A long history of land engineering is to blame for the poor ecological health of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Estuary, and it is engineering that is expected to repair it.
On Tuesday, questions of how to design and fund local restoration projects in the era of climate change were brought together in the 2024 State of the Estuary Conference, which runs through Wednesday at the Scottish Rite Center in Oakland.
The conference is sponsored by the San Francisco Estuary Partnership, one of 28 National Estuary Programs created by the federal Environmental Protection Agency and Congress in 1987 to protect and restore estuaries of national significance. Each National Estuary program develops and implements comprehensive plans that identify distinct challenges and priorities based on input from local, city, state, federal, private and nonprofit stakeholders. The number of stakeholders is mind-boggling, but the national program enables them to self-organize like bees around local projects.
“The San Francisco Estuary Partnership’s 1993 Comprehensive Conservation Management Plan was the first of its kind to recognize that the Bay and the Delta should be managed as a single critical estuary,” said Yana Garcia with the California Environmental Protection Agency in her opening keynote.
The 2022 update to the plan, the Estuary Blueprint, is a collaborative, five-year roadmap for protecting and restoring the estuary’s chemical, physical and biological health integrity, she said. It was done with the participation of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board.
“The Bay Delta is also a vital hub of economic activity and life, supporting millions of acres of farmland and commercial and recreational fishing industries, and supplying fresh drinking water to more than 25 million Californians,” said Garcia.
Many of the local community-generated restoration plans were shared through a poster exhibition at the conference. They included projects for flood management, combatting harmful algal blooms, the beneficial use of sediments and saving the salt marsh harvest mouse.
First: The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and San Francisco skyline seen during an Oakland, Calif., harbor tour on May 10, 2024. (Ray Saint Germain/Bay City News) Last: Construction crews remove a temporary drought salinity barrier on the West False River near Oakley on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta on Nov. 2, 2022. (Andrew Innerarity/CDWR via Bay City News)
“Local groups and communities who come up with a proposal for a local water restoration project can apply for grants from multiple sources,” said Evyan Borgnis Sloane with the California State Coastal Conservancy, one of the biggest funders of restoration projects.
Another large funder is the San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority. Sloane said funds can be requested through many organizations, like the Bay Area Regional Collaborative and the nonprofit Coastal Quest, who both maintain websites that track local, state and federal funds for local water restoration projects.
There is recent federal money that funnels down too. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is distributing $132 million through 2026 to expand and accelerate the comprehensive plans created through the National Estuary Program. Each estuary program will receive about $900,000 in annual funds, twice the amount they received previously.
Of those funds, at least 40 percent of the benefits are targeted for disadvantaged communities.
Garcia announced that there is $6 million in Environmental Justice grants now available through the California EPA for local restoration projects in 27 communities. She also underlined Gov. Gavin Newsom’s efforts to counter a May 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision that changed the definition of federally protected wetland to only, “wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are waters of the United States.”
That decision left many wetlands no longer protected by federal laws.
“Wetlands in California make up nearly 4 million acres,” she said. “The governor has set aside $6.1 million in the budget to protect state wetlands. These funds will allow the State Water Board to conduct water quality permitting and enforcement work that has historically been conducted by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.”
Note to readers: This story has been updated to correct information regarding grants and state wetlands.