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Sage Strategy for Bay Wetlands
The word "implementation" may be long enough to put most people to sleep, but it's the most sensational word on the title page of the latest paper blueprint for Estuary health. This "Implementation Strategy" for the 23-member, public-private San Francisco Bay Joint Venture, approved in October (see Now in Print), proposes to protect, restore or enhance 236,000 acres of baylands and creeks over the next 20 years, and suggests specific partnerships and tools necessary to do this. Venture partners say the strategy is both the necessary outgrowth of decades of contentious regional consensus-building on Bay wetlands, and the prerequisite for an official seal of approval that can earn the Joint Venture bigger bucks from Congress.
"A lot of big plans don't go anywhere, but this document shows that everyone here has bought into restoration as a public goal, and allows us to say 'Show me the money,'" says John Zentner of Zentner and Zentner ecological consultants who is also a partner in the Joint Venture. The Joint Venture is a five-year-old partnership of 23 public agencies and stakeholders formed to coordinate wetland acquisition and restoration on a regional basis, and one of 14 such ventures across the continent. The ventures were formed under the international North American Waterfowl Management Plan of 1986, which requires them to write an implementation strategy. With the strategy in hand, the Joint Venture is now officially eligible to pursue the $1.8 billion it needs to make good on that key word "implementation." This may seem pricey but, as Director John Steere points out, the sum is about what it recently cost to rebuild two East Bay freeway exchanges.
"We're at a pivotal point," says Joint Venture partner Arthur Feinstein of the Audubon Society. "We can either go toward one of the most spectacular restoration scenarios in the world, or we can see the Bay disappear as a habitat for living things, and become a habitat for more concrete and glass."
If anything is a legitimate step into that brave but more biologically beautiful new world, it is the strategy. Looking back over the last twenty years of wetland protection efforts, every step met with opposition except for this last one, according to Zentner. The first step involved creation of regional consensus on the S.F. Estuary Project's 1993 Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP) for the Bay and Delta, where even at the end of five years of discussion among over 100 stakeholders, a minority remained opposed to the plan's wetland to-do list. Next steps coming out of the CCMP effort were the push to provide a sound scientific basis for figuring out what kind of wetlands, and where, were needed to sustain estuarine health (Habitat Goals, 1999) and to create a mechanism for buying and securing threatened wetlands (Joint Venture, 1995), both of which also had their share of rocky moments. But by the time the Joint Venture began funneling the results of all these efforts into an implementation strategy, "We'd all sat around long enough together that nobody had to call the cops to break up a fight anymore," says Zentner.
The strategy aims to more than double the region's tidal wetland acreage and triple riparian habitats ringing the Bay. It seeks to achieve 75% of the 50-year scientific blueprint for biological health mapped out in the Habitat Goals, a percentage that some partners thought impractical, given economic and social realities, and others thought not bold enough. Steere says the Venture settled on 75% in 20 years largely because of mounting threats from population growth and associated increases in land prices. "The longer we wait, the harder it will be to accomplish anything," he says. "So we front-loaded the acreage goals."
In addition to acreage goals for acquisition, restoration and enhancement of habitats in each of five sub-regions, the strategy names specific partners and general actions necessary to achieve these goals. It suggests, among many ideas, developing a wetland and riparian "extension service" to help landowners be good environmental stewards; working with ports to use dredge spoils for tidal restoration; enhancing wildlife values on Cargill's salt ponds; holding a restoration festival; creating incentives for the military to stop filling and degrading wetlands on bases; and encouraging "management and monitoring endowments" as part of project construction budgets.
"The strategy provides a collaborative, entrepreneurial way of delivering on those goals and reaches across public-private boundaries to magnify everyone's resources," says Steere. What the document is not is a check-list of target properties and projects. A special committee will identify "high activity" projects and set priorities on an annual basis, according to Steere, although some priorities are obvious right now, including expansion of the San Pablo Bay Wildlife Refuge to encompass the North Bay's Marin shore, restoration of Bair Island and Baumberg Tract in the South Bay, development of a wetland management and restoration plan for Point Edith and the Concord Naval Weapons Station along Contra Costa's shore, and support for environmental stewardship in the East Bay's Marsh Creek watershed. Such areas are where the Joint Venture, a non-regulatory endeavor that only works with willing landowners, feels it has the property, people and pennies all poised for progress.
The strategy also breaks the waterfowl-centered mold of the other joint ventures by taking a multi-species, multi-habitat approach. Higher-ups in U.S. Fish & Wildlife have called the S.F. Venture a test case in broadening the scope of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan.
Test case or not, dollars and cents speak louder than paper and words. "You need an ambitious agenda to build the political will and public interest that will make all this possible," says the Bay Institute's Grant Davis, another Joint Venture partner. Davis testified before a House subcommittee this November in support of the Estuary Habitat Restoration Partnership Act (HR1775 & SB738), a potential funding vehicle for the strategy. "Our document conveys a regional direction with a sense of urgency, and tells Congress the Bay Area is ready to go."
Contact: John Steere (510)286-6767
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