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The Trump Administration has given new life to developing 1,400 acres of San Francisco Bay’s shoreline in Redwood City, a property where developers a decade ago proposed the largest housing development on the bay in half a century.
In a letter earlier this month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ruled that the land owned by Cargill Salt is not bound by the federal Clean Water Act. The decision, potentially worth billions of dollars, makes the land easier to develop or to sell at a higher price to the government for wildlife habitat restoration in the future.
In 2009, Cargill and DMB Associates, an Arizona developer, proposed building 12,000 homes on the industrial salt-making land east of Highway 101.
The project, which would have been the largest development on the bay since Foster City was constructed in the 1960s, was withdrawn in 2012 amid opposition from community groups and environmentalists.
On Monday, however, potentially setting up a huge new environmental battle, the companies said they are moving forward with public meetings to help craft a new project after the Trump Administration issued its key ruling.
In a 15-page letter on March 1 to the Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies, EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler concluded that the property, which was once underwater and part of San Francisco Bay a century ago before it was diked and filled for salt-making, pre-dates the Clean Water Act. Congress passed that landmark environmental law in 1972 to limit the filling and draining of marshes, bays and other waterways.
Therefore, Wheeler wrote, it “is not subject” to the law’s restrictions on development.
Environmental groups say the land, which sits at sea level, is prone to flooding and should instead be converted back to tidal wetlands for wildlife as part of wider efforts to restore San Francisco Bay. They promised to fight any new development.
“It’s a terrible precedent for the Clean Water Act and for the bay,” said David Lewis, executive director of Save the Bay, an environmental group.
“It’s clear that Cargill and DMB worked with the Trump administration to get this outcome,” he said. “It’s part of the Trump administration agenda for gutting the Clean Water Act, which has protected the bay from reckless filling for more than 40 years, which has allowed massive wetland restoration around the bay.”
Cargill still operates an industrial salt-making plant on the property. Salt is evaporated from bay waters and scraped off muddy “crystalizer beds” to be used in road de-icing, food and other uses.
Cargill has not yet issued a new specific development proposal. David Smith, an attorney in San Francisco for Cargill and DMB, said Monday that the company plans to build a website in the coming weeks and will hold public meetings to gauge public interest in a variety of options.
“We want to hear what the needs are, what the concerns are and craft something based on that input,” Smith said. “At two square miles there’s room for just about everything on that site.”
Smith said that housing, open space and connection with a planned ferry terminal at Redwood Shores could all be among the options.
If the company does try to build in the land, it still will need local approval from the Redwood City Council and several state agencies, including the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, even though its largest federal hurdle has been removed.
On Monday, Redwood City Mayor Ian Bain said he does not favor developing the site.
“I’d like to see Cargill donate or sell the land so that it can be restored to wetlands some day, as they have done around the Bay Area,” Bain said. “It’s not zoned for housing. It is zoned for harvesting salt. It would require a general plan amendment to allow housing out there. There is very little appetite in our community or on our city council to do that.”
Bain said the Cargill site is not appropriate for housing, since it sits in an area right near sea level and at risk as the bay continues to rise due to climate change.
A major development there — Cargill’s original plan called for 25,000 new residents on the property — would make bad traffic much worse on that part of Highway 101, he added.
Bain noted that Redwood City has been approving significant new housing construction downtown and along transit corridors such as Caltrain.
The new decision is something of a reversal. Four years ago, under the Obama administration, the regional office of the EPA in San Francisco came to the conclusion that the land was covered under the Clean Water Act, said Jared Blumenfeld, the former regional administrator.
But when his staff contacted EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., for final approval in 2016, managers there said that the agency was so busy with the Flint, Michigan, polluted water crisis that it would be months before it could address the Cargill issue.
After President Trump won election, he put in place new EPA leaders.
Blumenfeld, now the head of California’s state EPA, said he “vehemently disagrees” with the new federal decision because the Cargill site was once part of the bay and could fairly easily be restored to bay marshlands.
“Both from a precedent and policy perspective, they are undermining the Clean Water Act,” he said. “It’s no surprise because they are also trying to undermine it in other ways.”
In 2003, Cargill, a private company based in Minnesota, sold 16,500 acres of its salt ponds in the South Bay to the public for $100 million, setting up one of the largest wetlands restoration efforts ever attempted in the United States.
Since then, state and federal wildlife agencies have been converting much of the land — which includes property in Southern Alameda County and in Alviso — back to wetlands for fish, birds and public recreation.
But the Redwood City site was left out of the 2003 deal because Cargill said it could be developed more easily than the other properties, many of which were covered in water, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein said she couldn’t raise the amount Cargill wanted from Congress.