Tue, Mar. 22, 2005
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Grant launches wetland restoration
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
For more than a decade, Tom Huffman fought a lonely battle to turn the tides in the sprawling marshes north of San Pablo Bay, armed with little money and rusting equipment.
When a gate used to control the flow between a key pond and a channel rusted out and failed, Huffman rebuilt it with some redwood and a discarded metal bar scared up from the seismic retrofit of a highway bridge down the road.
"We're scroungers. We have to be," said Huffman, field operations manager at Napa-Sonoma Marshes Wildlife Area for the state Department of Fish and Game.
That's about to change.
With a new $11.8 million grant from the state Wildlife Conservation Board, work is set to begin this summer on what will be one of the largest tidal marsh restoration projects on the West Coast.
The grant will pay for the first phase of a 10,000-acre transformation of former salt ponds north of Highway 37 and provide better homes for bird, fish and wildlife species.
Over the past 150 years, 80 percent of the tidal marshes along San Francisco, San Pablo and Suisun bays have been lost, first to farming and later to salt production and urban development. Only 40,000 acres of tidal marsh remain.
Nowhere is the potential to make up for those losses greater than on the vast plain north of Highway 37 between the Napa River and Sears Point.
In addition to the state-owned marshes, conservationists hope to see wetlands restoration on Skaggs Island, a former military base adjacent to the marshes and, potentially, privately owned farms that might be sold one day. Marsh restoration is already under way at the San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge, west of Skaggs Island.
The money for the Napa-Sonoma marshes restoration, which comes from Proposition 50, the $3.4 billion water bond approved by voters in 2002, will be used for equipment, construction work and monitoring.
The grant is expected to pay for restoration of half the state-owned portion of the Napa-Sonoma marshes. Funding for the other 5,000 acres, which will be overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is at least a few years away.
New gates, siphons and pumps will be installed to circulate water and reduce the salinity of briny ponds. Levees will be broken in strategic places to soak former wetlands that are now dry.
"We're going backwards in a way," Huffman said. "We're trying to reduce the salinity."
On a recent day, hundreds of shorebirds fed in the shallows along with the occasional pelican or egret. Terns dove like raindrops into one of the fresher ponds, feeding on small fish.
"It's all subtle, natural beauty. It doesn't necessarily jump out and grab you," Huffman said.
The restoration will be particularly beneficial to two endangered species that depend on tidal marshes: the California clapper rail and the salt marsh harvest mouse.
Restoration is also expected to attract more ducks, shorebirds, salmon and striped bass, Huffman said. Predators will follow. More hunters and anglers are likely to visit, though much of the marshes will continue to be difficult to reach without a boat.
More marshes should also improve water quality by filtering runoff and creating habitat for fish and wildlife.
Some improvements will be noticeable in just a couple of years, but it will be decades before the restoration is mature, said Greg Green, a regional biologist for Ducks Unlimited. The wetlands conservation organization, based in Tennessee, won the Napa-Sonoma marshes grant at the end of February and will act as a construction manager on the restoration.
The marshes can be compared to one's lungs with the tides functioning like the flow of air in an out, Green said.
"It's had restricted breathing for the last 100 years, and now we're opening it up," he said.
Beginning 150 years ago, farmers and ranchers began diking the marshes here, converting them to fields. Over time, those fields began to sink below sea level.
Some of those fields were converted to salt ponds, where increasingly saline water is moved from one pond to the next until salt crystals form and can be harvested.
The idea behind salt pond restoration is to decrease the salinity of those old salt ponds, increase the circulation of water across the former marshland and allow sediment to settle so that sunken areas build up to an elevation where they can be alternately soaked and drained naturally on the tides.
Despite its great potential, the North Bay restoration effort has attracted little of the fanfare that accompanied wetland restoration plans in the South Bay. Last year, dozens of reporters, camera crews, public officials and others watched as gates were ceremoniously opened to begin draining one of the South Bay salt ponds into the Bay.
Tucked close to Silicon Valley population centers, the South Bay salt ponds are familiar to more people than the relatively isolated North Bay ponds, which are seen mostly by motorists on Highway 37.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein added to the South Bay project's visibility by becoming deeply involved in the $100 million acquisition, completed in 2003.
Both sets of ponds were purchased from Cargill Inc., a large Minneapolis-based food and agricultural products company that continues to produce salt on its remaining South Bay ponds.
Since the North Bay salt ponds were purchased in 1994 for $10 million, they have suffered for lack of planning and funding.
Equipment rusted. Ponds became saltier.
Concerns grew that draining some ponds would poison fish in the Bay.
"There was no action for years," said David Lewis, executive director of Save the Bay, an environmental group. "The ponds did what they were designed to do: They dried up. That made it harder to restore in the long run because they became more salty."
The problems caused by the lack of attention to the North Bay restoration effort made it clear that greater attention and more planning were needed in the South Bay as well, he said.
"It served as a valuable lesson for the South Bay," Lewis added. "At minimum, you have to keep the ponds wet."
But without funding or solid planning, that proved to be a difficult task -- at least until now.
"When I look back on my career," said Huffman of the state Department of Fish and Game, "one of the things I'll be most proud of is that I kept it as well as I did, on as little as I did, for as long as I did."
Mike Taugher covers the environment and energy. Reach him at 925-943-8257 or mtaugher@cctimes.com.
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