Sea level rise is forcing cities around San Francisco Bay to weigh demand for new housing against the need to protect communities from flooding. Builders say they can solve this dilemma with cutting-edge civil engineering. But no one knows whether their ambitious efforts will be enough to keep newly built waterfront real estate safe in coming decades.

Meanwhile, developers are busy building — and telling the public that they can mitigate this one effect of climate change, despite mounting evidence that it could be a bigger problem than previously believed.

On Treasure Island, a flat tract of 20th-century landfill with epic bay vistas, workers have poured the foundation for a 22-story tower, the first of six planned high-rise buildings, and broken ground on an affordable housing complex. Another, for families and unhoused veterans, is nearly complete. Townhomes, retail space and a waterfront transit hub are also in the pipeline. All told, the $6 billion development would be home to 20,000 people or more.

Engineers for the public-private consortium transforming the island, Treasure Island Community Development, say they are pursuing aggressive sea rise adaptation strategies. Improvements include raising some of the land by several feet, preparing a buffer zone for future levees and pumps, and setting aside low-lying open space that could convert to floodable marshland as higher bay waters spill onshore.

This is not a cheap endeavor. The development group’s director, Bob Beck, did not return multiple emails and phone calls regarding costs for this work. A 2011 report by the city of San Francisco, which includes Treasure Island, estimated that “geotechnical stabilization” measures would cost $137 million. Storm drains, soil grading and landscape and open-space improvements would add about $120 million.

Dilip Trivedi, the site’s project manager with international engineering firm Moffatt and Nichol, has been touting the consortium’s efforts for more than a decade. He said in a recent interview that the most built-up parts of the island should be safe from sea rise through at least 2070. Fifty years or so is a reasonable planning horizon for new developments, he added, and additional phased seawall construction can help future generations stay a step ahead of ever-higher tides.

“When you put together significant infrastructure, you don’t want to have to maintain it for about that time,” Trivedi said. “It is what we call project life.”

Climate scientists, however, commonly try to predict sea rise out at least to the year 2100, a time when some current schoolchildren could be octogenarian residents of the island.

Every contemporary climate model predicts that, even with deep carbon reductions starting this decade, several feet of sea rise are locked in. The debates for climate adaptation strategy are how many feet and how far down the road we should consider.

With ever more sophisticated climate predictions, the outlook for sea level rise has continued to darken, indicating that current trends will likely accelerate through the end of the century. In one pessimistic scenario — which researchers say is among the possibilities in a “business as usual” global greenhouse gas emissions future — much of the island could find itself underwater frequently, and some of the most developed areas could occasionally be threatened with flooding.

To home in on Treasure Island’s future, the San Francisco Public Press asked researchers at the United States Geological Survey’s Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center, based in Santa Cruz, to provide an analysis of storm conditions under various climate scenarios using sea rise projections by the Ocean Protection Council. They found that bay waters could surge higher than the developers have long been saying publicly.

In that analysis, by 2100 there is a small but not insignificant chance of 4 feet, 11 inches of sea level rise — slightly more than what the island’s engineers have accounted for. Adding in the effects of tides, weather and other transient events, such as in the kind of extreme storm seen once in a century, that total could be 2 feet, 11 inches higher.

The resulting surge would, at least temporarily, send waves 1 foot, 2 inches higher than the lowest ground floors of some planned housing complexes.

While the project’s engineers never address this possibility in their public narratives, documents they have prepared show they have known about similar scenarios for years.

Their own maps, which superimpose flood conditions on existing land elevations, line up fairly closely to the Geological Survey’s map data. Yet the engineers have chosen to downplay the likelihood of these outcomes as they pursued permits to build, arguing that novel construction technologies could make the development invulnerable to flooding under any reasonable course of events.

In a 2016 sea rise adaptation filing with a regional watershed agency, Moffatt and Nichol included six maps showing potential flood conditions in each construction phase, side by side with maps showing how the planned short- and long-term sea level rise protections would prevent inundation. 

One map shows 4 feet of sea rise. Before any land improvements, nearly the entire island would have been inundated — up to 8 feet in places — during flooding calculated by FEMA to have a 1% chance of occurring per year. Another part of that document showed a graph that indicated a 4-foot rise was possible by around 2093. The Geological Survey’s analysis of the Ocean Protection Council extreme scenario for 2100 puts sea rise closer to 5 feet.

