A Runways-for-Wetlands Plan

San Francisco International Airport has divided environmentalists here by coupling a proposal to build a huge landfill project in San Francisco Bay with an offer to restore 45 square miles of shoreline to wetlands.

For more than three decades, environmentalists have been united in their opposition to bay landfill projects, arguing that such filling destroys wildlife habitat, reduces water circulation and causes other damage.

Now, that unity has been fractured by the airport’s plan to fill as much as two square miles of the south bay to build new runways.

Environmental activist Ralph Nobles first proposed that airport officials compensate for the massive fill by buying salt ponds that extend from Hayward in the east bay to Redwood City in the west bay.

Nobles and others have lobbied the federal government unsuccessfully for years to buy the ponds, a major salt producing facility owned by the Cargill Salt Co. A shallow chain of natural and artificial lakes, they are separated from the bay by mud dikes.

Environmentalists want the ponds restored to wetlands and included in the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, but there has never been money available to make the purchase.

“A lightbulb just went off in my head,” the 77-year-old Nobles said. “I’ve lived near the salt ponds all my life, and I’ve seen the damage they have caused. The bay is a very sick body of water. We have polluted water, polluted air and fish that you can’t eat. Those salt ponds have taken away ecosystems and decreased the amount of water flowing into and out of the south bay.”

If the ponds are restored to wetlands, Nobles said, “it will improve the health of the whole Bay Area.” If the airport were able to purchase all Cargill’s lands, it would add 17,000 acres to the 21,000-acre wildlife refuge.

“It is a very rare opportunity,” said Marge Kolar, director of the refuge. “You could probably count on one hand where an acquisition that big has been offered anywhere in the nation.”

Airport officials enthusiastically embraced Nobles’ idea as the sort of dramatic initiative that might win over environmentalists they knew would mount a powerful campaign against any big landfill project that did not offer significant compensation.

“This seems like a fair deal in exchange for the 800 to 1,400 acres that new runways would need,” wrote John Martin, director of the airport, in a November op-ed piece for the San Francisco Chronicle.

“We are willing to spend millions and millions of dollars in mitigation to compensate for the adverse impact of filling the bay,” said airport spokesman Ron Wilson. The airport has proposed spending as much as $200 million to buy the ponds, although no one knows what price Cargill might seek. The airport is planning to spend $1.4 billion on its runway expansion.

But some environmentalists say the airport should consider alternatives before seeking the right to build out into the bay.

“Filling the bay should not be a starting point,” for the airport, said Keith Nakatani, program director for the Save the San Francisco Bay organization, which was founded 30 years ago to stop bay land-filling.

“We would like the salt ponds restored, but not at the expense of destroying another part of the bay,” he said.

The airport has held four meetings since the summer with dozens of representatives of environmental, community and business groups to persuade them otherwise. It recently unveiled its plan to the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the state planning agency that has veto rights over bay landfill projects.

The airport’s proposal is exciting, but should not be linked to its landfill request, said Will Travis, the commission’s executive director.

“The laws were set up because the bay was being piecemealed a little at a time for local needs,” said Travis. “Everybody had to get rid of their garbage, create a little more tax base, create more land for housing, and we ended up incrementally losing a third of the bay.”

A state law banned most land-filling of the bay and established the commission in 1965. By then, 90% of the bay’s salt marshes had been destroyed by development projects. The law specifically says, however, that airport construction can be allowed as an exception, only if the planning commission finds there is no other way to meet air transportation needs. Then, the commission may allow no more than the minimum fill possible.

The airport’s offer to restore wetlands “is a wonderful opportunity,” Travis says, but “the law didn’t say: We’re going to stop filling, except for when a really sweet deal comes along.”

“The airport has talked about everything from 400 acres to four runways on 1,600 acres,’ he said. “Four hundred acres would be the largest fill in the bay since Treasure Island in 1937. You would have to go back into the early 20th century to find a fill as large as 1,600 acres.”

The airport agrees that alternatives should be studied, said spokesman Wilson. But airport officials are convinced, he says, that additional runways are essential to ease air traffic congestion, end chronic flight delays and accommodate ultra-large airliners expected to go into use by 2004.

Hemmed in between U.S. 101 and the bay in San Mateo County, the airport’s 60-year-old parallel runways are inadequate for handling air traffic at the nation’s fifth-busiest airport, Wilson said. Because the two runways are separated by just 750 feet from center line to center line, the Federal Aviation Administration cuts landings in half during bad weather.

Wilson concedes that the airport is at the start of what promises to be a long, complex and hotly contended planning process. But airport officials hope to break ground on their project sometime in 2000.

One significant hurdle to the proposal is that Cargill insists it is not interested in selling its salt ponds. But the airport has the legal right, Wilson said, to force a sale if necessary through eminent domain.

Bay Area environmentalists have long viewed Cargill’s operations as a hazard to the bay, because salt processing produces toxic byproducts.

But the company said that its salt ponds, which range in size from 300 acres to 1,300 acres, provide habitat to millions of shorebirds. Plus, Cargill says, it already has sold at below-market rate about 10,000 acres of its north bay ponds to the state as a wildlife preserve, in addition to 12,000 acres it sold to the Don Edwards preserve in the south bay. The company retained the right to harvest salt from those ponds in perpetuity.

In its own master plan for bay restoration, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission recognized the salt ponds as contributing wildlife habitat to the bay.

“We are no nuisance,” Cargill spokeswoman Jill Singleton said. “We are recognized officially as a beneficial use of the bay.”

She scoffs at the notion that the airport would be able to make a case for eminent domain, given the fact that the nearest ponds lie 15 miles south of the airport.

“Why should our company be singled out and sacrificed so that another public project can go forward?” she asked. In the past, public agencies “have respected our right and our commitment to staying in the salt business,” she said.

Cargill produces about 1 million tons of industrial-grade and table salt from the ponds annually, and a total of 15 million tons of salt each year from 14 other facilities. The company is a division of the Minneapolis-based agribusiness company Cargill Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the world.

The airport also has run afoul of some environmentalists who complain that the proposed size of its landfill has grown from 300 acres last summer to 1,400 acres today. They point out that the expansion also may require massive dredging of the bay.

One alternative the airport is considering calls for as much as 110 million cubic yards of mud to be scooped from the bay’s bottom. Dredging is thought to be harmful to various species of fish and other animals that live in the bay, because it stirs up contaminated sediment.

But some environmentalists also say that it is tempting to seize the opportunity to restore so much land.

“Nobody living has seen that scale of restoration in the bay,” said Craig Breon, an environmental attorney for the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society.

The project could result in restoration of 80% of the historic wetlands of the south bay, airport officials and environmentalists say. It would create habitat for such endangered species as the California clapper rail and the salt marsh harvest mouse, and provide food and shelter to birds along the Pacific Flyway, a key bird migration corridor along the West Coast.

Still, Breon cautions that the restoration of the ponds might still prove enormously costly and take many years to complete.

Despite the arguments, Nobles, who devotes himself nearly full time to lobbying for the landfill-for-restoration project, says he is convinced his fellow environmentalists will eventually be won over.

“Wetlands are the key, they are at the base of the food chain,” he said. “They make the difference between a healthy bay and one that is polluted and dying. In exchange for losing one-half of 1% of the bay’s open waters, we will get back 80% of the lost intertidal wetlands. I think absolutely we should jump at it.”

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Airport Proposal

In exchange for a huge landfill project to build new runways in the bay, San Francisco International; Airport proposes to restore commercial salt ponds farther south to natural wetlands.

Corporate owned salt ponds or facilities

Salt ponds in wildlife refuge