Experts Hold Out Hope for Resurrection of Wetlands

The experts painted a dismal picture: Fully 95% of Southern California’s estuaries and salt marshes have been lost to development.

But some of those wetlands can be restored with the right mix of science, money and sheer force of will, scientists and government officials said Tuesday at a seminar in Long Beach.

“You can turn around some of it,” said John Teal, a leading wetlands expert and scientist emeritus at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “Even the ones that have been filled can be unfilled.”

He and others described a sea change in public attitudes in recent years that has spurred restoration efforts nationwide.

Some of that energy was evident Tuesday as 40 government officials and scientists held a brainstorming session on how to refurbish wetlands in Long Beach and throughout the region. The seminar was organized by the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific.

Long Beach once had hundreds of acres of marshes along the coast and at the mouths of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers. But the city’s coastline now bristles with office buildings, port cranes and homes, and the two rivers flow through concrete channels.

The experts studied a map showing 11 potential restoration projects in Long Beach, from a six-acre snippet of wetlands on 6th Street to the sweeping Los Cerritos wetlands, where several agencies and groups hope to create one of the largest wetland restorations in Southern California.

Los Cerritos is the only one of the projects that qualifies for millions of dollars in restoration money available from the Port of Long Beach, the largest potential funder of such projects in the area.

When the port builds new facilities, it is required by law to compensate for the loss of marine habitat by creating new habitat elsewhere. Hence, the port is helping to restore coastal wetlands in Huntington Beach and other parts of Orange County.

“And we haven’t spent a dime in Long Beach,” port official Geraldine Knatz said at a news conference after the seminar.

That is one reason why the port is so interested in a restoration project at Los Cerritos, an area now pockmarked with oil pumps and surrounded by shopping malls.

Most of the Los Cerritos land flanks Westminster Avenue east of Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach. Restoration planners hope to assemble up to 500 acres of land for a project that could be decades in the making. Its future hinges on ongoing purchase talks with three private landowners.

“You can’t do anything until you have the land, and that’s the big issue right now,” said Robert Hoffman, Southern California environmental coordinator for the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Some at the seminar were disappointed to learn that 10 other potential projects on the Long Beach wetlands list cannot be funded by port mitigation funds because they are freshwater projects and would not replace the fish habitat destroyed by port expansion.

Some urged those hoping to restore freshwater wetlands to seek money from four bond acts recently passed by state voters.

The high cost of restoring a wetland poses another hurdle. Wetlands restoration costs can range from a few thousand dollars to $500,000 an acre, Teal said.

Even so, he said he was impressed with the enthusiasm evident at the seminar.

“It looked very promising here,” he said.