But Trivedi said that the raising of the land under many of the buildings, plus additional shoreline improvements, would protect key infrastructure. Beside that map, the engineers showed how the existing 3.5-mile perimeter wall could be raised by 1 to 3 feet, depending on location, which they said would keep much of the island dry, although a note appended to the diagram said: “Does not show intentional flooding from managed retreat on northern and eastern shorelines — TBD.”

Within the last year, regulators have started questioning whether the steps developers are taking are sufficient to guarantee that the island remains dry in the long term.

“This is a community that will be around a while,” said Ethan Lavine, chief of permits for shoreline development for the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. “At a certain point in time, they will need levee protection.” Lavine’s office is pressing Trivedi and his colleagues to use a more cautious view of climate change when assessing whether Treasure Island’s flood prevention techniques can handle what nature might throw at them. 

When evaluating permit applications, government agencies require developers to reference the “best available science” to assess threats from climate change. In October 2021, the engineers issued an update to the 2016 filing. In it, Trivedi compared his firm’s sea level rise expectations against studies by several scientific bodies, including California’s Ocean Protection Council and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. His preferred predictions minimized the effect of the worst-case scenarios. The only needed change, he argued, would be to move up the time frame for planning adaptations by as much as five years. 

Yet climate policy experts point out that with significant scientific papers being released each year, guidance for builders has become a moving target. Because they admit a great deal of uncertainty in their predictions, scientists always publish their results in charts that consider an array of environmental assumptions.

That gives developers leeway to choose which predictions to focus on when describing the risks to their capital investments. Treasure Island could be the most expensive local project in the region’s history to take advantage of this ambiguity.

Projecting Optimism

All of Trivedi’s recent public statements conclude that the likelihood of the gloomiest climate scenarios is remote, and that the level of risk to property and lives is insignificant given the proposed engineering fixes. But a close examination of the 2021 adaptation plan offers a few reasons for concern:

• It dismisses high-end forecasts, in which global warming accelerates due to uncontrolled carbon emissions.
• It selectively cites climate models that make planned infrastructure appear sufficient to virtually eliminate future flood risk.
• It focuses on relatively short time frames, such as 20 or 50 years, while offering little specificity about expected conditions at the end of the century, which falls within the lifetimes of some children alive today.

Trivedi said in an interview that for planning purposes, he is focused on one recent predicted milestone: 3 feet of sea rise by 2080. In that circumstance, the ground floors of most buildings, to be built upon a now-elevated development pad, would still have a buffer of nearly 4 feet above the average highest tide of today.

He also asserted that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific committee organized by the United Nations, recently reported sea rise could be less severe than previously forecasted, based on the track record of recent years. “What has been observed is that sea level rise is not tracking” to the most pessimistic scenarios, he said. But there are reasons to question his conclusion.

The localized scenario for 2100 examined by the Geological Survey — the one resulting in water levels 1 foot, 2 inches above some developed areas — relies on a climate change prediction assessed to have a probability of 5%, that is, a 1-in-20 statistical chance of occurring. That prediction was published by the California Ocean Protection Council, a body of experts organized by the state government, in recent guidelines for community planning.

Trivedi said the international group’s current report indicates there’s “low confidence in that scenario happening.” When asked for a citation to back up this claim, Trivedi referenced a “localized model” of the findings from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and five other federal agencies.

A report these agencies jointly issued in February 2022 in fact gave a more nuanced view. In a section titled “Future Mean Sea Level,” the authors did exclude one scenario used by the Ocean Protection Council that had been labeled “extreme” and not given a numerical probability. But that is not the scenario Trivedi said the group ruled out. This same report indicates that the West Coast is likely to see 4 to 8 inches of rise over 30 years, accelerating later in the century.

Regardless of the pace of the increase, Treasure Island developers say they have contingency plans relying on future residents or taxpayers to fund the construction of progressively higher walls around the urban zone — several feet every few decades. In its latest update, Moffatt and Nichol said sea level rise of 1 foot by 2043 would trigger the plan to elevate the perimeter.

A strategy reliant on levees might seem risky in light of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when faulty engineering of levees led to catastrophic flooding of parts of New Orleans that sit below the level of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. In light of this recent history, Bay Area regulators are starting to ask whether the Treasure Island plan is entirely watertight.

