Features

When heavy construction equipment moved in to the meadow on Aug. 18, a lot of Berkeley residents were angered at the sudden closure of the 72-acre site between the I-80 frontage road and the Berkeley Marina. 

Environmentalists and park officials acknowledged that they could’ve done a better job alerting the public to what was to come, but insist that the final result will be something worth cherishing. 

Arthur Feinstein, director of conservation and education for the Golden Gate Audubon Society, called the project “a wonderful opportunity for the restoration of coastal scrub habitat.” 

Addressing critics, Feinstein asked, “Do we sacrifice that wonderful opportunity to create an educational experience for our children to see what coastal habitat once was? Here’s a chance where we’re actually trying to improve the world,” he said. 

Critics aren’t so sure, arguing that the land should’ve been left untouched as a natural habitat that evolved in harmony with the ecology of today, not an ecology of an imaginary past on land that didn’t exist until trucks started dumping in trash and other landfill into the waters of San Francisco Bay. 

“I’m pretty mad,” said Curt Manning, a West Berkeley activist who has harshly criticized the project. “They’re killing all the animals. It’s a piss-poor way of starting the development of the Eastshore State Park.” 

“Creation wasn’t good enough for all these people. They think they can improve on it,” said Maris Arnold, another critic. “The native plant people have no credibility in my mind. Besides, so many of us here are transplants.” 

Under the Eastshore Park General Plan adopted two years ago, the meadow—a 72-acre bloc of landfill between the I-80 frontage road and the Berkeley Marina—will be transformed into a re-creation of the seasonal wetland and upland ecology typical of the Bay Area before Europeans first appeared on the scene. 

Directors of the East Bay Regional Parks District gave formal approval to the meadow restoration last April 6 during a meeting in which directors also voted to accept $365,335 from Cherokee Simeon Ventures. 

Cherokee Simeon is a partnership between a Marin County developer and Cherokee Investment Partners, a Colorado firm which specializes in cleaning up and developing “brownfield”—contaminated—property. 

While the partnership is developing Campus Bay, a controversial Richmond waterfront housing development on a toxic waste site, their involvement in the meadow stems from their Metroport project in Oakland. 

Because the developer is filling in a 2.4-acre Oakland wetland site, state law requires them to fund an effort to reclaim another wetland site. 

The work now underway at the meadow is the first of three planned phases, and involves 16.5 acres of the site. Cherokee Simeon funds go toward creating 3.25 acres of new seasonal wetlands and enhancement of 2.5 acres of the existing site. The other 10.75 acres will be coastal prairie recreated with native plants and existing native scrub brush. 

The partnership will design, construct and monitor the improvements for up to five years. 

Les Rowntree, a long-term Berkeley resident and Professor of Environmental Studies at San Jose State, said the Meadows project will likely need more monitoring than that. 

“We still don't know how long it takes to create a sustainable wetland, since we’ve only been restoring wetlands in San Francisco Bay since 1970,” he said. “Five years does not seem long enough—that’s a mere snapshot in what should be an ongoing process. They monitor it for five years, and think it's successful, but it might not be.” 

Rowntree also questioned the environmental value of the project, saying, “They’re just looking for a convenient place to do a trade-off on the no-net-loss agenda of the Bay Control and Development Commission.” 

When fully complete, the project will be permanently fenced, and four entrances will lead to two roughly perpendicular paths that bisect the meadow. Dogs won’t be allowed inside the paths to prevent disturbances to the wildlife. 

“What is out there did not exist in 1985,” said Norman La Force, legal chair of the San Francisco chapter of the Sierra Club. “In October of that year Santa Fe bulldozed the entire meadow clean. They scraped it. In the intervening years, all this has come back.” 

The railroad, once the major shoreline landowner, had dropped out of the picture in the intervening years and the meadow was acquired by the Eastshore State Park, which now owns 2,262 acres along the waterfronts of Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany and Richmond. 

Under the plan adopted by park directors, over half of the site will remain as upland habitat for the protection of harriers and kites, two species of raptors who nest in the meadow. 

Once the land is scraped and replaced with clean soil, site developers will reintroduce native species and exclude “a lot of exotic plant species that are not necessarily healthy for wildlife,” La Force said. 

The Sierra Club activist acknowledges that the park district made one tactical error leading up to the restoration project by not posting explanatory signs before work commenced. That error has been belatedly rectified, and signs and an explanatory information sheet are now posted on the temporary fencing surrounding the site. 

One of the main challenges will be keeping out exotic plant species, the varieties imported intentionally or inadvertently by European colonizers.  

“It’s going to take a lot of effort,” Feinstein said. “But in Berkeley we expect plenty of volunteers to help us, so when the time comes, come on down and weed.” 

Manning scoffed at the notion. “The possibility of going around and getting rid of the foxtails and all the invasive species is like trying to wipe out the opposition in Iraq. Clean all that ground and the first thing to come in will be weeds.” 

“Basically, there’s going to be a lot of grubbing and removing of exotic vegetation,” said Larry Tong, Interagency Planning Manager for the East Bay Regional Park District. 

“The existing willows and other species are being protected by snow fences, and we’ll be finished with the initial 17-acre phase within two months,” Tong said. 

Construction is being scheduled around the nesting seasons of the harriers and kites, Tong said. 

Tong said that the park district, working with the California Parks Department and the California Coastal Conservancy, conducted a two-year series of public hearings, with 24 meetings and thousands of participants before the final plan was adopted two years ago. 

Berkeley City Councilmember Betty Olds, a project proponent, said Tong had explored all the issues with various environmental groups, who had signed off on the project.