Palo Alto Weekly
Guest Opinion: Salt Ponds may become next huge development-impact battle
By Yoriko Kishimoto
October 16, 2009

Our Peninsula has an overreaching positive vision for its future. At its heart is intelligent, progressive planning, so we can manage the future of our communities in the face of immense pressure for growth without negatively impacting our natural environment.

Our future lies in healthy communities where shopping, school and work can all be just a short bike or train trip away. Peninsula officials, neighborhood leaders and urban designers are working together to integrate some population growth into our fine-grained neighborhoods and historic downtowns rather than allow growth in the wrong places.

Today, there is a threat to this vision: a proposed development in Redwood City so breathtaking in its size and misguided in its scope that nothing of its kind has been seen in half a century.

Minnesota-based Cargill, Inc., the international agribusiness giant, is proposing to pave over 1,400 acres of Bayfront salt ponds for a new mini-city of 25,000 people.

Throughout the Peninsula - in Palo Alto, Redwood City, San Mateo - we are seeing downtowns revived with smart growth that preserves the open space we need for our economy and quality of life.

In the midst of our communities' positive efforts, it is unsettling to see a proposal for a massive new development that harkens back to a different era, one that will impact the entire Midpeninsula and beyond.

Cargill's so-called "Saltworks" development site is on the wrong side of Highway 101, more than a mile from downtown and Caltrain. This is not an infill site and this is not the place for housing.

It is several times the size of the equally misguided Mobil Land Co. proposal for Bair Island, just north of the Cargill salt ponds, that in the early 1980s was fiercely debated and defeated (by 43 votes) in a hard-fought referendum. That plan for several thousand new, high-priced homes and 12,000 jobs, would have ultimately destroyed a major bird-nesting area and would have added 20 minutes a day to the average commute on Bayshore Freeway. It would have required millions of cubic yards of imported fill, from someplace not designated in the project's environmental impact report.

That land is now preserved as permanent open space, thanks to the Peninsula Open Space Trust. The effort took a quarter century.

Back to the present, under California's new AB 375, we are required to work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by curbing sprawl. Real infill doesn't need new roads, let alone the 223 acres of them in Cargill's plan.

Redwood City officials have begun to lay a foundation for processing of Cargill's new city-in-a-salt-pond.

There is no doubt that city officials intend to study the proposal in good faith. But the big picture can get lost in the details, the forest obscured by the trees - and that may just be the developer's slim best hope for getting the project approved. The San Francisco Chronicle agrees that restorable bay wetlands are no place to build a massive development, calling this "an unacceptable site for housing."
The site should be restored to thriving tidal wetlands instead, to benefit people and wildlife. Urban sprawl, massive bay fill and diking have already reduced the bay's size by one-third and destroyed more than 90 percent of the bay's wetlands.

We must have a clear vision of what core assets we must preserve and what fundamental changes we need to prepare for. Top among those assets is our threatened open spaces; high among the coming changes are rising sea levels from a warming planet.

Cargill's proposal is simply at odds with where the Peninsula needs to go as a community.

This development scheme faces intense opposition and enormous hurdles from the many agencies that would have to approve it. The state Natural Resources Agency, for one, is recommending that "State agencies should not plan, permit, develop or build any structure that might require protection in the future." Yet none of the region's time and effort need be wasted if the developer is delivered a simple message by local officials here on the Peninsula: Don't pave our bay.

The Bay Area needs more housing, but not in the bay itself or what historically were bayfront wetlands. If sprawl into the baylands is seen as an answer then we have to revisit the question being asked.

Yoriko Kishimoto is on the Palo Alto City Council and was mayor in 2007. She serves on the Bay Area Air Quality Management District Board of DIrectors, the Joint Policy Committee that coordinates regional policies and the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority Board of Directors. She can be e-mailed at ykishimoto@earthlink.net.