Red Tape Threatening Reef Made of Old Tires

It seemed like a novel but environmentally correct way to dispose of hundreds of old automobile tires: just lay them on the ocean bottom off Balboa Pier as the foundation for a brave new marine world.

Add a hundred long pieces of plastic piping and you have what is supposed to be a laboratory to foster underwater life.

“What grows is mussels, mussels, mussels,” said an exuberant Rodolphe Streichenberger, who created this artificial reef in 1988 and for years has hailed it as a way to grow mussels and replenish marine habitat destroyed by development.

But the reef has a problem, according to the staff at the California Coastal Commission. It lacks a coastal permit.

And try as they will, commission planners say, they cannot get the information from Streichenberger’s nonprofit Marine Forests Society that they need to approve the reef eight years after the fact.

Streichenberger says he’s weary of the planners’ questions and requests for documentation. He fears, he says, that his reef is falling victim to red tape.

“Hundreds of letters, photos, everything, and there is no end,” he complained. “It’s a mess. It’s a mess. I don’t know what to do.”

But commission official Susan M. Hansch said Monday, “We’re asking for the same level of information that we’d ask from everyone who’d like to build a reef.”

And in a report dated last Thursday, the commission staff raises a host of questions about environmental effects of the tires, Styrofoam, plastics and other materials used in the reef, as well as its sturdiness, anchoring and potential effects on coastal erosion.

Streichenberger has appealed Commission Executive Director Peter Douglas’ decision that the application for reef development is incomplete. The staff report recommends that the commission deny Streichenberger’s appeal when it meets July 10 in Huntington Beach.

Streichenberger, an economist by training, has said his reef experiment would not only provide a means of recycling tires but would create a lucrative local industry for exporting mussels to countries where they are a delicacy, and would replenish the marine environment so that both commercial and recreational fishermen benefit. For instance, he said, one plastic pipe pole can produce 400 pounds of mussels annually.

The reef consists of 1,500 used automobile tires, 2,000 one-gallon plastic jugs covered with plastic mesh, 100 20-foot sections of PVC pipe known as “mussel columns” and “various materials from canceled past experiments, such as nylon fishing net, plastic, Styrofoam, iron rods and polyethylene mesh,” the staff report states.

The materials used to build the reef, Streichenberger said, are “absolutely harmless. You have seen no impact. Only fish. It’s very good for the fish.”

On Monday, Streichenberger said his reef really isn’t a “development” at all, but research aimed at “ranching” the ocean bottom. And he says the state told him years ago that no permit was needed.

But Hansch said the reef is, in fact, a development, and therefore under Coastal Commission jurisdiction. “If a university wanted to come in and build a reef to do research, they would still need a permit,” Hansch said.

She declined to speculate on whether the reef would have to be dismantled if, in the end, the commission concludes it does not qualify for a permit under the California Coastal Act.

“That’s for the commission to decide,” she said. “There’s a host of things you could do.”

The reef initially was built under a lease approved by the California Fish and Game Commission, according to last week’s report. But the lease eventually was abandoned by mutual agreement, said Rob Collins, senior marine biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game’s marine resources division.

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Streichenberger said the city of Newport Beach last year granted the Marine Forests Society a harbor permit for a tire reef demonstration project. Newport Beach Marine Division deputy chief Tony Melum could not be reached Monday for comment on the reef.

A Fish and Game reef expert questions the wisdom of using tires to build reefs to begin with.

“We’re not at all enthusiastic about tires,” said Dennis Bedford, a marine biologist who heads Fish and Game’s artificial reef project, “because they don’t offer the kind of substrate for attachment of invertebrates and algae. They don’t attach the way they do to either concrete or rock.”

The Coastal Commission staff only learned of the reef in 1993 and made suggestions to remedy the problem, according to the staff report.

But no permit has been forthcoming, and a frustrated Streichenberger says he’s worried his reef is foundering in a bureaucratic morass.

“It will destroy, by absurdity, the most productive marine habitat in the area,” he said.