A March 2022 letter from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the agency that issued the island’s 2016 permit for waterfront areas, called the update too optimistic and tolerant of long-term flooding potential.

“Public access along a shoreline and a big mixed-use development require using a medium-to-high-risk projection for sea level rise,” said the commission’s planning manager, Erik Buehmann.

Re-engineering Shaky Ground

On an island built by the government generations ago out of rocks, soil and dredged sand, preparing high-and-dry land would be difficult even if it were not in an earthquake and tsunami zone.

In numerous reports and public presentations, Trivedi has said construction workers have elevated land on the 100-acre development pad to 3 feet, 6 inches above the “base flood elevation” — a height calculated by Federal Emergency Management Agency representing a 1% chance of flooding each year. The homes, hotels and businesses there will be set back from the shoreline by 200 to 300 feet on most sides and as much as 1,000 feet from the northern shore because that area is more prone to flooding. Building is planned to roll out in phases through 2035.

Workers have spent years using cranes to repeatedly drop heavy weights to compact the soil. They have driven vibrating probes into the earth, filling the holes with concrete for stabilization. They then piled 1 million cubic yards of soil atop the compacted layer. These measures are intended to prevent the kind of ground liquefaction seen in the Marina District and elsewhere during the devastating 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Other geological improvements include inserting vertical wick drains, akin to long drinking straws, to help remove water from the soil as it compresses. These techniques have been used by civil engineers around the world for more than 30 years to develop areas without easy access to bedrock.

Trivedi said these measures, together with a jagged, rocky seawall raised to allow for just over 1 foot of sea rise, would help take energy out of large waves, and the setback would use the landscape to dissipate any possible overtopping before it reaches valuable structures.

At the same time, the engineers have recognized that much of the island — particularly the low-lying northern end — are indefensible. Areas that have flooded in the past will eventually be sacrificed to rising waters. That strategy has immediate, concrete consequences: Dozens of existing structures, including homes of about 3,000 people currently living there, are set to be demolished to create open space. Over time these areas could be turned into tidal marshland to protect the newly developed areas from storms.

Regulators Balk at a Sunny Assessment

The Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the agency most empowered to weigh in on new waterfront building, is hamstrung by a legal mandate to regulate only what happens 100 feet inland, regardless of elevation — an artifact of legislation dating from before climate change was a dominant concern.

The 2016 permit the agency issued for improvements on Treasure Island’s margins, including a ferry terminal, required adaptation updates every five years. Moffatt and Nichol’s 2021 update concluded that the original adaptation plans needed few changes, except for possibly needing to accelerate, by five years, the planning process for building higher perimeter levees.

Regulators balked at the assessment. In a March 2022 letter, the commission advised Moffatt and Nichol to plan more conservatively. The agency demanded consideration of a 1-in-200 chance sea rise scenario, in which seas rise 6 feet, 11 inches by 2100. Adding in a 100-year storm surge, waves could plausibly overtop portions of the sea wall along the southeastern side by about 1 to 2 feet, and along the northern end by about 1 foot. That is an even worse outcome than that predicted by Geological Survey’s localized flooding model.

The commission said Moffatt and Nichol seemed too dismissive of chances that things could go wrong.

“The permittees decided to design the project considering very low risk of sea level rise related impacts” the letter said, noting also that engineers seemed too focused on the short time horizon of 2080.

Trivedi counters that the Treasure Island development was never built upon projections of a certain sea level happening by a certain date, because seawalls can, for all practical purposes, be built arbitrarily high, on whatever schedule is needed.

“We adopted an approach where we decided on an allowance we are building into the project,” he said in the interview. “As future projections come out, we will adjust the date of the adaptation.”

Commission staff met with planners from Moffatt and Nichol last summer to work out the requested additions to the 2021 adaptation strategy. Buehmann, who worked on the original permit, said follow-up discussions were to be expected because the Treasure Island permit was the first since the commission began requiring builders to submit sea rise assessments. “We didn’t expect it to be perfect the first time,” he said.

Whatever comes of this process  which Trivedi referred to as merely “an internal thing” that was required for the filing — the adaptation plan is unlikely to change significantly, because the development pad is already in place and huge construction cranes are sprouting up on Treasure Island’s skyline. What is left in the playbook is raising future seawalls, ceding the northern open space and the installation of pumps.

