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Two-Way Ticket to Health and Safety

An eye for an eye is the stuff of conventional mitigation practice - you destroy one thing and recreate it with trimmings next door. But if San Francisco airport's new runway scheme gets permitted, the Bay may get an ear, an arm or some new organs instead.

Looking around for "compensatory mitigation" for any unavoidable environmental impacts of the airport's potential fill of 1,000-odd acres of open water, an eye for an eye would involve removing one or more of the region's man-made islands and letting the Bay water rush back in. Along these lines, someone has suggested a major surgery in which the mass of Treasure Island is transplanted to the West Bay runway site - a "nonsense" idea according to environmentalist Marc Holmes.

"Open water is not a habitat which has been significantly depleted," he says. "If you're going to do massive ecological damage then you should create comparable ecological benefits." The biggest depletions have been wetlands, says Holmes, who supports another environmentalists proposal to have the airport buy and restore Cargill Inc.'s 14,000 acres of South Bay salt ponds. The proposal has one big disadvantage - Cargill wants to stay in business and isn't in the mood to offer itself up body and soul - and one big advantage - if Cargill could be convinced to give up an arm and a leg, the airport might only have to deal with one landowner. Holmes says only a huge, new, progressive mitigation purchase like the Cargill properties can make the airport project environmentally palatable.

The airport's plan, formally released in a feasibility study on January 29, entails building two new runways and extending one current runway on 900 to 1,400 acres of open bay water. Airport spokesman Ron Wilson says that two-hour delays would drop to a few minutes because the airport could operate at full capacity in bad weather. The airport's study outlined four options for the new facilities, ranging from construction of a pile-supported structure all the way to filling in the entire runway area, the option preferred by the airport's consultants.

Appended to the airport's feasibility study is a list of 50 potential mitigation projects, most of them wetlands. The list details everything from transforming Sonoma's diked marshes into tidal wetlands at places like Cullinan Ranch or Skaggs Island to creating burrowing owl habitat in San Leandro, enhancing vernal pools on a private ranch in Marin and purchasing a San Francisco spit whose shell-laden substrate is favored by locally extinct plants.

With a new deep pocket for wetland acquisition and restoration flapping around, everyone has their own ideas about which body parts the Bay's most in need of. Nadine Hitchcock of the S.F. Bay Area Conservancy Program, a new state program aimed at obtaining and directing funds to open space and restoration projects throughout the region, says that outside the South Bay, Marin's Black Point, Bel Marin and Bahia bayshore properties are the nearest to the airport, the most threatened by development, and the least protected. Hitchcock would also like to see some mitigation dollars go to getting creeks out from under the concrete and lined with native vegetation. "Creek restoration not only benefits life in the creeks but also water quality in marshes and the Bay, which will be impacted by any major fill," she says.

There's also talk of a big endowment to properly finish, monitor and maintain all the restoration projects already underway - many of which belong to strapped state and federal agencies with no health insurance to ante up for maintenance of bodily functions. But Holmes thinks frittering away the money on piecemeal projects already on the books is crazy. Who in Congress will give us money when we have a big balance in our own bank? he asks.

The agencies in charge of permitting the airport project aren't officially even talking mitigation until the project gets approved. But U.S. EPA sent a comment letter to the airport on the project's feasibility study this February strongly recommending an immediate pow-wow to create criteria and guidelines for developing any mitigation proposal. The letter foresees conflicts between potential mitigation measures and agency policies and practices, suggesting that all interested parties should put their heads together sooner rather than later. In addition, "the greater the lag time (or uncertainty) between impact and compensation, the greater the mitigation ratio is likely to become," EPA wrote. With a conventional mitigation ratios of 4-10 acres for every acre lost, we might just get a bionic Bay yet.

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