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What Price Restoration?
Ask five experts what it costs to restore wetlands, and they'll all say it depends on the site and what you want to do with it. The site might be anything from a diked cow pasture to a trashed-out marsh, and the goal might be anything from pickleweed flats to winter duck ponds, but it's how closely the before and after resemble each other, and what it will take in terms of human intervention to transform one into the other, that creates vast differences in dollars and cents.
"Just breaching levees is pretty cheap," says hydrologist Bob Coats of Philip Williams & Associates. "If toxics are involved, things can get very expensive." In the restoration trade, the word is that average costs are $20,000-$30,000 per acre, with big ticket items reaching $80,000 per acre.
"One of the biggest cost factors can be whether the land you want to restore is at or near the grade you need to get tidal action," says engineer Andrew Leahy. "Another is if you have to excavate large areas and you have no place to put the dirt, so it has to be hauled away. Then the price can really escalate."
"You've got to pick your sites," says Cal Fish & Game's Carl Wilcox, "and do what lends itself most to the physical situation - restore it to what it most wants to be." All the experts agreed that the suitability of the site to the proposed project is paramount to the cost. Wilcox explains that if your site is full of transmission lines, roads and other infrastructure that may need to be raised if tidal action is restored, for example, it's going to cost more. So you have the option of raising the bucks necessary to get your environmental goal or setting a different, less costly goal, such as seasonal ponding.
From Idea to Paper
Once the appropriate goal is set for the site, cost considerations can be easily organized into a number of basic activities ranging from planning and permitting to actually bulldozing through levees, carving out new channels, installing tide gates, raising land levels or conducting post-restoration monitoring. The list goes on. Profiles and price tags of four projects discussed here are presented later in this document. In general terms, the paperwork - the up-front planning and engineering costs - can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. At a minimum, as in the case of a recent 46-acre Petaluma marsh restoration, this is done in-house by an agency staffer like Wilcox (one consultant called the project "the people's simple and cheap marsh"). At a maximum, you may have a bevy of biologists, hydrologists, engineers, lobbyists and other consultants to write your environmental impact statements, handle community and special interest feedback, and push your permits through the multi-agency wetlands regulatory apparatus.
If contaminants on the restoration site need to be immobilized or removed, plan on beaucoup extra bucks for exhaustive soil sampling and risk assessment. Glenn Young of Harding-Lawson Associates, a firm working on removal of several small pockets of contaminated soil at a San Leandro Citation Homes Central development with a wetland component, says up-front consulting and chemical testing costs will be almost as much ($100,000-$200,000) as actual removal of the 600-900 cubic yards of material ($160,000-$200,000).
If mitigation for the loss of wetlands is involved, whether for a wetland-to-wetland deal or for a new development that impacts wetlands, fees for paperwork can skyrocket. Bud Lyon, a developer in the midst of a major Fremont shoreline development called Warm Springs, has already spent $600,000 on environmental reviews and permitting for the second phase of his project, and an Army Corps permit is still not in the bag. "In terms of cost, the real unknown and greatest risk is getting the agencies to give the nod," says Lyons.
Lyons' first phase, completed in 1985, included 250 acres of business park, 50 acres of pickleweed stands and a 200-acre shallow water basin with wetland fringes. The latter two added up to a $2.7 million mitigation for his $14.5 million development. Whether the new wetlands and wildlife habitat are more environmentally beneficial than those destroyed remains the million-dollar and most side-stepped question of all mitigation projects. But at Warm Springs, at least, biologists are already seeing thousands of waterfowl, schools of fish and even the odd endangered salt marsh harvest mouse in restored areas.
On-the-Ground
Once all the paperwork and permitting are done, the next bill coming in will be for the down-and-dirty steam, sweat and hardware of wetland restoration. Most consultants break down construction costs into the following basic categories: mobilization (getting the heavy equipment in and out of the site), excavation, tide control, levee construction and improvements and debris removal.
"Whenever you install tide gates in a levee, there are a lot of incidental costs," says Leahy. "You have to spend considerable money up front just to reach the point at which improvements can be put into the ground." By way of example, Leahy explains that at the 172-acre San Leandro Marshland Enhancement project he recently worked on, breached levees had to be temporarily plugged with giant 4x20-foot sheets of corrugated steel driven into the mud ("sheetpiles"), while dewatering and excavation were going on inside. This step - sheet piles and dewatering - alone cost $60,000 at San Leandro. Equipment access can also play a big role in construction costs - some sites have deep easy access channels or good roads; others can only be reached by shallow, constricted sloughs at high tide.
