After pulling invasive weeds with some Girl Scouts from the trail banks on the Bair Island marsh in Redwood City on this week , U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced the area would be receiving $2 million from President Joe Biden’s Investing in America Agenda.
The funds will go to ensure trails there will be restored and protected from rising sea levels.
The Bair Island marsh is part of the larger 30,000-acre Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. The area is home to over 280 species of birds and millions of waterfowl, who pause to refuel there during seasonal migrations.
The secretary gave her statements surrounded by open wetland, under a row of towering transmission lines, while small aircraft cued above for landing at San Francisco International Airport.
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland with Girl Scouts Taylor Rienhart and Violet Webb, pulls invasive plants from the Bair Island marsh. March 27, 2024 (Laraine McKinnon via Bay City News) 
Girl Scouts Taylor Rienhart and Violet Webb, worked on a service project to remove invasive plants from the Bair Island marsh. March 27, 2024 (Ruth Dusseault / Bay City News)
Haaland stopped to thank the two Girl Scouts who came out Wednesday.
“They really showed me what I was supposed to do today,” she said. “Without their help, I might have picked the wrong weeds.”
“I’m actually working on removing the Australian saltbush,” said 16-year-old Girl Scout Taylor Reinhart before the presentation. Her larger goal with removing the vegetation was to protect bats. “The bush is a strangler plant. It carpets the ground and strangles other species. That inhibits the biodiversity of local plants, and those local plants are what insects need to breed and to feed off of. And those insects provide bats with their diet,” she said.
“When one thing gets taken out of the ecosystem, the whole ecosystem gets messed up,” said fellow scout, 12-year-old Violet Webb.
Haaland also announced $58.3 million in funding for 11 states through the Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership Program to help economically underserved communities build outdoor recreation spaces.
The city of San Francisco will be receiving more than $8 million to renovate three of the five park blocks that comprise Buchanan Street Mall, a pedestrian walkway and city park in the Western Addition. Renovations will include a performance stage, a picnic and barbeque area, playgrounds, an adult exercise area, new lighting and landscaping.
Haaland was joined by California’s Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot and Walter Moore, president of Peninsula Open Space Trust, a Palo Alto nonprofit that helped save Bair Island marsh from development through a land acquisition in 1997.
Rep. Kevin Mulin, D-San Mateo, was also at the event and said that the funds are coming in part from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, “which included the largest federal investment in climate challenge that history has ever embarked upon,” he said.
