We have also found that environmental protection is really the foundation that the vibrant economy in the Bay Area is built upon. If you look at our region and how its economy is seen as a prototype for world’s economy in the 21st century and then look at the environmental protection record of the Bay Area, you would think that the two would be at odds. But by protecting our environment, we are protecting the quality of life in the Bay region which attracts the bright, innovative people we need to make our high tech economy hum. This is why I believe environmental protection is essential to continued economic prosperity in the Bay region.

That’s not what we’ve found. If you actually go down to the Bay shore to some of the fishing docks and see people who are out there fishing for subsistence, they are really using the Bay as one of their primary sources of food. And look at the people who enjoy boating. Not all boats are yachts. Most of them are small boats that are stored in driveways or garages and are used on the Bay. The Bay trail, which is now circling most of the Bay, ties back into the communities around the Bay, many of which are low income and communities of color. And also the Bay is a fantastic visual resource for the people around it and an inspiration to all of us. You don’t have to be rich to love beauty.

I think it’s fair to say that filling the Bay will undoubtedly have negative impacts. The question is how much impact will there be. Where will those impacts be felt, locally or regionwide? How will they be minimized? How will they be mitigated? What BCDC has to do is weigh all those things under the law, which provides that "further filling of San Francisco Bay should be authorized only when the public benefits from the fill clearly exceeds the public detriment from the loss of the water area." So we have to balance the benefits against the losses.

First off, the money has not all been made available yet, only a small amount. There’s been a $25 million appropriation by the State. Cargill’s asking price for about half of its property in the South Bay is $300 million. There still has to be an appraisal to determine whether that’s the property’s fair market value. Restoration could cost as much as another half-billion dollars. There needs to be a plan for the restoration. That planning has to address potential flooding problems. There’s been a lot of subsidence in the South Bay so that some of the communities are actually below sea level. Breaching the dikes could expose these areas to flooding. So this problem has to be addressed in the planning restoration. There also has to be a cleanup of the residue from the salt making and other possible contaminants that may be in the area. So it’ll be a long time before any restoration gets started, and once it gets started, it’s going to take a long time to complete. Wetland restoration is more of an art than a science at this point, so we should be moving very slowly. We should restore one area and see how it works, see what we’ve learned before we go on to another area. So looking at something as large as the 18,000 or 19,000 areas in the South Bay, it will - and it should - take decades to restore the entire area.

Let me read a policy in BCDC’s Bay Plan to you. The Bay Plan, guides the Commission in making its permit decisions. The policy says "the Bay represents a great, but at present little-used resource for transportation within the region. A system of modern ferries may be able to provide service between major downtown traffic generators, for example between downtowns or downtowns and airports, and eventually to provide scheduled service from one end of the Bay to the other for both commuting and pleasure use." What’s interesting about that policy, beyond the substance of the language, is that the Commission put that in its Bay Plan thirty-two years ago. So the Commission recognized the potential of using the Bay for a modern ferry system a generation before anybody else did. Naturally, we are delighted with what has finally come to pass with the passage of legislation to get that ferry system up and operating. Now we will have to weigh the impacts of large scale ferry operations against the other policies in the Bay Plan on the protection of resources. But I believe a ferry system provides us with a great opportunity to lace together bayfront communities, to revitalize and invigorate undeveloped shoreline areas, to allow the public to reach their Bay, to develop new neighborhoods around ferry terminals, and to provide an alternative to driving across crowded bridges. The environmental impacts will have to addressed, of course, but I believe that in the final analysis we will find the environmental impacts of not using the Bay for water transportation are far worse than their impacts of running a Baywide ferry system.

While we don’t have an explicit policy on this issue, one of the things the Commission does is to protect areas along the shoreline that are needed and suitable for water-related industries. We have very little heavy industry left in the Bay Area. The predominant use of the Bay Area shoreline is now for software and offices which are located there so that their workers can go out and enjoy the amenities of the Bay and can jog on the Bay Trail system. I think it would be wonderful if we could provide some opportunities for blue collar workers, as well as white collars or, increasingly, no collar workers.