Plan to Restore Lagoon Gets State Approval : Wetlands: Coastal Commission chooses San Dieguito for SCE mitigation project but expresses concern over needs at the border.

The California Coastal Commission on Thursday approved a Southern California Edison project to restore the mouth of the San Dieguito River Valley in Del Mar, while expressing concern that the North County project would divert funds from wetlands near the U.S.-Mexico border that also desperately need attention.

Under an agreement reached last year with the coastal panel, the utility was required to propose a project to offset damage to local fish and plant life caused by the power company’s San Onofre nuclear generating station.

The 12-member commission chose the plan to permanently open the San Dieguito River mouth to tidal flushing over seven other coastal wetland projects, including the Tijuana River Estuary near the international border.

The San Dieguito Lagoon restoration project, estimated to cost up to $25 million, had been preferred by the utility company and recommended by the Coastal Commission staff.

“We’re delighted,” Frank Melone, manager of Southern California Edison’s mitigation program, said after the decision. “Of all the possibilities, we think this one had the highest probability of success.”

But as several dozen North County residents and local politicians celebrated the decision, commissioners voiced regrets about once again overlooking the Tijuana project.

“Like that line from the old ‘Star Trek’ show, one day I would like you to go where no commission has gone before--to the Tijuana River Estuary,” Chula Vista City Councilman David Malcolm told fellow Coastal Commission members.

Malcolm told the nearly packed meeting room at the U.S. Grant Hotel that last week marked the first time in 12 years that no South Bay beaches were closed because of ocean pollution--much of which emanates from the border estuary.

“Where else in California would this commission tolerate such a closure? All those beaches closed. Not safe. Can’t go down there. We aren’t rich. We aren’t powerful. And we don’t have the political might of you people from Del Mar. But our voices need to be heard,” Malcolm said.

In the end, the commission rejected suggestions by two marine biologists to split the mitigation project between the San Dieguito and Tijuana river proposals, agreeing with utility officials that partial funding would serve neither project well.

Commissioners said they want their staff to research ways in which the Tijuana River Estuary project could receive alternative funding as soon as possible. That project calls for enhancing and expanding tidal saltwater marshes with channels.

But commissioners were told that the South Bay project involves pollution problems that the North County project does not. Several times a year, human waste from Tijuana flows from the river into the Pacific, closing beaches and endangering public health.

“We’ve got to find a way to broaden environmental restoration so that it not only affects plants and animals but human animals as well,” commission Chairman Thomas Gwyn said.

Last year, the commission approved a plan requiring Edison, which operates the nuclear power plant just south of the San Diego-Orange counties line, to restore at least 150 acres of wetlands somewhere along the Southern California coast.

A 15-year study released last summer found that the nuclear plant had caused a 60%, or 200-acre, reduction in the San Onofre kelp bed. The study said the plant’s cooling system sucks up and kills 21 to 57 tons of fish and 4 billion eggs and larvae yearly, then discharges the debris-filled water into the sea, reducing natural light on the ocean floor by as much as 16%.

Rimmon C. Fay, one of three biologists on the Marine Review Committee that conducted the study, at the time recommended refitting the nuclear plant’s existing cooling apparatus with cooling towers, which use less seawater.

On Thursday, Fay told the commission that any off-site mitigation plan it approved would not make up for the environmental damage caused by the utility.

“I’m not sure this lagoon project will function as the committee imagines,” he said after the decision. “This board feels that it has to do something. But this solution is not going to take care of the problem of ocean pollution--something the cooling towers would have done.”

Fay also cited several projects in which constricted river mouths were opened to improve tidal flow and habitat for fish. In each case, he said, the project failed because of silt sedimentation or predators that destroyed the breeding fish.

He said tidal flushing of lagoons can introduce chloroform bacteria into the ocean, which might present a health hazard to crowded North County beaches.

“And what happens if this project doesn’t work 15 or 20 years down the road?” Fay said. “What are they going to do then? How will that have solved anything? Will Edison be required to find another 150 acres to mitigate?

“I think more research needs to be done into this project before any decision is made,” Fay said.

Edison engineer Melone said the company has purchased 90 acres in the San Dieguito River Valley, just south of Via de la Valle and east of Interstate 5.

He added that the utility also has an agreement with the San Dieguito Joint Powers Authority to restore another 90 acres in the valley, giving the company more than the required acreage for mitigation.

Melone told the commission that the San Dieguito Lagoon project was preferred because the lands surrounding the lagoon are privately held and therefore in greater danger of being lost to commercial development.

The land near the Tijuana River is predominantly government-owned and not as vulnerable, he said.

Moreover, opening the mouth of the Tijuana River to increased tidal flushing would subject the area to more hazardous wastes that flow into the ocean from Mexico, Melone said.

Melone assured the commission that, once the San Dieguito Lagoon project is approved, the utility will prepare several restoration plans for the lagoon and return to the panel for final approval by next June.

Wearing blue and green buttons bearing the insignia of the San Dieguito River Valley Regional Park, supporters spoke one after the other to express their passion for the project.

Representing the county and five North County cities, they stressed that the San Dieguito River project is a community effort that was more than 20 years in the making.

Brooke Eisenberg, former Del Mar mayor and member of the San Dieguito River Valley Land Conservancy, emphasized how crucial it is for the commission to act quickly to save the region’s fast-disappearing lagoons.

The lagoon mouth, once open to the ocean, is now closed much of the year, causing the waters to stagnate and endangering its plant and animal habitats.

Supporters called the lagoon project, part of an overall plan to establish a 55-mile-long park from Del Mar to Julian, “a model restoration effort for California, the rest of the nation and the entire world to follow.”

“This is certainly one area worth saving, worth your attention,” Eisenberg said. “For the first time, you have the opportunity to make a long-sustained dream a reality.”

But Malcolm, the Chula Vista councilman, also emphasized the importance of the Tijuana River Estuary, which represents 20% of all the 8,500 wetland acres between Santa Barbara and the Mexican border and provides a home to 29 species of fish and 298 species of birds, a number of them endangered.

The estuary, he said, needs help fast, and the residents of the South Bay are tired of waiting for that help to come.

“Those people in the black community can’t relate to people in Del Mar,” he said. “They want to go to beaches near their own home. They can’t understand why they can’t do that.”