Government officials have long acknowledged the inevitability of Treasure Island’s relying on artificial barriers. In 2015, Brad McCrea, regulatory program director at the commission, told the Public Press: “At the end of the day, this will be a levee-protected community — there’s no getting around that.” Since then, agency staff have not changed their view.

Rapidly Outdated Climate Science

To determine how high to raise the building pad, Treasure Island builders consulted several climate studies published as early as 1987 and as recently as 2007. At that point, scientists were predicting that by 2100, oceans could rise as much as 4 feet, 7 inches.

This forecast was echoed by a state panel of scientists and policy experts in 2009, when then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger visited Treasure Island to announce its findings and call for better sea level rise mitigation.

Moffatt and Nichol then relied on these studies to anticipate that the oceans would rise 3 feet by 2075. So the company proposed raising the development pad to 3 feet, 6 inches above the predicted levels for a once-in-a-hundred-year flood.

Moffatt and Nichol did not spell out a rationale for setting the height of the development pad, as the Public Press reported in 2010. The firm did argue that raising it higher could create other problems, such as jeopardizing the island’s stability under the weight of packed soil and adding expense. “At some point it doesn’t become cost-effective — it’s a matter of acceptable levels of risk over your planning horizon,” Trivedi said in an interview then.

To be sure, when Treasure Island plans were drawn up, scientific modeling showed wide uncertainty about how much global temperatures could increase. In 2009, scientists around the world were saying that oceans could rise anywhere from a minimum of 3 feet, 3 inches to a maximum of 4 feet, 11 inches by 2100. At that time, the effects of ice melt from land via glaciers, snowpacks and ice caps were little understood.

Today, European and U.S. scientists using satellite imagery to measure the shape of Greenland’s ice sheets say melting is outstripping gains from snowfall. In a paper published last August, they found that no matter how much countries curb emissions, seas will rise by a minimum of 11 inches from this effect alone.  

Focusing Locally

The U.S. Geological Survey developed the Coastal Storm Modeling System to help protect waterfront communities. It simulates the forces behind wave and wind data and translates them into local flood projections that include tides, storm surges, waves and seasonal events such as El Niño.

The Public Press requested that the agency simulate a small section of San Francisco Bay, in the vicinity of Treasure Island, relying on probability scenarios for global sea levels in 2100 developed by the California Ocean Protection Council in a 2018 guidance paper. This report offered up sea rise projections of likelihoods as high as 50% and as low as 0.5%. 

The Ocean Protection Council’s examination of a wide array of probabilities heavily influenced the Bay Conservation and Development Commission’s critique of the Treasure Island adaptation update. The commission’s biggest concern was that change might happen faster than the engineers were anticipating.

[Explore sea level rise scenarios using Climate Central’s interactive tool. Here we show floodwaters at 7.8 feet above the present-day high tide line. ]

But Trivedi said the Ocean Protection Council’s past predictions had already failed. “If you look at the year 2022 projections, follow the OPC formulas,” Trivedi said. “We should have seen about 8 inches of sea level rise since 2000. In reality, it has been about 2 inches or less.”

Most forecasts predict increased global temperatures due to persistent carbon pollution. But the emissions projections are still hotly contested.

The Ocean Protection Council examined two emissions scenarios. One assumed that carbon dioxide output doubles through 2050. The other imagined more aggressive greenhouse gas reductions — 70% by 2050 and “net zero” emissions by 2080.

For the purposes of seeing how bad things could plausibly get, the U.S. Geological Survey used a midlevel emissions scenario. This decision was based on detailed simulations into the next century of swell and waves along the Pacific Ocean. What the researchers found was that paradoxically, milder greenhouse gas levels generated worse storms for California’s coast than do extreme ones. 

“What’s really changed in the research community is that worst-case scenarios have become more common,” said Patrick Barnard, a research geologist with the agency. “The state is asking communities to prepare for these.”

This approach helps waterfront areas learn to be more risk-averse to protect property and lives.

Avoiding Mistakes of the Past

Foster City is paying a high price for waterfront sprawl. Like Treasure Island, the mid-Peninsula community 25 miles to the south was built entirely on landfill, not unusual in the Bay Area, where efforts to accommodate population growth stretching back to the Gold Rush consumed most of the wetlands and tidal marshes.

