Famosa Friends Win Fight to Save Slough

After a two-decade fight that some compared to guerrilla warfare, the Friends of the Famosa Slough celebrated a victory Tuesday when the city of San Diego announced it has arranged to buy the wetland area.

In a closed session Tuesday morning, the San Diego City Council voted unanimously to approve an agreement to pay $3.5 million, plus closing costs, to the owner of the Point Loma parcel, TLS Investors.

Later, at a jubilant news conference at the 20-acre salt marsh, Councilman Ron Roberts acknowledged the hard-fought history of the slough, saying he felt more like he was attending “a dedication of a battlefield as opposed to an environmental area.”

“This shows what we can do when we work together,” he told Jim Peugh, chairman of the Friends of the Famosa Slough, the 800-member group that led the community-based opposition to development of the wildlife area. What’s more, he added proudly, “we’re paying less than we agreed to (more than) a year ago.”

In May, 1988, Roberts and Mayor Maureen O’Connor announced that the city would purchase the slough from developer Terry Sheldon and TLS Investors for $4.6 million, $2.6 million of which would come from city coffers. That agreement was stalled, however, when state fiscal constraints made money tight.

Last July, Roberts, whose 2nd District contains the slough, announced that the city had made a second offer, one that matched the $3.5-million value indicated in a recent appraisal. Roberts said $3.2 million will come from the city’s wetlands acquisition and capital outlay funds and the remainder from the state’s Environmental License Plate fund.

Robert Caplan, the attorney representing Sheldon TLS Investors, said Tuesday that his clients, who once planned more than 416 condominiums in four-story buildings on the site, were content with the offer.

“The owner would have much preferred to develop the property, but a case of realism set in that he was faced with enormous opposition,” Caplan said. “A reasonable compromise was better than letting it go on for a long time.”

But already, the scuffles over the area, one of the last remaining coastal wetlands, have become the stuff of local lore.

Once, when the owner tried to drain the marsh, the community disabled the pump. On another occasion, when the owner tried to prevent the tidal flushing of the pools by damming a pipe with concrete, someone found a way to open them.

“It was like guerrilla warfare--a true battle,” said Councilman John Hartley. “And every time it faltered, somebody else would pick up the torch.”

Indeed, the slough has outlasted some groups that formed to save it, said Peugh, who has become known in recent years as the slough watchdog, organizing every-other-month clean-ups at the site and trying to discourage further degradation by teaching the neighborhood about its value.

Throughout the fight, the area’s poor condition was often used as an excuse to destroy it, remembered Barbara Bamberger, a spokeswoman for the San Diego chapter of the Sierra Club. Often the egrets, ducks and herons that fish in the pools were surrounded by used tires and trash. To this day, the noise of traffic from West Point Loma Boulevard is punctuated by the roar of airplanes overhead.

“ ‘It’s degraded--why not go ahead and develop it?’ That’s an argument used again and again by developers,” said Bamberger, who said she was optimistic that Tuesday’s agreement will help persuade other developers that environmentally sensitive areas, no matter how decrepit, are not easy targets for development or land speculation.

“This sends a message to developers that they can’t expect to buy land like this and carte blanche go in and develop it,” she said. “It also sends a message to other communities to continue fighting.”

Norma Sullivan, the conservation chair for the San Diego chapter of the Audubon Society, agreed.

“It’s a new cottage industry--taking an option on a sensitive piece of land,” Sullivan said. Since Famosa Slough has now been purchased at a price that did not exceed its worth, she said, the developers will learn “they won’t be able to milk governments that buy these lands.”

Now that the land is destined to change hands, the next order of business is restoration, and already on Tuesday, advocates of the wetlands set about planning a bright future.

Roberts said discussions would begin again with Ducks Unlimited, a private organization that works to preserve wetland habitats, which in 1988 had discussed setting up a mechanical flushing system to prevent water stagnation and mosquito breeding.

State Sen. Lucy Killea (D-San Diego) said that while the state had not been “as forward as I would like for it to have been on financing,” she is hopeful that the state Department of Fish and Game and groups like the Coastal Conservancy will make up for that by involving themselves in rehabilitating the area.

“I’m hopeful we can get sufficient money to move it right along,” Killea said.

Peugh says the Friends of the Famosa Slough will serve as advisers as state and city officials craft a restoration plan. And as the plan is implemented, he predicted, the crabs, fish, and birds that live there will make it worth the effort.

“In the morning, if you go and stand quietly at the entrance sometimes you can hardly see the bottom of the pools, there are so many fish,” he said. “Sometimes there are so many crabs, the shore seems to move.”

Bamberger echoed a widely shared sentiment when she called for the slough to become an educational preserve that would be used primarily to teach students, from kindergarten to college, how a coastal wetland works. And she was among many who seemed determined not to celebrate too soon--before the wetland gets the improvement it needs.

“Now we’re in a new ballgame, and that game is restoration,” Bamberger said. “But I think this is going to be a much tamer game than the last one.”