Dealing with the elephant

Although we cannot raise the entire city, we could build dikes or walls to protect it. Such remedies may eventually be needed, but those are expensive and difficult solutions that will take time to construct. Fortunately, there is a simpler, cheaper and more natural mechanism that would help hold off the water and buy us some time: wetlands.

Wetlands act a bit like a sponge, trapping, distributing and then slowly releasing flood waters. By doing so they lower flood heights and help dissipate storm surges. During high tides they absorb tremendous amounts of water, and then, as the tides go back down, feed it back into the surrounding waterways.

The recent restoration of Bair Island’s 1,552 acres of tidal wetlands and salt marsh habitat resulted in a great place to walk and to watch birds and small wildlife. But Bair Island is much more than that. It also serves as an important buffer helping to protect Redwood City from encroaching Bay waters. Unfortunately, Bair Island can only protect a small part of Redwood City’s shoreline. But not far to the south are Cargill’s salt ponds. If these ponds, which are more than 2 square miles in size, were turned back into wetlands, they’d protect a much larger part of the city.

Currently, Cargill’s “land” is being used for the production of salt. But Cargill would prefer to develop much of its site, building a sea of housing, shops, offices, schools and parks, thereby creating something akin to a high-density Foster City. Such a development would itself need protecting from sea level rise, though; it would add to the problem rather than help deal with it.

Cargill thinks it has a gold mine on their hands, but only if the salt ponds can be developed. Under our current presidential administration, the EPA had issued a ruling that the ponds weren’t bound by the federal Clean Water Act, making the land easier to develop or sell. Thankfully, just last month a federal judge overturned that ruling, noting that “the salt ponds here at issue have not been dry and have had continuing connections to the Bay.”

Even with this latest ruling, I recently read that two candidates for the Redwood City Council were unwilling to stand up to Cargill and profess blanket opposition to any development. Since the city’s General Plan would first need amending before significant development could take place — the site is currently not zoned for it — the City Council has a great deal of control over the future of that land. By categorically stating that they will not change the zoning and thereby not allow the land to be developed, the council could limit Cargill’s options either to continuing their salt harvesting operations or to selling or donating the land to be restored to wetlands (something it has done with other sites around the Bay). And with few profitable uses for the land, it would have relatively little financial value, keeping the price down in the event the state ends up having to purchase it.

I well understand the pressures Redwood City is under to encourage the development of more housing, and I can see how tempting it might be to allow development on Cargill’s salt ponds. However, developing former wetlands seems to be just asking for trouble. Why fight Mother Nature? Why not instead work with her, and turn those ponds back into wetlands? If we protect them, they’ll protect us. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Greg Wilson is the creator of Walking Redwood City, a blog inspired by his walks throughout Redwood City and adjacent communities. He can be reached at greg@walkingRedwoodCity.com. Follow Greg on Twitter @walkingRWC.