Foster City did have worries about flooding decades ago. It is shot through with artificial waterways, including two sloughs, several small canals and an artificial lagoon. Barely above sea level before being developed, it would not exist if not for its levees and seawalls. 

Yet, in 2014 FEMA informed Foster City officials that new studies showed the levee system was neither strong nor tall enough to withstand a major storm and the large waves that would result. Update the seawalls and levees, or the entire city would be designated a floodplain, the agency said. 

Sixty years ago, developers there hauled in tons of sand to raise the land several feet to construct thousands of homes in what became a 33,000-resident community. That was a time when climate change was not a part of city planning vernacular. Today workers are busy widening and raising levees and adding interlocking steel plates as a bulwark against the storms federal regulators warned of, as well as rising seas.

But Treasure Island, which is slated to add 8,000 units of housing to accommodate more than 20,000 residents, is still more than a decade away from build-out. What the engineers put in place there in the next few years could avoid Foster City’s mistakes — or compound them.

To be sure, some cities are starting to alter blueprints on pace with the evolving science. In October, the Port of San Francisco announced it was collaborating with the Army Corps of Engineers to study how to shore up the city’s seawall along its eastern waterfront, from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Hunters Point Shipyard, to combat both sea rise and earthquake risk. This area includes attractions like the Chase Center sports arena, a project green-lighted before a city-commissioned study surfaced that predicted flooding from sea level rise in the new Mission Bay neighborhood, as the Public Press reported in 2017.

Port officials now say they anticipate 7 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. That is 2 feet, 5 inches higher than the level Treasure Island’s developers are planning for in their adaptation strategy.

The Port’s yearlong effort will consider elevating barriers along the Embarcadero, installing a system of locks at Mission Creek and buying back and cleaning up privately owned landfill areas around Islais Creek to return them to the tidal zone.

Not Easy to Abandon a Home

In the grips of a housing affordability crisis, San Francisco needs new construction. But is a flood zone the wisest place to build? That could depend on how long we expect buildings to last.

Barnard, of the U.S. Geological Survey, has traveled to many communities, including Okracoke Island, part of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, to assess how to protect people from storms. In September 2019, Hurricane Dorian shut the island down to visitors. For residents, it was hard to consider leaving a place they have inhabited for seven or eight generations. “You can’t detach people from their place, or their heart,” Barnard said. “They’ll stay until water is up to their nose.” 

Before the developers moved in, Treasure Island had roughly 3,000 residents, according to the 2020 Census, many living in homes built for the U.S. Navy in the mid-20th century when it was a military base. Nearly half have a household income less than $50,000, and many do not speak English. 

Now these residents are on tenterhooks. Under an agreement with the developer, people who lived on Treasure Island before 2011 are guaranteed new affordable and rent-controlled units. But the wait times and other inconveniences have been tough. Everyone is living in a construction site with an unreliable electrical grid that browns and blacks out frequently. 

The new units are supposed to be comparable to what they had, but longtime islander Christoph Opperman said they have been offered “interim” units that, for example, might not have enough space for a family, or lack laundry facilities.

“They’re picking us off one neighborhood at a time by making us do two moves,” Opperman said. “We’re not entitled to just anything on the island, but we are entitled to fair treatment.”

Treasure Island’s planners are essentially acknowledging that they must sacrifice part of the island to the bay, even while pursuing a more built-up urban environment just several hundred feet away. This combination of advance and retreat is all part of the plan, the engineers say.

Asked whether he would move to Treasure Island, Trivedi did not hesitate to say yes, observing that no part of the Bay Area was completely free of danger.

“I don’t see why not,” he said. “I mean, should people be moving to San Francisco, because of the seismic risk? Buildings are being designed to codes. And flooding is the same way.”

A version of this story was republished in partnership with Inside Climate News.

This reporting is supported by grants from the Solutions Journalism Network’s Business and Sustainability Initiative and by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Correction 5/4/2023: An earlier version of this story misstated the process the U.S. Geological Survey used to report an extreme flood projection for Treasure Island. The model upon which it was based was produced not by the agency, but by the Ocean Protection Council. Also, the likelihood of that scenario is higher than originally given — 5%, not 0.5 %.

