Coast & Ocean Magazine Winter 1997-98

1998 The Year of the Ocean

Opposite: A new channel has been cleared in the Ash Avenue wetland.
INSET: An excavator works on the project.

TOP photo by Wayne Ferren; INSET photo by David Hubbard

MOM ALWAYS SAID,
"PUT IT BACK THE WAY YOU FOUND IT"
The Story of a Salt Marsh Restoration Project

KAITILIN GAFFNEY

THE MASSIVE CONSTRUCTION project under way on the upcoast end of Carpinteria State Beach may have worried some vacationers last summer. Bulldozers were pushing dirt, digging trenches, loading up dump trucks. Was another housing development or shopping plaza in the works? Not at all. This time the earthmovers were working for the shorebirds, fish, crabs, mussels, clams, mice, and other wetland creatures.

How much are you ready to pay? One hundred dollars? Two hundred? How about $16? That's how much it costs to stay in one of the 25 hostels run in California by American Youth Hostels, Inc., including the Montara Lighthouse Hostel, the San Francisco International Hostel, and 15 others along the coast. At the International Hostel the $16 fee even includes breakfast. At freeway speed, you get about a five-second glimpse of the Carpinteria Salt Marsh as you travel on Highway 101 along the Santa Barbara County coast. That's just enough time to notice a sizeable open space tucked in among the houses and industrial buildings beside the railroad tracks west of the City of Carpinteria. You may not realize that this is an especially important kind of open space - a coastal wetland.
      Most schoolchildren are aware by now that wetlands are valuable, as are adults who follow the news. Wetlands filter pollutants. They soak up flood waters and serve as buffers against the fury of storm-driven waves. They have been compared to rainforests in terms of the variety and abundance of life they support. They are threatened.
      In southern California, all but 10 percent of the once vast coastal wetlands have been destroyed, and every remnant is now precious. The 230-acre Carpinteria Salt Marsh, also known as El Estero de la Carpintería and Sandyland Cove, provides habitat to a wide range of species, from tiny microbes to endangered plants to native California oysters to snowy plovers, in a region where humans have preempted most of their former habitat. Downtown Carpinteria itself stands on former marshland.
      About 200 years ago, the Carpinteria Salt Marsh was double its present size. Half of the former expanse has been drained and filled. There had been plans to fill the remaining 230 acres also, or to dredge them for a marina, but fortunately our understanding of wetlands grew and policies changed before the marsh was entirely destroyed. In 1977 the University of California purchased 120 acres for inclusion in its Natural Reserve System. Over the years, additional acreage has come under the control of entities with preservation goals. Thanks to efforts by local citizens, public officials, and others, and to tougher regulatory restrictions on development, these wetlands have survived in a relatively natural state.

The 230-acre Carpinteria Salt Marsh will grow by 15 acres. The Ash Avenue wetland is indicated by arrows.

      I am truly familiar with only one small part of the Carpinteria Salt Marsh: the 15 acres that make up its eastern edge, known as the Ash Avenue Wetland Area. About half of this area has continued to function as a wetland. The other half became an example of what you get when you add nearly 24,000 cubic yards of dirt to five acres of coastal salt marsh: an open field overgrown with weeds.
      Now comes the heartening part of this story. This year the Coastal Conservancy, the City of Carpinteria, and the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County began a project awkwardly named the Carpinteria Salt Marsh Enhancement Project Phase I, Ash Avenue Wetland Area. They have dug out the soil suffocating the wetland and are busy restoring natural grades and excavating channels to again allow the tides to inundate and flush the area daily. Native wetland species will be planted for the benefit of invertebrates, fish, and wildlife. In short, the restoration project will attempt to give back a small piece of what has been taken from the marsh over the past several decades.
      This restoration is a testament to society's growing recognition of the value of wetlands. The project would not have occurred without the tireless efforts of dozens of concerned citizens and dedicated organizations. It depends on the support of myriad public and private funding sources: local, regional, state, and federal. Whether this project will succeed will not be known for 15 years or more.
      My mother used to admonish: "Put it back the way you found it." That's not always possible when you've pulled apart something nature created over hundreds of thousands of years, and it certainly is not easy.
      The cost of the Ash Avenue restoration project to date is $3.8 million, of which $2.3 million went to acquire six parcels of land from 17 different owners, while $1.5 million went to fund construction. This project has required at least seven different permits from local, state, and federal agencies. By the time it is finished, it will have complied with local, city, county, regional, state, and federal requirements ranging from archeological studies to soil toxicity tests. More than 23,000 cubic yards of fill will have been removed and thousands of native plants will have been planted. The project will have been the subject of countless meetings, telephone calls, memoranda, faxes, letters, and e-mail messages.
      For several weeks I was a part of this process. Hired to help the City of Carpinteria get through its permitting requirements, I filled out forms in triplicate, drafted memos, copied reports, and waded through mind-numbing regulations. I talked to staff at Santa Barbara County, the State Office of Historic Preservation, the Army Corps of Engineers, even the California Department of Transportation's Metrication Program, which oversees the conversion of design measurements to the metric system. I was amazed at the intricacy of the processes required to perform such an uncontroversial and innocuous project, and I was, at times, frustrated by seemingly duplicative layers of bureaucracy.
      Despite all that, working on the marsh restoration project was a great experience. I was inspired by seeing how many intelligent, committed, caring individuals were willing to work diligently to protect their environment and how many agencies and organizations have been established with this same mission. Working on the marsh project was also sobering. I saw firsthand what a tremendous amount of effort - literally years of work and millions of dollars - is required to meet the deceptively simple goal of environmental restoration: to return an area to what it once was.
      Aldo Leopold has said that the first step of successful tinkering is to save all the pieces. After a couple of months of working on a coastal salt marsh restoration project, I would suggest that when dealing with wetlands, it's best not to tinker in the first place.

Kaitilin Gaffney, a graduate of the Environmental Studies Program of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and of Boalt Hall School of Law, is currently a Fulbright Fellow in Wellington, New Zealand, studying fisheries management.

For more information, contact Bob Nisbet, Public Works Director, City of Carpinteria, (805) 684-5405, ext. 402.

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