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Publication Date: Friday, June 29, 2001

"The message that I'd really like to convey is that the cleanup will be done in steps... The first step to restoring this wetland is to restore it to its current use." @dropname: Andrea Muckerman, Naval cleanup coordinator for Moffett
"You have to take it in increments, but to say you will clean it up to its current use and then see what happens is not a commitment... Everyone is looking for loopholes and a less expensive way out." @dropname:Virginia Robinson, community coordinator for the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition

Wetlands restoration groups seek city support

By Justin Scheck

A group of environmental advocates is asking the city to take a stand on wetlands restoration at Moffett Field.

After a Navy cleanup plan for a wetland area on the base failed to satisfy local environmental interests, groups concerned with Bay restoration began planning ways to get official support for their vision for Moffett Field's future.

The Alliance for a New Moffett Field, CLEAN South Bay, the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society, and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition have drafted a resolution that Council member Sally Lieber will introduce to the council sometime in July.

The resolution was drawn up in response to the Navy's proposal to remove toxic substances - including PCBs and the pesticide DDT - from an historic tidal marsh on the base that has been separated from the bay by man-made dikes.

The Navy plans to clean the site to the standard required for a diked wetland, while environmental groups want the cleanup to aim for the higher standard required to safely restore tidal flows.

The eastern diked marsh is on property currently owned by NASA, although the contamination is from naval operations during past years when the Navy owned the area. Under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund program, the Navy is required to clean up the waste to accommodate reasonably anticipated future land uses.

Owing to the dikes, the only source of water to the marsh is storm water runoff from the base. The Navy's cleanup plan would require this habitat to be maintained, and would therefore only remove enough contaminants to make the habitat safe for animals living in a seasonal wetland; they are less sensitive to pollutants than animals living in a salt marsh, where chemicals can accumulate through the food chain and end up in high concentrations at the top in animals such as the great blue heron.

The Navy's proposal would also implement "institutional controls" prohibiting future alteration of the seasonal freshwater marsh.

For their part, environmental advocacy groups want natural tidal flows to be restored to the marsh, and object to the Navy's cleanup on the grounds that it would prohibit tidal restoration in the future. Pointing to other projects around the Bay Area, the groups maintain that tidal restoration is a reasonably anticipated future use, and the Navy must therefore clean the marsh up to the standards required by tidal restoration.

The debate between the Navy and environmental concerns hinges on the question of what "reasonably anticipated" means.

Lieber, a former president of the Alliance for a New Moffett Field, said the city should expect the Navy to perform "the highest level of cleanup possible."

"Looking at what's happening around the Bay, it seems reasonable that in the future this type of restoration is possible," said Lieber.

Andrea Muckerman, the Navy's cleanup coordinator for Moffett, said that without a commitment from NASA to plan for tidal flow restoration, the Navy will move ahead with its proposal.

NASA has said repeatedly that it has no future plans to remove the dikes from the wetland, and fears that doing so could result in the flooding of runways on the base.

According to Paul Lesti, the current president of the Alliance for a New Moffett Field, and a member of the Environmental Planning Commission, said the resolution for the City Council does not push for immediate tidal restoration; rather, it urges the Navy not to preclude the possibility of restoration.

Muckerman said she does not believe tidal flow restoration is an imminent possibility, and added that the Navy has no plans to alter its cleanup in response to environmental concerns.

She said that the Navy has not studied how the cleanup plan would have to be changed to accommodate tidal flows, or how the cost could differ from the estimated $1.9 million for the proposed cleanup

But Muckerman did say that the Navy will express a different approach to the cleanup in its documentation and public communication.

"The message that I'd really like to convey is that the cleanup will be done in steps... The first step to restoring this wetland is to restore it to its current use," said Muckerman, adding that once the wetland is cleaned up to the standard required by a seasonal marsh, subsequent actions could clean it up to the standard required by a tidal marsh if NASA decides to restore the area.

Muckerman did not say whether the Navy would be willing to pay for a subsequent cleanup, saying only, "That would be speculation."

Virginia Robinson, a community coordinator with the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition's water cleanup initiatives, objected to the Navy's approach.

"You have to take it in increments, but to say you will clean it up to its current use and then see what happens is not a commitment... Everyone is looking for loopholes and a less expensive way out," said Robinson.

Lesti said that tidal restoration is "a technical issue which has become a bigger regional issue."

He said that a technical problem arises from maintaining the area as a seasonal wetland, where no marine organisms would be present; without such organisms, the cleanup would not have to address the biological pathways through which toxic pollutants could contaminate marine organisms and the animals that feed on them.

A cleanup allowing for the restoration of tidal flows would have to be more comprehensive - and probably more expensive - than one which would keep the marsh a seasonal wetland.

If adopted, the resolution would state that the city "finds that a reasonably anticipated future land use of Moffett Field Site 25 is restoration to tidal marsh, and therefore Moffett Field Site 25 Superfund remediation should be performed at a level that would support future restoration of the site to tidal marsh-that is, to allow the controlled flow of waters, fish and wildlife from the San Francisco Bay into the Moffett Field Wetlands."