The post Promising to Prevent Floods at Treasure Island, Builders Downplay Risk of Sea Rise appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

As regulators, environmental advocates and academic scientists debate the fundamental science of toxicology, it’s little wonder cities in the Bay Area — ground zero for thousands of lawsuits against the manufacturer totaling billions of dollars — have settled on wildly disparate policies about whether and where to use the herbicide in public spaces. (See “As Cancer Concerns Lead Cities to Ban Herbicide, S.F. Scales Back Use of Roundup.”)

Monsanto owner Bayer says glyphosate, the active ingredient in weedkiller Roundup, is not a carcinogen. The European Union and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency back the company’s view.

That conclusion contradicts a finding from the World Health Organization in 2015 that glyphosate is a “probable” human carcinogen. And international researchers and U.S. government agencies aside from the EPA are finding enough links to cancer and other illness to raise the level of concern and call for further research. 

Billions of dollars and the health of broad swaths of the public — especially the thousands of people in agriculture and public works who handle and apply the herbicide — potentially hang in the balance. Without scientific agreement, users across many sectors have been left to decide for themselves whether or not they are taking a big risk.

“Drawing a link between glyphosate exposure and cancer is tricky,” said Michael Davoren, a cell biologist at UCLA, specializing in immunology and cancer.

Without any type of exposure, one in 50 people will develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the type of cancer afflicting the Roundup plaintiffs, he said. People who handle the chemical, such as Dewayne Johnson and Edwin Hardeman, plaintiffs in two lawsuits against Bayer, are only incrementally more likely to succumb to the disease.

“Even at the highest levels of exposure like Johnson and Hardeman had, the cancer risk moves up to one in 35,” Davoren said. “But the cancer won’t develop until multiple mutations occur, among other factors.”

Plaintiffs have filed thousands of lawsuits against Bayer, which in September said it would settle about 15,000 of them after agreeing to pay $10 billion in a massive settlement offer announced in June. As of Nov. 9, the company said it had settled about 88,500 cases out of an estimated 125,000, according to Reuters.

Documents emerging from the lawsuits reveal that Monsanto buried research demonstrating a link between glyphosate and cancer or other illnesses, and that it even hired ghost writers to produce positive reports.

An earlier proposed settlement would have established a five-member scientific panel to determine whether glyphosate causes cancer and what exposure levels could be considered safe. That deal could have insulated Bayer from liability against future claims of harm should the panel have found glyphosate caused cancer, prompting criticism from U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria.

“In an area where the science may be evolving, how could it be appropriate to lock in a decision from a panel of scientists for all future cases?” he wrote in a preliminary order in July.

Sowing doubt about the science

The quality of the science conducted by the EPA and Monsanto to demonstrate the safety of glyphosate and enable the sale of glyphosate-based products is central to the lawsuits. According to court documents, the original testing of glyphosate in mice in the early 1980s found a strong link to cancer. Monsanto and the EPA were at odds over these early studies.

Over time, however, Monsanto was able to sow doubt at the EPA about the glyphosate cancer risk. Documents from the lawsuits show how the company paid scientists to determine glyphosate to be safe. 

The EPA has taken surprising stances that thwarted scientific inquiry. The agency worked in 2015 to derail a study eventually released last year from the toxicology branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, calling it a “duplication” of government resources. The EPA would not grant Health and Human Services access to raw data and animal studies that the EPA used in its own studies to renew registration of the herbicide. Instead, the agency provided summaries of this data to Health and Human Services.

UCLA’s Davoren said Monsanto “has never been 100% open in terms of allowing every raw detail of its studies for the academic community to pore over.”

Despite these obstacles, Health and Human Services used rat and human epidemiological studies to produce a toxicological profile on glyphosate that supported the WHO’s finding of a cancer risk, but did not draw a definitive conclusion on the matter.

A Bayer spokesman took issue with this interpretation. “Significantly, the report contains a summary of eight national and international agency assessments of carcinogenicity that, with the one exception of IARC, conclude that glyphosate is not carcinogenic,” wrote Bayer spokesman Bob Chlopak in an email, referring to the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

He was pointing to a single table summarizing mostly favorable findings. The 237-page profile examines several varieties of studies, including investigations by the cancer research agency, independent researchers  and a Monsanto-sponsored study by Ellen Chang and Elizabeth Delzell. 

Chlopak did not cite the company-sponsored research as part of Bayer’s response to the Health and Human Services paper. Instead, he called the International Agency for Research on Cancer “an outlier,” while quoting part of the report: “‘Most studies found no association between exposure to glyphosate-based products and risk of cancer.’”

