Dateline: February 13
OF CONSENT AGENDAS AND RIVER LEVEES, OR…
IS THE SAN LORENZO RIVER A PERSON?

As you walk, bike, or drive along or across the San Lorenzo River between Highway 1 and the trestle bridge this week, until mid-March, you may see increased activity on the levees: mowing equipment and contracted workers with hand tools, tagging to preserve or removing most plants between the ground and five-feet high. The city is under the gun to carry out an intense campaign to control plants and animals in order to keep local control of our levee infrastructure.

But there is an irreconcilable conflict between protecting our river’s ecology from human impacts and protecting people and their built environment from the river itself.

For 230 years, non-Indigenous settlers of Aulinta(k) have repeatedly attempted to exploit and control the river and her floodplain. The powerful try, fail, and try again–even to this day–with earth, pumps, bigger buildings, and now the city council majority’s Downtown Expansion Plan right against the levee and in one of our most flood-prone areas (Mayor Keeley likes to call it a “new neighborhood”).

At the city council meeting of December 13, 2022, Consent Agenda Item 26 to approve vegetation management and rodent control for our FEMA levee maintenance accreditation was passed. Thanks to the vigilance and persistence of everyday people, the item was pulled for public comment and council discussion.

Of course we want and need our levee to be in compliance with safety standards, especially with thousands of residents living in areas that could be devastated by levee failures.

So what’s the conflict?

The crux of the issue is that the upper 20 feet of the inboard/riverside/inside slopes and the entirety of the outboard/landside/outer slopes of the levee must be open to visual inspection in case of failure like sand boils, especially during storms. On the other hand, we have a decades-long history of community planning and action around the river’s habitat and ecosystem restoration, calling for improved biodiversity, aesthetics, and public access. There has been a sometimes-cooperative effort by city government and residents, occasionally supported by federal funds, to plant and maintain riparian, riverine, and estuarine habitats with native plants and to control invasive weeds. Check out the San Lorenzo Urban River Plan (SLURP). The online document is missing page 72, the Beach Flats recommendations. If you’ve got a paper copy that could be scanned, let me know!

Sadly, much of the SLURP and similar plans have been mothballed, like the 1996 Jesse Street Marsh Management Plan which called for the marsh’s restoration in a tradeoff with the wastewater treatment plant’s expansion in Neary Lagoon. Instead, Jessie Street Marsh has been treated as a zone for both organized abandonment and control through prison-labor vegetation management.

Like so much public land, there is a complex web of jurisdictional responsibilities for the levee. While the inboard slopes of the levee are under the jurisdiction and regular maintenance of public works, they have been subjected to annual vegetation management by city-contracted workers to US Army Corps of Engineers specifications for years. At the same time, a lengthy area of that inboard slope plantings is under the watch of the Coastal Watershed Council and their volunteers.

The outboard slopes of the levee are under the jurisdiction of the parks department, with a section under the care of Jane Mio, Project Director of the Valley Women’s Club’s Native Habitat Restoration Program’s “San Lorenzo River Estuary Re-vegetation Project,” or The Estuary Project, and more volunteers.

The current FEMA accreditation plan calls for removal of many existing plants at ground level and “limbing up” of tree branches to above five feet to create open space for easy visual inspections. Intentionally planted low shrubs like manzanita and coyote bush would be cut to the ground annually, or removed and replaced with native grasses and wildflowers that can be mowed. Specialists would reserve the option of using herbicides on invasive plants.

In spite of the California Fish and Wildlife’s rules on protecting nesting sites, the deadline for work to be completed is long before nesting season is over. While there will be a biologist survey done to mark nests to avoid during work, the work itself will eliminate currently established, potential nesting areas.

Does it really make sense to “manage” or even destroy a significant number of native plants that were put there on purpose, for good reason, often with public funds?

Burrowing animals, especially the ground squirrels, will primarily be controlled with rodenticides. So far, the ground squirrels and gophers have frolicked for generations without breaching the levee, though they do present some risk, however small, of tunneling through and weakening the entire structure. A far less toxic, more effective, cheaper, and fun option would be to use raptors and other birds of prey as “integrated pest management.” Habitat restoration, perches and nesting boxes have proven effective elsewhere.

Even while the city is under a tight deadline to contract and complete work for FEMA accreditation, government leaders and agencies are reevaluating how this kind of work is done. Times may finally be changing, with ecological, decolonial, and antipatriarchal practices (perhaps) finally trickling up to the establishment from decades of radical thought and activism, even if they co-opt these practices for their own neoliberal, rather than liberatory, ends, as the Biden/Harris administration did at COP27 last November.

Included in that Biden/Harris document: “Nature-based solutions in floodplain management: The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is revising its floodplain management requirements to require consideration of nature-based solutions as alternatives for all projects that have the potential to affect floodplains or wetlands. This action is in response to Executive Order 13690, which established the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard that requires federal agencies to amend their floodplain policies to consider the use of nature-based solutions. Interim program policies are underway.”

