has been built on. The latest plan for the public to buy the south bay salt ponds was posed two years ago, in a time of huge state and federal budget surpluses. Cargill Inc., the Minneapolis-based agribusiness giant that owns the ponds, decided to consolidate its Bay Area operation and offer 19,000 acres of excess ponds to the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, already the biggest urban refuge in the West. By the time the appraisals finally came in last year—reportedly at well over $300 million—both the state and federal economies were in deficit free-fall. Three hundred million dollars, once a day’s work in Silicon Valley, suddenly seemed like a king’s ransom. Late last year, U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who’d been trying to broker the deal, did a quick rewrite for the new, red economy. She proposed subtracting the most expensive 1,400 acres in the plan, those around Cargill’s Redwood City salt plant, and reducing the price by two-thirds to about 100 million. But even the new, Marsh Restoration Lite plan will be hard to finance. Thirty-three million dollars has so far been committed for the purchase—25 million from the state and 8 million from the federal government—and some hopes have arisen around Feinstein’s efforts to raise private money. She has reportedly approached the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. But all of these groups have been experiencing their own financial tribulations. Proposition 40, approved by state voters in March, should help, too. Called the “California Clean Water, Clean Air, Safe Neighborhood Parks and Coastal Protection Act of 2002,” Prop 40 will raise $2.6 billion for California’s parks, some of which could be used to help fill the gaps in the salt pond purchase. Furthermore, in January, Secretary of Interior Gale Norton announced both her support for the acquisitions and a $1.1 million annual increase in the refuge system’s operating budget. The budget is $2.5 million for 2002 and will be $3.6 million in 2003. A million-dollar annual raise won’t begin to bridge the gap toward purchasing the acres, but it will help deflate critics who say the refuge is already too big to manage for its budget. Cargill is open to the slimmed down proposal, but hasn’t agreed to the $100 million price tag, says spokeswoman Lori Johnston. If Cargill thinks the hundred million isn’t enough, there are others who think it is much too much. Janice Delfino and her husband Frank have been pursuing the dream of a restored south bay for 36 years. They worked toward the creation of the Don Edwards Refuge in 1972, and were early members of the Palo Alto-based Citizens Committee to Complete the Refuge, a group dedicated to expanding the refuge’s boundaries ever since. As much as she would like to see the Cargill properties made part of the refuge, says Janice, she doesn’t think the current proposal is a good deal for taxpayers. “These ponds are wetlands,” Delfino says. “They can’t be developed, they can’t be sold to any other commercial users. They are waters of the United States.” “Waters of the United States” is a legal description that until a year ago had put the fear of God in the hearts of individual property owners and major landholding corporations alike. But ever since January 2001, owners of wetlands have taken heart. It was then that the Supreme Court declared that an Illinois quarry filled with rainwater did not constitute “waters of the United States” just because migrating birds sometimes landed there to rest or feed. The quarry was slated to become a dump for a number of municipalities around Chicago. Local environmentalists had protested, saying the “wetland” was covered by the migratory bird rule, a provision of the Clean Water Act that protects waters used by birds crossing state lines. The district court sided with the environmentalists, but the Supreme Court disagreed, concluding that Congress did not intend the Clean Water Act to apply to “isolated” bodies of water such as the submerged quarry. That case, Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. Army Corps of Engineers, was “very relevant” to Cargill’s holdings here in the south bay, says Cargill’s spokesperson Lori Johnston. And she says that if Cargill doesn’t sell part or all of its holdings to the government, they will be forced to sell it to developers on the open market, something they feel they can do since the ruling. Delfino and others disagree. Unlike the isolated quarry, Cargill’s salt ponds are filled with water from the bay. “No one could reasonably claim these aren’t wetlands,” says Delfino. Neither Cargill nor the feds want to test the law on this question. But without knowing for sure whether or not those acres around the Redwood City salt plant or other parts of Cargill’s south bay holdings could ever be developed, it is almost impossible to appraise their real estate value. Delfino has other concerns about the deal as well. She points to 10,000 acres of salt ponds at the mouth of the Napa River that Cargill sold to the state in 1994 for $10 million. With the exception of 550 acres liberated when the Department of Fish and Game dynamited a levee in 1995, after heavy rains threatened to wash the dikes out, those ponds have yet to be restored. In fact, they move further and further from possible restoration every year as the saltwater within them concentrates. Now the disposal of the bittern—what remains after sodium chloride is crystallized out of brine in the salt-making process—and other byproducts of salt production has become an expensive proposition, far more expensive than foreseen, says Carl Wilcox, Habitat Conservation Manager at the California Department of Fish and Game. The acres that were freed by dynamite have been coming along fine, but such straightforward methods aren’t an option under normal circumstances. Environmental regulations apply to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, too, and the bittern is so concentrated it is considered a toxic material. Although Delfino has her heart set on restoring of the north and south bay salt ponds, she thinks Cargill should pay a greater share of the costs for the restoration itself. After all, she says, they’ve made money from the ponds for years. Their condition, and the environmental threats they pose, should be just as much Cargill’s responsibility as the public’s. One way the company could step up and be accountable, says Delfino, would be to clean up the properties before they are sold to the government. Alternatively, she says, the price tag could be radically reduced to reflect the costs of restoration. “We don’t want Cargill to get off free and leave the public to do the cleanup like they did in the North Bay,” says Delfino. The agencies, too, have learned something from the North Bay debacle, says California Fish and Game’s Carl Wilcox. The proposed arrangement with Cargill in the south would probably include some cleanup and management support services. Because Cargill will still be making salt in the area, they can remove the bittern in the most toxic ponds and use it in their ongoing salt production process, says Wilcox. And the company’s engineers could also help to maintain the pipes, levees, and other systems that regulate water flow to and from the ponds. Not all of the acquired ponds would be restored to marsh. Ornithologist Douglas Bell of California State University, Sacramento, points out that even in their current state, the ponds provide shrimp and other invertebrate food sources for thousands of waterfowl—avocets, terns, gulls and other birds—whose ancestral wetlands have been filled and developed for agriculture and other uses. These birds have come to rely on the salt ponds as constant, nontidal water sources, and if they were all converted back to salt marsh, the birds would be left high and dry. So some portion of the ponds will be managed as nontidal refugia, requiring ongoing maintenance of the levees and drainage systems that make them work. The expertise and assistance of Cargill engineers in this arena would be worth a lot, says Wilcox. Delfino questions whether it would be wise to base a refuge—whose integrity must be maintained into the indefinite future—on the solvency, proximity, and good will of a profit-seeking private company. But if the deal would get the public’s foot in the door to peek at a restored South Bay, we can figure out how to squeeze the rest of the body through later. “We hope that before we leave this Earth, there will be something other than salt ponds out there,” says the 75-year-old Delfino. “The opportunity is just too great to miss.” Gordy Slack is a science writer living in Oakland. His book Faith in Science: Scientists Search for Truth, was released by Routledge in December. |