Is a Major Restoration of San Francisco Bay at Hand?

By Steve Werblow

Ferry riders enjoy a front-row seat to the
San Francisco Bay’s remarkable pageant of wildlife and beautiful scenes. And just a few miles south of the ferry routes, Bay Area residents have an up-close view of the most exciting wetlands habitat restoration opportunity since settlers started filling in the Bay a century and a half ago.

Cargill Salt is discussing the sale of nearly 19,000 acres of salt ponds and shoreline property. Sharing the table is a consortium of state and federal agencies, local officials, and an array of environmental groups. The salt ponds under discussion represent a remarkable piece of Bay history, a teeming habitat that already supports a million birds a year, and an unprecedented opportunity to restore miles of long-lost tidal marshes along the Bay’s edge.

The massive scale of the wetlands makes this project worth far more to efforts to restore the Bay than the sum of its parts. Restoring vast tracts of salt ponds to tidal marsh will not only provide more habitat for many species of birds, animals, plants and fish, but it will connect wildlife havens along the Bay.

For the first time since the 19th century, wildlife will be able to follow corridors linking marshes, tidal flats, vernal pools, creeks and uplands. Endangered species including the California clapper rail and the salt marsh harvest mouse will be able to spread from their current, confined clusters to tidal wetlands around the South Bay. Invasive smooth cordgrass can be beaten back as native species are encouraged to return. Tidal marshes will filter runoff entering the Bay ecosystem.

Meanwhile, salt ponds still in production will continue to serve as vital foraging and nesting habitat for an array of shorebirds and waterfowl. Today’s children will grow up watching the South Bay step back more than a century in time, as the wild places return to the Bay’s edge.

"This large area of South Bay shoreline has not been converted to residential or commercial development, so there’s a great opportunity to restore this on a landscape level," said Debbie Drake, director of the National Audubon Society’s San Francisco Bay Restoration Program. "I think it’s also an exciting opportunity to bring back these lands into public ownership for public use."

Adds Will Travis, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) in San Francisco, "This probably represents the best chance we’ll ever have to restore the South Bay."

Nearly three years ago, it appeared almost certain that a long-simmering dispute between Cargill and state and federal agencies was headed for a courtroom showdown. But before either party took that fateful step, both sides decided to try a different approach. The objective: find common ground that would accommodate Cargill’s desire to maintain a strong, viable salt business in the South Bay, while also meeting the public’s desire for greater public access to the Bay, permanent open space, and greater habitat diversity at the edge of the Bay.

Those discussions coincided with a reengineering study underway at Cargill that charted a way for the company to produce almost as much salt as it does today on just one-third of the current acreage, according to Lori Johnson, public affairs manager for Cargill Salt in Newark.

"As we sat down with our reengineering team and looked at a map of the Bay, we realized we could create an opportunity for large-scale restoration. Not just postage-stamp-sized restoration sites, but thousands and thousands of acres that could offer interlocked habitat for a wide variety of plants, animals, birds and aquatic life," said Johnson. "Meanwhile, we would be able to achieve our business objectives. We could more efficiently supply our customers with salt and maintain our role in the economy of the Bay Area. Most important, we would continue to employ our 200 full-time workers and 100 seasonal workers. We realized we were looking at a remarkable win-win situation."

Johnson explained that Cargill inherited a jigsaw puzzle of salt ponds when it purchased Leslie Salt in 1978, cobbled together as 37 small salt operations consolidated throughout the industry’s 150-year history in the Bay. The principle of using wind and sun to evaporate Bay water and harvest the gleaming salt crystals left behind dates back to the Ohlone Indians, who collected salt from natural pans along the Bay shore. But experience gleaned from other Cargill solar salt sites around the world yield efficiencies far greater than solar salt pioneer Capt. John Johnson could have dreamed of when he diked the Bay’s first salt pond near Alviso in 1854.

In Capt. Johnson’s day, the Bay was more than 30 percent larger than it is today, but it was already shrinking. Settlers had begun draining the land for farms, pastures and towns. Miners were silting creeks with spoils from hydraulic mines. Cities along the Bay were building flood control dikes. And the Bay’s salt industry was booming, supplying salt to preserve fish and produce, cure meat, dye miners’ dungarees, blow glass, forge metal and mine silver as far away as Nevada.

Today, there are more than 14,000 commercial uses for salt. Bay salt feeds thousands of those uses, from food preservation to medical applications to industrial feedstock. Meanwhile, more than 70 species of shorebirds and waterfowl use the salt ponds for feeding, resting or breeding habitat. If agencies and company officials can agree on mutually satisfactory terms, the 150-year-old tradition of salt harvest will continue beside tidal marsh that in some cases hasn’t been seen in the South Bay since statehood.

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