The US Army Corps of Engineers’ partnership with the Network for Engineering with Nature website describes, “Engineering With Nature® [as] the intentional alignment of natural and engineering processes to efficiently and sustainably deliver economic, environmental, and social benefits through collaboration.”

Aside from the ludicrous trademark on “Engineering With Nature (™),” and the offensive assumption that we can continue to engineer nature at all, this time with her, even to maintain the military-industrial complex and protect private real estate, there are useful recommendations here. Many are low-tech, managed retreat options that many of us on the ecological-left will see as common sense: give rivers room to roam again (via levee setbacks), restore carbon sinks and improve water quality with wetland restoration (including removing hardscapes like parking lots), improve species survival and diversity with reforestation projects (aids integrated pest management).

Perhaps our next ballot initiative could be to recognize our river’s rights of personhood, as the people of Toledo, Ohio, did for their portion of Lake Erie and its watershed in 2018.

A year after its establishment near the present-day clock tower in 1791, Mission Santa Cruz was destroyed in a flood. Only needing to learn that lesson once, missionaries retreated and rebuilt on top of the nearest terrace. Instead of me rehashing it, you can read The History of Floods on the San Lorenzo River in the City of Santa Cruz, a mid-length online article by Daniel McMahon.

I thoroughly agree with Daniel McMahon’s conclusion: “A reading of the history of a town developing in a floodplain, and struggling to cope with the floods of 120 years suggests that there is a relationship between the river and the city, and that this has always been a changing relationship. Some balance can hopefully be found between the protection of the City of Santa Cruz from the San Lorenzo River, and the protection of the natural aspects of the river from the city.”

It seems to me a huge folly to establish a permanent human settlement in a flood plain, and then to increasingly armor that settlement each time it floods again. Once built, we’re largely locked into the logic of that infrastructure, and it becomes less and less likely that we will pivot to respect the logic of the land.

With catastrophic climate change happening now, globally and in Santa Cruz, we already live with “weather whiplash,” unprecedented proximity of wildfires, faster-than-modeled sea-level-rise, and intensified beach and cliff erosion. With downtown residents’ recent evacuation warning, West Cliff Drive crumbling into the sea, and the lucrative Steamers Lane losing cliff chunks, which logic will prevail?

A fortress isn’t going to save us from the changing climate. Managed retreat is the reasonable response, given that unmanaged retreat is the only other option.

To get involved with current river restoration work, contact:

Barbara Riverwoman, Protect Our River, river@cruzio.com, 831-346-8944

Jane Mio, The Estuary Project, slvhabitatrestoration.org

Coastal Watershed Council, Get involved, volunteer!

And don’t forget to keep reading those consent agendas, you never know what gems you’ll find!

Also on this week’s city council agenda:

So much for increased transparency, accountability, and participatory democracy under Mayor Keeley’s tenure! I guess from now on if we want to know the rationale behind councilmembers’ votes, we’ll have to remember to track down the meeting minutes two weeks later, instead of hearing their thoughts during the meeting or in the easily available online recording. This item also snugs up language around disruptions to council meetings.

Consent Agenda Item 10: Changes to the Councilmembers’ Handbook (CN)

The proposed resolution would amend the Councilmembers’ Handbook (on page 23 at “Remarks of Councilmembers Entered in Minutes”) so that it contains the following language: “In response to a roll call vote, Councilmembers shall respond with “yes”, “no”, or “I am disqualified.”

If a Councilmember wishes to have an abstract of their statements on any subject under consideration by the Council entered in the minutes, they may submit those statements in writing to the City Clerk Administrator within 48-hours after the relevant Council meeting ends, and those statements shall be included in the minutes.”

We also received the police chief’s terse responses to the auditor’s report, including a 2019 death in custody. I’ll keep saying it: we need a community police oversight body, not just a single independent auditor.

General Business Item 27: Response to 2021 Independent Police Auditor Report (PD)

In 2022 the Independent Police Auditor (IPA) presented its 2021 annual report to the Public Safety Committee (March 23, 2022) and City Council (August 23, 2022). The report addressed the IPA’s review of thirteen formally investigated public complaints, administrative investigations involving an in-custody death and a vehicle pursuit, and two other concerns regarding SCPD performance.

The report notes that many files reviewed reflect “thorough investigations and sound conclusions” but also outlines 26 recommendations to strengthen accountability systems, including ways that SCPD can improve investigation and review of critical incidents.

And in the budget adjustments, $35,000 for a new SCPD indoor shooting range? That amount of money could help at least 10 residents avoid eviction, access reproductive health care, or get seniors rides to appointments if it was shifted from the police budget to CORE funding for social services.

General Business Item 30.1 FY 2023 Budget Adjustments and Information