The Bay Conservation and Development Commission": sounds like being a little bit pregnant. How can one Agency simultaneously promote conservation and development?
Published: November, 2000
One of my predecessors said that the most important word in the agency name is "AND". His point was that BCDC is a management agency - not just a single purpose environmental protection agency and not just a single purpose economic development agency. What BCDC does is balance these two objectives and reach sound policy decisions. I think the Legislature was very wise in putting us in that role. If you look at the Commission’s record over the past 35 years, I think you will agree we have achieved our primary objectives: keeping the Bay from being unnecessarily filled and increasing public access along the shoreline. The Bay is actually larger than it was when we were created because of wetland restoration projects and breaching dikes to enlarge the size of the Bay. Public access, which in 1965 was limited to about 4 miles of the 1,000 miles or so of shoreline around the Bay, has been increased to a couple hundred miles. At the same time we’ve approved some 10 billion dollars of development along the shoreline. So I think we’ve shown that BCDC can be both a conservation and a development agency. Our primary products are sound public policy decisions, which I think the Commission has delivered.
Who’s sticking more pins into Will Travis voodoo dolls: developers or environmentalists?
I guess the answer to that is who I disagreed with last. I think that it’s also not me so much as the Commission as an institution people take issue with. BCDC is probably seen by the developers as being too protectionist of the Bay and it’s probably seen by environmentalists as working too hard to solve permit applicants’ problems. Our role as BCDC’s staff is not to try to find ways to deny applicants’ permits, but rather to work with applicants to try to refine their projects so that they can be approved by the Commission. Fortunately, we have found that there are, with a few exceptions, three types of applicants. They’re either people who want to live on the Bay shoreline because they love the Bay and want to see and use it everyday. Or they are people who have projects that have to be on the Bay shoreline, like ports, marinas and other water-dependent uses that require Bayfront locations. Or they run businesses like restaurants and hotels that have a distinct competitive advantage by having a waterfront location. Whichever of the three categories they fit into, we have found that these applicants want the Bay protected as much as we want to protect it. So our staff approaches applicants not as enemies but rather as potential allies in the ongoing effort to protect the Bay. We try to understand their needs and try to have them understand why our policies make some sense. Our greatest thrill is when an applicant says, "I didn’t want to have to go through your process, but I have to admit that my project is better for it."
WILL TRAVIS
Will Travis is the executive director of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, commonly called BCDC, which was the nation’s first state coastal management agency when it was created in 1965.
Will, who is a native of Allentown, Pennsylvania, earned Bachelor of Architecture and Master of Regional Planning degrees in 1967 and 1970 respectively, both from Penn State University. During 1966, he studied architecture in London.
Will began his professional career as an assistant planner and urban designer at BCDC between 1970 and 1972. He then spent a year as a consultant on the master plan for the East Bay Regional Park District. In 1973, he joined the staff of the newly-established California Coastal Commission where, between 1973 and 1985, he held a number of positions including heading the coastal agency’s offshore oil drilling permit staff, directing its public access program, and overseeing its budget and administrative functions. He returned to BCDC in 1985 and spent the next ten years as the Commission’s deputy director. He has been BCDC’s executive director since 1995.
Will has written many articles on coastal issues and has provided advice on coastal matters to other states and nations. He has also been a lecturer at colleges and universities throughout North America.
He serves as the chairman of a trustee committee which manages a multi-million dollar oil spill settlement fund set up by Shell Oil Company after a 1988 oil spill in San Francisco Bay. In that capacity, he directed the public acquisition of a 10,000-acre property along the northern shoreline of San Francisco Bay which will become the largest coastal wetland restoration project in California’s history.
Will serves on the board of directors of Friends of the Estuary, on the committee of policy advisors of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, and on the editorial board of the newsletter Estuary. He is a member of a group which is providing advice on coastal management to the National Coastal Services Center in Charleston, South Carolina, and serves on the National Ocean Service’s Advisory Group for the San Francisco Bay Project. Will also served a four-year term as a member of the Berkeley city planning commission.
Will, his wife, Jody Loeffler, their nine-year-old daughter, Kate, and their golden retriever, Daisy, live in Berkeley, California
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.
What connection does the average Joe (and Jane) have to do with the work of BCDC? Aren’t the folks who live, work and play on the waterfront by far and away mostly rich and white?
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.
Common sense: no matter what the economic benefit, filling in the Bay for an airport – any airport – is an environmental wrong. True? Fair?
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.
Money has been made available to buy the Cargill Salt Flats in the South Bay as "mitigation" of Bay fill needed for SFO expansion plans. Will the dikes that form salt flats be broken anytime soon?
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.
More ferries on San Francisco Bay: is BCDC pro or con?
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.
Plans for a new ferry system call for building many new ferryboats. What is BCDC’s take on the possibility of renewed shipbuilding on the Bay?
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.
The Navy skedaddled from San Francisco Bay years ago but left behind quite an environmental mess. Are you satisfied with the way the Navy is handling its clean-up responsibilities?
