Feds Tout $1.2 Billion Plan to Restore Tidal Marsh

By Bay City News Service

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced on Thursday the start of a 50-year, $1.2 billion tidal marsh recovery plan to save endangered plants and animals in San Francisco Bay and 500 miles of California coastline. 

The plan is the second largest tidal restoration project in the country after one in the Florida Everglades and mostly covers 40,000 acres of land within San Francisco Bay, wildlife service spokesman Doug Cordell said. "The (San Francisco) Bay is the focus of the plan," Cordell said. "To do a tidal restoration in an urban area, that is unprecedented. 

It is not happening anywhere else." Federal wildlife officials discussed the plan, called the Recovery Plan for Tidal Marsh Ecosystems of Northern and Central California, this morning at a news conference held at the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Fremont. Among those attending to commemorate the launch were Florence LaRiviere and Frank Delfino, who with their late spouses have been active in efforts to preserve the East Bay and block shoreline development there since the early 1960s. "It's a time to celebrate," LaRiviere said. "So many scientific minds have worked on this document. It's going to last us a long time." "Since we started back in the Sixties, it took a long time, it took a lot of meetings," said Delfino, 86. "We'd tell people, if you're going to get involved, be sure to have a tough butt. There are whole lot of stupid meetings by city councils and county planning operations and so on." 

The plan will extend for 50 years and cost about $1.2 billion from federal, state and local governments and non-profit foundations, spent mainly on acquiring marsh land from private owners and land trusts, giving tax breaks for land donations as well as paying for restoring and managing the marshes, Cordell said. The top recovery areas in the plan include coastal marshes from Humboldt Bay to the north extending 500 miles south, including the Suisun Bay Area, San Pablo Bay, central and southern San Francisco Bay, the Central Coast and as far south as Morro Bay, Cordell said. The areas along the coast of California are for the most part smaller, "pocket marshes," according to Cordell. The effort's goal is restoring the flow of water to salt marshes by digging up and removing old man-made earthen levees meant for farming, commercial salt ponds, housing and other developments, Cordell said. 

Over the last 150 years, about 85 percent of the salt marshes in San Francisco Bay have been lost due to different types of developments by humans, Cordell said. By allowing the salt water to flow back into the tidal marshes, federal and state wildlife officials hope to enhance the ecosystems for 17 species of birds, animals and plants, Cordell said. The recovery plan is focusing specifically on increasing the populations of six endangered species, the California clapper rail bird and the salt marsh harvest mouse, and the plant species Suisun thistle, soft birds beak and California sea blite, Cordell said. Once the levees are dug up and the blocked saltwater flows back in, "the marshes return, which happens fairly rapidly," Cordell said. "Within a couple of years, you'll see birds coming back, you'll see fish species coming back that haven't been seen in decades," he said. 

One federal restoration effort in the Bay, known as the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration project that began near the bay shore Alviso area of San Jose in 2007, has already produced positive results for fish, Cordell said. Some senior citizen residents of Alviso who have been fishing in the Bay there for many years have reported "seeing fish they have never seen since they were children," Cordell said. The plan also includes building walking trails, installing interpretive signs and making places available for kayaking and fishing along the marches, he said.

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