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.
By Steve Werblow
Published: March, 2001
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."
Consolidating Saltmaking, Expanding Restoration
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.
Appraisal Results Due Soon
Not surprisingly, 19,000 acres of South Bay land won’t come cheap. Led by Howard Stark, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife real estate expert in Sacramento, federal, state and Cargill leaders commissioned two appraisals of the property. Working in strict accordance with government guidelines, federal and state land acquisition experts selected two qualified, independent appraisers to study every parcel in the 19,000-acre property. A third appraiser – named by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the California Wildlife Conservation Board – is currently reviewing the reports and is expected to make a recommendation in mid-April to federal and state officials on which appraisal best reflects fair market value.
Stark explained that the recommendation and agency approvals will rest on which figure is best supported by the market and the appraiser – "basically, who did their homework, who put together the best report, supporting market value and following acceptable methodology," he said. "It could be a higher number or a lower number. It’s not a question of picking the low one, or averaging the two appraisals."
Until the state and federal agencies choose one of the appraisal figures and Cargill exercises its right as the prospective seller to reveal it, the agency-approved fair market value will remain a mystery. "The landowner’s right to confidentiality is based in federal law," Stark said. But Cargill has already announced that if the appraised fair market value is higher than $300 million, the company would be willing to make a bargain sale, donating the excess value to the public. The company has made donations like this in the past. In 1994, Cargill transferred nearly 10,000 acres of land near Napa to the State of California for $10 million – $26 million less than the value determined during the company’s appraisal.
Seeking Funds
Whatever the final appraised value turns out to be, anything in the ballpark of $300 million is a hefty sum.
Supporters of the project received a boost last year when Governor Gray Davis and the California Legislature allocated $25 million to kick-start the effort, and the Bay Area congressional delegation secured $8 million from Congress to help. But there are still many bridges to cross. Perhaps most significant, those allocations date back to last year, when there was a large federal budget surplus, no tax cut on the table, and the State wasn’t spending millions of dollars to secure affordable electricity in California, noted Travis.
That’s one reason proponents of the restoration project are already prodding lawmakers to find funds to cover the purchase price, even before the appraisal is in. The board of the San Francisco Bay Joint Venture, a coalition of 27 agencies and non-profit organizations dedicated to acquiring and restoring Bay wetlands, sent a letter in mid-February to President Bush, Governor Davis, and elected officials from around the Bay Area. "We urge you to exert your leadership to realize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to protect and restore our wetland ecosystem through public/private partnership," read Joint Venture director John Steere in Oakland.
Part of the success of gathering funds will be making sure they come from the right accounts. California’s $25 million came from the General Fund, points out Drake at Audubon. With the General Fund currently being tapped to stave off the state’s energy crisis, it’s imperative to convince Sacramento to establish a direct appropriation for the purchase, she said. Agencies and environmental groups will also need to scramble for allocations through related programs, such as water quality or flood control, or grants from private foundations. "If this deal were to go forward, we’d have to look at multiple funding sources, different revenue streams," said Drake.
Lobbying will be critical. "If there is broad support and this is seen as a priority for enough constituents in the Bay Area, I think the money will be available," she said.
Creative Solutions?
Travis said he’s concerned about the size of the expected price tag for the land, and he points to an element that he believes could be contributing a big chunk to the cost: a developer’s dream, a highly desirable parcel that houses Cargill’s Redwood City operations. "It is not all salt ponds," he said. "There are acres of land that are high and dry, and not subject to the jurisdiction of BCDC or the Army Corps of Engineers. Because it includes developable property in Silicon Valley, it is very expensive."
Though it’s not uncommon for landowners to sell a portion of a property to pay for the remainder, Stark noted that the strategy doesn’t fit government policy. "Federal and state agencies don’t operate in the land speculation business," he said. "At the Fish and Wildlife Service, we have very little disposal authority. If we buy a piece of land, we keep it and use it for habitat." In fact, Fish and Wildlife would literally need an act of Congress to sell the Redwood City site for development.
