Can you bury a stream under 400 feet of garbage with no ecological impact?

Potrero Hills Landfill says you can

The new Recirculated Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for the proposal to expand the Potrero Hills Landfill on the edge of Suisun Marsh is a remarkable and alarming document. The proposed project would create a 400-foot-high landfill mountain on what is now a thriving valley and streambed. What is remarkable is that the DEIR concludes that there would be no ecological impact!

Suisun Marsh and its Secondary Management Area (SMA - the hills and grasslands surrounding the marsh) form the largest brackish marsh complex on the West Coast of North America and one of its most important natural areas. The state protects it with one of the strongest environmental laws in the country, the Suisun Marsh Protection Act of 1977, which prohibits new development in the Marsh, and allows essentially only agriculture in the Secondary Management Area (SMA).

The Act contains one important exemption, however. That exemption allowed what in 1977 was a small, mom-and-pop solid-waste landfill already located in the SMA to move to another location in the SMA - because it was filled to capacity. Such a move was supposed to be allowed only if no significant ecological impact would result, but at that time, environmentalists were few in Solano County, and no one challenged the move. A new landfill was created in the SMA in part of the beautiful valley of Spring Branch Creek. Since then, a major national firm has bought the landfill and has greatly increased its rate of filling. The space is almost filled up, and so the owner has developed a plan to fill another 200 acres of the valley in the SMA.

This valley is extraordinarily rich in wildlife. The untouched part contains wetlands and grasslands that provide important habitat for many critters such as the threatened California tiger salamander, the state-protected golden eagle, and the evocative long-billed curlew, the latter a species on the brink of disaster. Spring Branch Creek, flowing through the valley, feeds several sloughs of Suisun Marsh where the endangered Delta smelt lives for part of its life cycle. Some of the creek was impacted by earlier landfill development, but the new proposal would destroy more than a mile of this vital creek.

We are not amazed that landfillers would propose to further devastate this wonderful valley, but what is truly amazing is their bald-faced claim that there would be no significant ecological impacts.

Spring Branch Creek? Well, that is no creek at all according to the DEIR; it is simply stormwater run-off. "To keep all runoff water from the surface of the landfill within the main Potrero Hills Valley Watershed, [t]he drainage water is directed into the onsite drainage system where it combines with the other landfill runoff and all the runoff is handled collectively." Drainage water was once called rain, and rainwater once ran down creeks and streams, but now, evidently, runs only in drainage ditches.

The DEIR also soothes that "the BCDC [Bay Conservation and Development Commission] Panel report was concerned that habitat fragmentation may result from the proposed landfill expansion. Although the landfill may form a barrier to the movement of plants and animals during its active life, lands to the east and west would continue to allow movements from north to south. The landfill would grow slowly eastward over the years of operation. . . . Thus, the habitat changes would evolve and not be a wholesale, rapid changing environment." This new mountain would be about 2/3 of a mile long; counting the old landfill, over a mile and a half of barrier would be created. For slow-moving land creatures such as salamanders, even if that barrier grows slowly, it would still remain a barrier once completed.

For whatever impacts may remain on the several hundred acres to be destroyed, the landfillers claim mitigation credit for proposing to preserve over 600 acres of grasslands. These grasslands, however, happen already to be within the SMA and so are already protected by law from any sort of intrusive development other than agriculture, a use compatible with most if not all of the critters now using the existing grasslands. So the proposed mitigation is really no mitigation at all.

WhatYouCanDo

This EIR and project will probably come before the Solano County Board of Supervisors for approval before you have read this article.

If the county approves, the final voice on the project will be BCDC, which is likely to hear this issue in the spring or early summer. Please write to:

Will Travis, Executive Director
San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission
50 California St., #2600
San Francisco, CA 94111.

Ask the Commission to deny the Potrero Hills Landfill expansion. The relevant law for the Commission's decision states that the landfill cannot be expanded if that expansion will result in a significant ecological impact to the Suisun Marsh and the SMA. Because you can't turn a rich valley into a mountain without having a devastating ecological impact the Commission should deny this project.

Arthur Feinstein, Bay Chapter Executive Committee