Contents
- A Letter from Sally Gale, Marin RCD Board President
- “A New, Laid-Back Life for a Creek” byFriends of Corte of Madera
- “From Darkness into the Light” by Friends of Willow Creek
- “Urban Ebbs and Flows in the Mill Valley Watershed” by the Mill Valley StreamKeepers
A Letter from Sally Gale
Marin RCD Board President
When my husband, Mike, and I moved to my family’s west-Marin ranch from Hawaii in 1993, our ranch’s creek was bare
and uninviting with only a few willows defined the curves and bends. Big clumps of soil regularly eroded and washed into the creek; the water was brown, occasionally sporting clumps of poop.
Fortunately, my father made friends with Charlette Epifanio, then head of the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Petaluma Field Office. Through her, I met Steve Chatham, the then Principle of Prunuske Chatham Inc. a restoration consulting firm, and through connecting with them our creek restoration project was born.
In 1996, out of work salmon fishermen erected fences on both sides of the creek to keep our livestock out. Without access to the creek, our livestock needed water, so NRCS helped fund off-stream water sources. The next phase of the project was planting native trees in the wet areas. This creek project was the launching point of a great adventure that is not finished yet.
Soon after our creek project was done, I got invited to join the board of the Marin Resource Conservation District (Marin RCD); Charlette and Steven happen to be close partners with the District. I thought this might be fun, because it would be a way for me to better know the new community I was now a part of. While I knew my many relatives, since the ranch has been in the family since 1862; the idea of helping all Marin County ranchers sounded like a wonderful opportunity. I have been on this friendly board for almost 30 years now.
During that time, the Marin RCD has sped forward from being a small part-time secretary/bookkeeper plus a board to now being the board plus a staff of ten. Nancy Scolari, our steadfast Executive Director, has provided expertise and grace. From managing one grant at a time, we are now supported by twenty-seven grants. Our annual budget has grown from one to three million dollars. Measure A in no small part has enabled us to respond to all the requests we get from ranchers. We have provided assistance to almost a third of the farmers and ranchers in Marin County.
The 74 square-mile watershed that our ranch is a part of, the Walker Creek watershed has received much attention, especially lately. Over the past several decades, neighboring ranchers here have partnered with Marin RCD to clean up the creeks, plant native trees, increase biodiversity and support healthy soils and livestock. After implementing numerous conservation practices with over 50% of the ranchers within the Walker Creek watershed, salmon and steelhead have been rebounding within the watershed.
We are most grateful to all the Federal and State agencies who have served as our partners over the years. The support of the voters of Marin County most recently through Measure A funds has been a tremendous boost. Our hearts gave a jump when NOAA invited us to apply for a 9 million dollar grant to provide nursery habitat for small salmon and steelhead in the Walker Creek Estuary, along with several programs to promote native plants and biodiversity projects.
It has been my pleasure to serve on the Marin RCD Board all these years. From what I have written above, you can see that it has been a lot of fun!
“A New, Laid-Back Life for a Creek”
For years, Friends of Corte Madera Creek Watershed has dreamed of removing the concrete flood control channel in Kentfield and Ross. It has harmed the steelhead trout population and extirpated the coho salmon from Corte Madera Creek. It is poorly designed and a failure at flood management. The College of Marin has been supportive and the response from the public has been positive.
Finally, if all goes well, (de)construction of a short length of it can begin in late Summer 2025. The process seems simple enough: Develop a design, complete environmental review and get permits, and carry out the construction. Of course, the challenge is funding these efforts.
In 2017 Friends hired Geomorph Design to prepare a conceptual plan for laying back the right bank of the creek (looking downstream) starting at the upstream end of the College of Marin campus and ending at the downstream end of the concrete channel near the RVSD Kentfield pump station (existing infrastructure prevents substantial construction on the left bank). Using Geomorph’s plans, Friends obtained funding from the Coastal Conservancy and Marin Community Foundation to prepare the 65% designs for the reach downstream of Stadium Way, what we refer to as the Lower College of Marin Habitat Restoration (Lower COM) Project.
Using those designs, Friends obtained all the permits necessary for the Lower COM project except for the Army Corps of Engineer permit to modify an existing project (408 Permit). The Flood Control District, bundling our project with the upstream work in Kentfield and Ross on fish passage and flood management, prepared the Environmental Impact Report and obtained the 408 Permit. Finally, the District funded preparation of the 100% designs and specifications, and the project was shovel ready. A combination of funding sources from the County, the Coastal Conservancy, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and US Fish and Wildlife Service would have allowed construction in 2024.
However, the project is located in a FEMA regulatory floodway, so special conditions apply. Our project easily satisfied them, but other parts of the bundled project did not. The District plans to construct all parts of the project together and has had problems satisfying FEMA. As a result, the Lower COM project is delayed and we have lost some funding as a result.
The remaining hurdle is to again get all the funding necessary for construction. We are waiting for the district sort out its problems with FEMA and to receive additional grant funding for upstream fish passage and flood risk reduction. If all goes well, construction will begin in late summer 2025.