Plantings - to springload the return of wetland flora - can also tap the wetland wallet. Wetland Research Associates' Doug Spicher says that for the Cadillac treatment in terms of planting expertise and material, he estimates $2 per "plug." Spicher also cited an Army Corps study that counts on 10 person hours of labor per 100 plugs. One on-the-ground example can be found in a Hayward marsh restored to treat municipal wastewater, where Joe Ernest recently oversaw the harvesting (from nearby flood control channels) and planting of 3500 1x1-footclumps and 223 3x3-foot clumps of bulrush. Bands totaling two-and-a-half acres in area were planted across two 30-acre basins - total cost $175,000 including labor, fencing, transportation and levee improvements. Ernest says nurseries also sell the bulrush at $1 or more a stalk. Most restoration projects do not include plantings, and rely on tides and rivers to import seeds and nutrients.
Restoration's clutch on the pocketbook doesn't always end when the tides roll in. Leahy says debris will most likely have to be cleared from the San Leandro site at least once a year. Other sites may need monitoring to make sure endangered species or contaminant problems don't crop up. Army Corps permits often require ongoing assessment to see if "what you said would work did," says WESCO's Steve Foreman, another consultant.
Special Order Items
Upon closer examination, some of the projects examined for this story had special specific costs. At San Leandro Shoreline, for example, the city wanted to make sure that the public was kept out of the potentially dangerous work zone - a public that had easy access to the site in the past. Bid prices received for security fences and patrols ranged from $3500 to more than $50,000. In the same vein, the city's goal of continuing public access along the Bay levee while also improving it for future use by emergency vehicles added $108,600 worth of road and trail improvements that wouldn't be necessary in a wetland restored purely for habitat values. Public access goals also added cost in terms of aesthetics. "We didn't want big obtrusive operating gear like hand wheels and tide gate frames sticking up from the levee, " says Leahy. "We hid all that."
At Sonoma Baylands - a 320-acre restoration incorporating dredged material - the costs were influenced by the dual goals of doing a first-class wetland restoration while finding a home for several million cubic yards of sediments from the Oakland harbor. The potentially high costs of transporting the material from Oakland and then placing it on the Baylands site initially worried the port when the option of wetland restoration over the more traditional open water disposal was first introduced. But project manager Laurel Marcus says as it turns out, adding Sonoma Baylands to the disposal roster on the Port of Oakland deepening ticket increased costs by less than 5%.
In terms of Baylands environmental value, a less tangible cost factor, use of the material will speed up the creation of a fully functional marsh (rather than relying on natural sedimentation). Marcus says the project might have cost less if they'd maximized the disposal capacity of the site but that was not the project goal. "We filled to the level best for wetland development, not for disposal," she says. But the fact that the project did offer a disposal opportunity in a region strapped for options did have some associated benefits. "We're using industrial public works money for environmental purposes, money not normally accessible to us," says Marcus. "The public gets two - dredged ports and restored wetlands - for the price of one."
Lessons Learned
The experts offered diverse words of financial wisdom to would-be restorers. Wilcox suggested that contrary to popular perception, more intervention and more cost doesn't necessarily mean better wetlands. "Most of the best restorations aren't engineered," he says. "You can engineer them to death but you're still better served by just creating a simple template and letting natural processes take over." Wilcox points to simple restorations that have worked well on Bair Island near Redwood City and White Slough near Vallejo.
Marcus urges restoration wannabes in public agencies not to underestimate the staff time and resources necessary to stay on top of the thousands of details of a project like Sonoma Baylands. And Leahy suggests one way to keep costs down is for engineers to try and configure their projects to minimize excavation. "You also have to look for trade-offs," he says. "You may not get 100% of your environmental or operational goals on a specific project, but if the cost is 40% less, then maybe that extra money is better spent elsewhere." Other experts say if the Army Corps is involved, never take its estimates as gospel, as they're often orders of magnitude higher than what you'll get from the private sector.
the experts interviewed here, finding more cost-effective ways to do restoration will be an ongoing challenge. "The value of wetlands to the environment is pretty well documented, and the need for healthy estuaries along our coastline is clear," says Leahy. "We just have to find the most effective ways to bring them back." Whatever the allure of remaking nature, it may pay us to remember that no matter how much know-how, technology and money we throw at restoration, preserving those wetlands that are still intact may be the most cost-effective option of all.
Contact: Joe Ernest (510)790-0100 ext. 266; Andrew Leahy (415)386-5893; Laurel Marcus (510)286-1015; Carl Wilcox (707)944-5525
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