Posted on February 19, 2024
Over the years, Marin has taken the initiative to restore its wetlands.
The focus and work is a recognition of the importance this soggy acreage plays in the ecological chain that keeps our bays and oceans healthy and thriving.
In many cases, it means restoring historic wetlands covered by years of built-up silt and blanketed by landfill.
The announcement that work will soon start on two such projects is another sign that progress is being made to restore and revive these shorelines.
In Kentfield, work will soon start to lower sections of the tall concrete flood-control walls built along Corte Madera Creek in the 1960s.
The goal is to reduce the walls in order to foster restoring the native habitat into a self-sustaining shoreline.
The project is part of the county Flood Control District’s plans for risk-reduction work along that stretch of the creek. At the same time, the plan will enhance habitat for fish, waterfowl – among them the federally protected Ridgway rail – and other animals, such as river otters.
Also included in the project is an educational component and opportunities for environmental programs at College of Marin and Kent Middle School.
On the other side of the county, a $812,000 project has received a National Coastal Wetlands Conservation grant to enhance four acres of intertidal Tomales Bay wetlands and habitat at the county’s popular Chicken Ranch Beach, near Inverness.
The work has been shaped to address long-standing problems with bacterial pollution, remove dredged sediment that’s been dumped in the area and remove spoils left from a 1950s installation of a communications cable, enhance the wetlands and riparian habitats, address worries about flooding and reduce the need to dredge the channel.
Officials also expect the work will help reduce beach erosion.
The overall goal is to address decades-old man-made problems with the tidal function of the bay and remove an often stagnant drainage ditch that crosses the beach with marshland designed to flush out pollutants.
The priority of eliminating a recurring public health risk has made this a state and county priority.
“Addressing existing pollution problems through tidal marsh restoration provides an additional public benefit and constitutes a prudent investment of state resources,” a 2022 Coastal Conservancy staff report said. Staff wrote that the work will, in effect, create “a treatment wetland along Tomales Bay, thereby improving water quality at the same time as enhancing tidal marsh.”
The Chicken Ranch Beach project has been in the works for years and represents a collaboration of a number of governmental and local nonprofit agencies.
Both projects focus on restoring the landscape closer to the way nature made it as the best way to address a number of problems while also enhancing and expanding habitat.
In the case of Chicken Ranch Beach, the project should make the popular beach, which attracts a lot of use because of its shallow water, safer for the public.
For Chicken Ranch Beach, steering federal dollars to the project is going to finally take a long-proposed plan off of blueprints and to real change.
The Kentfield project is an advancement of the county’s goal of addressing flood control by enhancing the creek and away from 1960s engineering that turned the creek into an ugly concrete channel.
Both projects are important advancements in Marin’s investment into repairing, restoring and enhancing the natural environment of our county.