I think you have to look at this problem from the perspective of not pointing a finger but understanding that we are suffering from a legacy of military priorities. We had base commanders who had limited budgets and they had a responsibility for military preparedness and training. When they got around to dealing with the toxic contaminants, they could either spend the money on cleaning up those contaminants or having their ships and sailors ready for duty. I suspect there is no Navy captain who ever became an admiral because he said, "Well, my guys aren’t ready to go to sea, and the ships don’t work, but I sure cleaned up the base." So that’s what we’re left with. The problem now isn’t lack of will. It’s a lack of money. The last figures I saw were that nationwide Congress had appropriated on the order of 20 or 25 cents on the dollar of what is needed to clean up all the closed military bases. This situation is acute in the Bay Area because there have been more military bases closed along the shoreline of San Francisco Bay than in any other state of the union outside California. So we have had a lot of experience with planning the reuse of closed military bases. The Pentagon looked at a these closed bases and saw them as having schools and churches, bowling alleys and roads and said, "This base is an asset worth millions of dollars." The surrounding community that was getting the base looked at it and said, "None of the houses are built to state or local code. The buildings are filled with asbestos. There are environmental contaminants all over the place. The sewer, water and electrical systems are so bad that our local utilities won’t take them because of liability. We won’t take this base unless you give us millions of dollars." And that’s the way the negotiations process started.
The challenge in base reuse planning has been to attract private capital to revitalize the bases. The advantage we have had over other communities around the country, which are also trying to attract that private capital, is that our bases are on the front door of the Pacific Rim. So we have been working with local communities to take advantage of that location and urging them to "celebrate the majesty of San Francisco Bay" in their re-use planning. Thus far, they have done that very well. I sure wish that there would be more money to clean up the bases more quickly, but I think in the end, we will come out just fine.
Is it true that ships used in the Bikini atoll hydrogen bomb experiments were towed back to San Francisco Bay and straightforwardly sandblasted at the docks of Hunter’s Point and Mare Island?
I have heard that. I don’t know whether that’s an urban legend or whether it’s true.
Maritime Unions think you’re the Great Satan for pulling down piers on the San Francisco waterfront to open up "view corridors". Have you concluded that maritime jobs on the northern San Francisco waterfront are an anachronism?
First off, we’re not pulling down anything. There was an agreement reached between the Port of San Francisco, which wanted to have greater flexibility to use their piers for non-maritime purposes, and BCDC and Save San Francisco Bay Association. In return for BCDC providing greater flexibility in the regulatory process, the Port of San Francisco agreed that it would build three large plazas along the waterfront and remove some of the dilapidated piers that were falling into the Bay and some that were not being used for maritime purposes. The rest of the piers can now be used for non-maritime purposes. They can also continue to be used for maritime purposes. The problem is there aren’t a lot of proposals for maritime uses. Instead, there are proposals for offices, shopping centers and for health clubs.
The challenge in San Francisco is that the finger piers along the northern waterfront are configured based on 19th century shipping technology, but what we have in the 21st century is the need for large expanses of space for container operations. We have that on the southern waterfront in San Francisco and in Oakland, but we don’t have it on the northern waterfront. So as much as some people would like, simply retaining the piers in their existing condition won’t bring back the clipper ships. We would still like to see as much maritime use as possible, but that’s simply not what is being proposed anymore. So the best way to preserve the historic waterfront is to allow the piers to be used for a mix of uses that will pay for the restoration of the piers.
Working piers create blue-color jobs, many of them for people of color. View corridors disproportionately benefit the very wealthy, who can afford to be near the water, and almost all these folks are white. True? Troubling?
Most of the piers, in fact, are not being used for blue-collar maritime jobs. Most of them are used for parking and storage. The new plan that we and the Port of San Francisco have adopted allows for a variety of uses that will provide for job creation.
I also think it’s offensive to suggest that only rich white people appreciate the Bay and use it. The jobs that are being created are available to everybody. And again, simply retaining the piers and hoping that we will have break bulk cargo come back is just a fantasy. It’s not going to happen. We want to see maritime jobs. The place to provide them is the southern waterfront of San Francisco. The challenge that the Port has is that San Francisco is, after all, on the end of a peninsula. Cargo that is unloaded in San Francisco and destined for anywhere other than the San Francisco peninsula, has to be shipped by either rail or truck. If it’s by rail, it goes down the rail corridor where it has to compete with the commuter trains, be shuttled in San Jose and then ultimately ends up back in the Port of Oakland in the rail yard there. By truck, it has to go across the congested Bay Bridge. So the Port of San Francisco is really emerging into kind of a niche port for those commodities that are, indeed, destined for San Francisco and the Peninsula. And I think that along the southern waterfront there are ample opportunities for maritime jobs and port development. The northern waterfront where we have finger piers and urban development right up against the waterfront, there simply isn’t the space that the Port needs for an ongoing real port operation.
You work for a 27 member Commission. How do you answer to so many bosses?
Since every Commissioner has an alternate there are actually 54 people that I answer to. And it is, surprisingly, pretty easy. The law provides very clear policies that guide the Commission. The Commission, in turn, has adopted a Bay Plan which guides the staff. So we have very clear policy direction.
The composition of the Commission - which is appointed by representatives of local government, appointees of the Governor, Legislature, state agencies, and federal agencies - tends to generate political consensus on issues. I think that if BCDC were being created now, we would call it a stakeholder group. Everybody that has a stake in the decisions that affect the Bay has a representative on the BCDC. And it has worked extraordinarily well to have this large group administering policies that are very clear. What one needs to do to get a permit from BCDC to fill the Bay is show that the fill project will benefit the whole region, not just one local government or one particular special interest. I think the measure of BCDC’s success is how many times the structure and composition has been copied around the country and around the world. So rather than being difficult to answer to many bosses, I find it an honor, a privilege and a pleasure of having the best job in the world.
