Posted on May 5, 2025
The only marine lab on the San Francisco Bay is on the brink of shuttering, after failing to secure the funds necessary to cover its operating and maintenance costs.
San Francisco State University’s Estuary and Ocean Science Center, which has conducted critical marine research in Tiburon for nearly half a century, failed to raise the $10 million the cash-strapped university said was needed by the end of April to keep the lab open, at least in the short term.
“My deadline was yesterday,” said Katharyn Boyer, an SF State ecology professor, who is the interim director of the center.
Boyer said she recently found out her last-ditch grant proposal had been rejected.
Without that funding, the school is likely to begin phasing out the center’s operations over the next six months. Boyer, two other tenured faculty and their graduate students will move back to the university’s main campus.
About 12 adjunct faculty and employees who are not funded through the university could lose their jobs, Boyer said.
Scientists, conservationists and community members have rallied to save the center since the university announced in February that it could no longer afford to keep the doors open on its 53-acre Tiburon campus.
The center’s turmoil is a result of San Francisco State’s deep financial troubles. With dropping enrollment and new reductions to state university funding, the school announced it would need to slash spending by some $25 million next year.
Boyer said her frenzied fundraising efforts over the last few months have brought in about $3.2 million, just shy of the $3.5 million she said is needed to keep the center operating for the next three years. However, that alone is unlikely to sway university administrators, who note that aside from the operating budget, the center also needs millions of dollars in maintenance and repairs to continue functioning properly.
“I presented a plan to the university leadership for how we would cover our costs so that there would be no cost to the general fund for the next three years,” Boyer said, a day after meeting with administrators. “They don’t pay for anything then. We cover our costs entirely.”
Boyer said that the school was also deterred by her “bake-sale” fundraising approach, which involved collecting multiple smaller donations, rather than securing a large — and potentially sustaining — grant from a single source.
“So even though it was I think by all accounts a heroic effort to fundraise that amount in a couple of months time, it still might not be considered a successful campaign,” she said.
That said, she noted that if someone donated an additional $300,000 or so, “like today, it wouldn’t hurt.”
“But I don’t know if it’s going to change anybody’s mind at this point,” she said. “I mean, if we had a bigger donor who could step up, that to me is what would change their minds.”
Katharyn Boyer, interim EOS executive director and professor of biology, talks about tanks used for ocean acidification projects, at San Francisco State’s Estuary and Ocean Science center, in Tiburon on April 23, 2025.
Robert King, a spokesperson for SF State, said the amount Boyer has raised “wouldn’t address the long-term issues with the site.”
He emphasized that, absent a funding miracle, the site will close, but the center’s work would continue at the school’s main campus.
“The effort to find additional funding sources or a partner to help shoulder the burden of the location dates back several years and includes SF State administrators, EOS staff and even assistance from the CSU Chancellor’s Office,” he said in an email. “In addition to the operating fund shortfall, the [university] estimated $3.97 million needed funds just for safety repairs if we found a partner to continue operations.”
The university began research at the Romberg Tiburon Campus, once a U.S. Navy base, in 1978. Although many of the defunct military structures are in disrepair, the university’s main lab buildings serve as a regional science hub. The site is also home to the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.
“It’s the only marine biology center in San Francisco Bay, and it’s leading the innovation of how to use nature for sea-level rise resilience,” said Evyan Borgnis Sloane, deputy executive officer of the California State Coastal Conservancy and a San Francisco State alum who studied at the center. “If you don’t want to see the bay shoreline where you kayak, walk and swim be transformed over time to concrete sea walls, then you should care about this center closing.”
Ironically, if the center closes, Boyer might have to return millions of dollars in research funding, including out of a recent $4.3 million grant from the California State Coastal Conservancy for climate change adaptation and education projects. Boyer said she would also have to give back $5.8 million awarded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for a new aquatic research facility.
If the site shuts down, Boyer said, the university would likely fence it off and hire security guards to monitor it, at a cost of about $500,000 a year, while they tried to sell it.
Stakeholders from across California have joined the Friends of the Estuary and Ocean Science Center, reaching out to their representatives and the university to voice their strong support for the center.
“All the agencies responsible for managing California’s coasts and oceans owe a lot to the studies, education and leadership of the Estuary and Ocean Science Center,” said Rebecca Schwartz Lesberg, the president of consulting firm Coastal Policy Solutions, who organized the coalition.
“We provide a service and we do it well, and we’re valued for it, but somehow we just can’t seem to convince the outside community that has the means to make a difference that they should,” Boyer said.
While San Francisco State values the work of the center, she added, they just can’t afford to fund it anymore.
“There are so many people who are like, ‘I can’t believe the only marine lab on San Francisco Bay could close,’” Boyer said. “We should be outraged, right? It’s unbelievable to me, anyway, to be in this kind of dire situation and to have had so much press and to have people not step up.
“I just have to think that our region has different priorities than what I would have expected.”
