Small Delta Island’s Lifeline Ferry Service Facing Cutoff Over Funding

Every daylight hour on the hour for more than half a century, a ferryboat has arrived at the edge of the levee that rings this tiny community, as certain as the tides that measure time in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

In the early years, the ferry shuttled cattle and crops from the island to a road on the Contra Costa County mainland across the San Joaquin River and returned with newcomers ready to farm rich peat soil 15 feet below sea level, where the island’s winter wheat grew sheltered from delta winds.

More recently, when a 1983 storm smashed through the levee and devastated Bradford Island, the ferry rescued the island’s inhabitants.

Most of the people never returned, but the hardy two dozen who rebuilt their homes on this remote, grassy island about 45 miles northeast of San Francisco have depended on the ferry to carry their produce to market and their children to school. The ferry also services neighboring Webb Tract, an island inhabited by even fewer people, and visited mostly by duck hunters.

Heavy Loads

Now the service that has withstood heavy loads and bad weather appears to have been sunk by a funding dispute. The local government agency that operates the boat has announced that it can no longer afford it, and one of the last regularly running ferries in the delta will be drydocked at the end of January.

Unlike many of the 60 or so islands in the delta, neither Bradford Island nor Webb Tract are linked by bridges to the mainland. When the ferry closes, residents who cannot afford their own boats fear they will be stranded.

“We don’t know what we will do, or how we will buy food,” said Peter Gates, a retired farmer who with his wife, Marie, rebuilt their house on Bradford after the flood. When Gates suffered a stroke a year ago, it was the ferry that carried him across to the mainland for medical treatment, he said.

Cynthia E. Solorcano lives in a two-room houseboat moored beside a tule thicket at the island’s edge. Inside, books and rag dolls on sagging shelves reveal water stains from the flood that destroyed her home on the island five years ago.

She matter-of-factly dismissed that catastrophe--”what’s gone is gone”--but railed against the imminent closure of the ferry service.

“I need that ferry,” she said. “No fooling.”

Her 13-year-old daughter relies on the ferry to get her to school. When the service ceases, Solorcano will have to teach her eighth-grader at home, she said.

Two other children of school age live on Bradford, which stretches about four miles from end to end. The children’s mother, Mimi Crow, said her family will try to find money to purchase a small motorboat.

Solorcano and other residents of the island said they have been unfairly denied their rights to what is in effect a county “road.” They criticized county officials, claiming that the officials cut ferry service in order to spend money on more politically profitable enterprises in more populous areas.

“They don’t care about us because there just aren’t enough votes out here,” one islander said.

For the last 10 years, the ferry, called the Victory II, has been operated by a temporary agency funded jointly by Contra Costa County and two local reclamation districts.

The service, which makes a circle from Bradford to Webb Tract to Jersey Island, which is connected to the mainland by a bridge, costs about $110,000 a year to run. Islanders point out that this cost is much lower than constructing and maintaining a bridge to Bradford, a project that county public works officials have deemed unfeasible.

Last year the county Board of Supervisors voted to discontinue funding the ferry. Bradford and Webb Tract reclamation districts then took over the operation, continuing to use the county’s boat, a barge-like craft that was built for the shallow waters of the delta and can carry about 12 vehicles.

Early this year, a Bradford landowner who does not live on the island threatened to sue the reclamation district, claiming that district funds are earmarked for flood control and not for ferry operation. The landowner, Donald Towse, said he was concerned that the reclamation district would have to double the taxes it assessed him in order to sustain the ferry.

Cease Operations

Faced with possible costly litigation, the Bradford Island Reclamation District then decided to cease ferry operations Jan. 31, according to Dante Nommelini, an attorney for several reclamation districts.

“The supervisors would not cut off the road to their own house,” said Tom B. Trost, a Bradford Island wheat farmer. “They are cutting off my livelihood. My father has had land out here for 25 years and paid taxes. I don’t know what I am going to do.

“In June I need to harvest. We will just have to let the birds eat it.”

Tom Torlakson, a Contra Costa County Supervisor, defended the board’s action.

“We have massive red ink,” Torlakson said. “We had to make a tough decision to say, ‘No more.’ The subsidy we were giving was too much for the small number of residents.”

Torlakson said the county has pledged to look for funding from other sources, such as local transit and regional park authorities. An earlier appeal to the Assembly proved unsuccessful, he said.

Reports that the ferry will close have already depressed land values, said Bradford landowner Bruno N. Ghinazzi. He had planned to retire on the island but instead has been trying in vain to sell his property.

At the end of a lonely levee road, a bullet-pocked sign printed with the Victory II ferry schedule has already been painted over so that the hours cannot be read. But the usual collection of drivers still lines up: homeowners and visitors in small cars, farmers in flatbed trucks and a gas company meter reader.

Distant Objects

When asked what he thinks of the island’s future, ferry captain Bob Landrum narrows his eyes like a man accustomed to picking out distant objects through the morning delta fog.

“That land has the potential to be something,” Landrum said. “We are in the Bay Area. We are right in the middle, between the Sacramento and the San Joaquin valleys.”

Landrum turned the wooden ship wheel slowly toward the mainland, and then added: “But taking the ferry away, that is not what government is supposed to do. It is like taking the road in front of your house and filling it with water and saying, ‘Get across any way you can.’ ”