Travis muses about a different approach. "Should there be a severing of the property so what is purchased is that part of the property that has restoration potential?" he offers. "If our financial resources are limited, perhaps the purchasing agencies ought to get together with Cargill and say, ‘in fact, we don’t want to buy your Redwood City property. Let’s find a ‘green’ developer who will restore 700 acres and on the remaining 300 acres put up an example of smart growth: housing, transportation, the infrastructure that we need in the South Bay.’ That would allow us to fulfill the social equity and environmental objectives, and Cargill could still get a fair price."
No Tight Connection At SFO
There has been a tremendous amount of discussion about the need for San Francisco International Airport to find mitigation sites if its proposal to landfill part of the Bay is accepted, acknowledges Travis. But he is quick to separate the review of SFO’s plans from the proposed land acquisition in the South Bay.
"The regulatory agencies and the environmental community have resisted any linking of the two," he said. "We don’t want to be in a position where the airport said, ‘if you approve this project, you’ll get this enormous amount of restoration funding.’ That would compromise the regulatory process, and would frankly be close to illegal."
"Is there a role for San Francisco Airport in this project?" he asks. "Yes – if their runway gets approved."
Restoration Will Be A Challenge
Securing the money to purchase the land and fund habitat restoration will be an enormous achievement. But the actual restoration – the engineering, the hydrology, the vegetation management – will also be a challenge. Guided by lessons learned through previous restoration efforts, scientists and wildlife experts are confident that they can begin the slow, steady process that will allow the Bay to rebuild its ancient landscape, gently washing sediment into thousands of acres of land that is currently diked and protected from the tides.
Drake said the Audubon Society sees the 19,000-acre acquisition as a critical piece of the effort to restore 100,000 acres of Bay Area tidal marsh, wetlands and riparian habitat – the Baylands. The figure comes from the 1999 Baylands Ecosystem Habitat Goals, a report by a committee of scientists and resource managers on restoration in the Bay. Drake adds that there would be plenty to accomplish beyond tackling the Baylands. "The first phase is restoring the 100,000 acres, but that’s just one piece of the puzzle," she said. "We need to develop a comprehensive ecological plan that would outline the restoration for the entire San Francisco Bay estuary."
Exciting Opportunities
"People are very concerned about the region in terms of transportation and housing infrastructure," noted Drake. "But the Bay is natural infrastructure, and we need to invest in that as well. A healthy Bay is critical to our economy and our quality of life."
After nearly three years of discussions that have brought dozens of federal, state and local agencies to the table with Cargill and an array of environmental organizations, dawn could be breaking for a new era in the Bay’s ecology. Many of the people close to the process credit the atmosphere of cooperation and mutual respect that has pervaded the discussions.
Cooperation is critical to success, points out Stark at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "This is private land," he said. "People in a deal this big lose sight of that sometimes, but we’re operating under a willing seller policy. The landowner can sell private property when they choose, to whom they choose. Fish and Wildlife very rarely uses eminent domain as a vehicle. This is not like building a highway, where the road’s got to go through."
Travis adds that Cargill is often regarded with undue suspicion by people outside the discussions because it is a multi-national corporation with extensive land holdings. He reflects on his experience heading up the Shell Oil Spill Litigation Settlement Trustee Committee, which spearheaded the 1994 purchase of 10,000 acres of Cargill salt ponds near Napa. "Cargill is an interesting company in that some people just love to hate them," he said. "But they never, ever lied to me. And they’re proud of their record as an industrial operation that does a lot for the species.
"I think the important thing is that you have Cargill and the environmental community in the Bay Area saying the same thing: let’s consolidate the saltmaking on the east side of the Bay, let’s get public resources to buy the land, and let’s get this done."
Students of ecological history recognize that the Bay ecosystem has changed since settlers first began draining the wetlands and building towns that have since paved the region. Some species have disappeared, and new ones have made themselves at home. Recreating the past isn’t an issue, said Travis, but creating a future with vast open, wild places along the Bay shore is within reach.
"We are at the point where we can actually restore the health of the ecosystem," he said. "If we create the conditions, we won’t get the grizzly bear to come back, but we can create a vital, vibrant ecosystem."