See www.friendsofcortemaderacreek.org for more information about Friends.
From the Darkness Into the Light
Friends of Willow Creek, in Sausalito, is celebrating 13 years of stewardship and advocacy for “creek daylighting”, which is the conversion of buried pipes that convey former streams to above-ground, vegetated channels. Daylighting creeks is a complex, expensive and uncommon undertaking, as the Friends have learned, and requires patient planning, outreach, and partnership-building over a sustained period of time. One of the reasons creeks were buried in Sausalito and mostly forgotten was to make room for buildings, streets and yards, so there is not much room available to restore creeks and their riparian corridors. Willow Creek represents one of those rare opportunities, with most of its alignment on public lands through the City with no permanent structures, and this inspired the formation of the Friends to protect the last remnants of what remains, and possibly add to them in the future.
The Friends partnered with the Sausalito Marin City School District (SMCSD) to apply for U.S. EPA Water Quality Improvement Program (WQIF) funding in 2022. This application was for funding the design and construction of a daylighted creek channel along with a newly planned school campus on Nevada Street funded by Measure P passed by the voters in 2020. Also included in the grant are provisions for monitoring and outreach, naming Marin RCD as one of the partners to advise on revegetation of the restored riparian corridor. In June 2023 U.S. EPA announced SMCSD had been awarded $3 Million for the project and they have already begun to use the funding to modify school campus designs. If the project stays on schedule, design could be completed this year and construction of the creek channel could begin as soon as Summer 2025.
In early 2023, the creek daylighting project was uncertain because of concerns raised by some in the school community about the safety of a creek corridor through the center of the campus, where the underground pipe is currently located. On March 7, 2023, the City Council of Sausalito weighed-in on behalf of the Friends and unanimously passed Resolution 22-2023 encouraging the SMCSD to daylight the creek as part of the campus project. Subsequently the Friends were able to fund the preliminary design of an alternative alignment to go around the new school and affirm the support and commitment of its SMCSD partners.
The southern Marin peninsula is a coastal fog condensation machine because of its steep topography and orientation parallel to the Pacific Ocean coastline. The air above the ocean, saturated with water, is wrung by this ridgeline and fuels perennial streamflows that drain to Richardson Bay through the City of Sausalito. Sausalito’s name is Spanish for “little willow grove” which grow near little creeks that are now mostly buried and forgotten. Therefore creek daylighting in Sausalito will help restore its natural heritage and remind residents that there are waterways that can provide water quality improvement, flood attenuation, wildlife habitat and quality-of-life benefits right here in town, as they used to do for millenia.
Urban Ebbs and Flows in the Mill Valley Watershed
By Betsy Bikle, Mill Valley StreamKeepers
From the flanks of Mt. Tamalpais to the waters of Richardson Bay of San Francisco Bay, the waters flow through redwood forest, mixed bay and Douglas Fir, and grassy slopes down to brackish wetlands and through urbanized zones of homes, exotic gardens, and downtown buildings. RCD helps restore stream banks. RCD educates about the web of plants and animals. From bacteria to banana slugs to skunks, foxes, coyotes, deer, birds and an occasional otter (but no beaver). RCD can be called on to assist the city, county and environmental organizations, such as Mill Valley StreamKeepers (MVSK) to collaborate with the wider community. We appreciate the Resource Conservation District people!
Active efforts to protect and rejuvenate the natural environment include massive undertakings in several areas. One goal is to prevent massive wildfire. There is a large amount of built-up brush and biomass on the mountain. Controlled burns are risky and not done very often. Native Americans used to clear brush by setting fire to it, but that’s before you had to worry about burning down homes. Thanks to the City’s emergency preparation team, many residents are adding defensible space around their homes. And there are lots of flammable non-native species that add to fire risk. This includes French and Scotch broom and eucalyptus trees. We need to put more effort into reducing these invasive species.
Preventing destructive flooding in low areas necessitates keeping bridges and culverts unblocked. Sea level rise mitigation is under study including through the leadership of our county supervisor, Stephanie Moulton Peters.
We do not have an aquifer to protect, but we do need to encourage water sinking into the ground rather than running off impermeable surfaces. The city is under mandate to provide in the next few years 800 more housing units. Green roofs, permeable paving, raingardens, electric cars, heat exchangers will all be important. Mill Valley now has a part time climate control and sustainability coordinator, Grace Ledwith. Welcome!
Non native plant removal, especially Broom, ivy, and a sedge, Carex pendula, particularly in riparian areas, is an ongoing effort. It’s looking like we need professional help with this effort.
Bring back the fish! Although we had a few Chinook venturing up our streams recently, t
here are no Coho anymore. Steelhead trout do populate our streams, but their spawning ability is hampered by several temporal (meaning that only during very good water flow can the fish make it upstream) barriers to migration. One such barrier is a dam immediately adjacent to the Cascade Avenue bridge in M
ill Valley’s Old Mill Park. We are planning to make a second application for a grant to remove the dam.
And so the effort goes on for restoration and protection of the natural environment.