The next sentence notes, “However, a possible association between exposure to glyphosate and risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma could not be ruled out, based on conflicting results.”

This report also found risk for noncancer health conditions, most notably miscarriage and preterm delivery, as well as reproductive concerns such as low sperm production, abnormal sperm and decreased testosterone.

California sets risk levels

California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment in 2015 announced its intention to list glyphosate as a cancer-causing substance under Proposition 65, the 1986 referendum requiring warnings of cancer or birth-defect risks on certain products. 

The move came in response to the WHO study finding the herbicide to be a probable human carcinogen. This link was based on what its authors called “sufficient” evidence of cancer in lab animals and “limited” evidence of real-world exposures examined in humans. Researchers found the strongest link with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the type of cancer suffered by plaintiffs in several lawsuits against Monsanto. 

California determined that exposures above 1,100 micrograms per day were potentially harmful. Nathan Donley, senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization, said the state’s environmental office is “the only agency that has actually tried to identify a number above which you’re at risk.”

Yet a coalition of environmental advocates, including Donley, argued in a 2017 letter that the proposed risk threshold should be lower. They highlighted three studies not available when the WHO prepared its 2015 paper.

Donley said California’s risk level “is way more than what people will eat in their diet, but it’s potentially a level that applicators or farmers could be exposed to.” The state’s final risk determination did not reflect the environmental groups’ recommendations. 

Assessing risk levels from various exposures over different time periods would require additional study, said Sam Delson, deputy director for external and legislative affairs at the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. The current California standard requires companies with 10 or more employees to provide clear warnings if they could be exposed to quantities of glyphosate above the regulatory risk level. 

Such warnings are common. Every Starbucks store has a Proposition 65 sign because of acrylamide, which is produced in small amounts during the process of roasting coffee beans. 

Under Proposition 65, Monsanto would have been forced to put cancer warning labels on all formulations of Roundup, Aquamaster and other products containing glyphosate sold in California.

But after several court appeals by Monsanto, the EPA stepped in and halted this order in August. In a letter to Monsanto, the federal agency wrote that it “considered a more extensive dataset” than the WHO, “including studies submitted to support registration of glyphosate.” As a result of this study, the EPA concluded that glyphosate was “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans” and that it considered Proposition 65 warnings on the chemical to be “false and misleading.”  A federal judge in California affirmed the EPA’s conclusion on June 22 when he issued a permanent injunction preventing the state from placing warning labels on these products.

More local, U.S. and international research

San Francisco in 2015 commissioned a study by a local firm, which supported the WHO’s conclusions that glyphosate was hazardous, and posed the greatest danger to those applying it. Inhaling or ingesting glyphosate via food contamination posed the next-greatest concerns. Casual contact from clothing that brushes vegetation sprayed with the herbicide was the lowest concern.

This study expressed a higher concern for children than for adults. Children’s brains and internal organs continually develop and can be harmed by exposure to toxins. In addition, small children have a tendency to put many things, including plants, in their mouths. 

The WHO and Health and Human Services studies both called for more research. A 2019 study of more than 300,000 farmers across Norway, the United States and France found a link between glyphosate exposure and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. A University of Washington study of more than 54,000 licensed pesticide applicators around the same time found that exposure to the chemicals in Roundup increased the risk for non-Hodgkin lymphoma by 41% among those who worked with it for 20 years or more.

Studies from the University of California, San Diego, and more recently, the National Institutes of Health looking into human exposure to glyphosate, indicate that it is showing up in the food supply and water. They noted that human studies indicate increasing levels of glyphosate in urine and breast milk but said they could not conclude anything about the effects of such tiny levels of exposure. 

What’s clear to Sheldon Krimsky, an environmental policy professor at Tufts University, is that the disagreements about pesticide policy are not just about the science. “Determining the safety of a chemical has become a politicized activity,” he wrote in a 2019 paper addressing the controversy over glyphosate toxicology.

“After 40 years in use, public health officials are asking for independent toxicological studies on the health effects of glyphosate-based herbicides,” Krimsky wrote. “This fact alone underscores the failure of the ‘approve first, test later’ principle of regulation.”

CORRECTION: A mention of a study on non-Hodgkin lymphoma risk from Roundup has been corrected to note that elevated rates were found for those who had used the chemical for 20 years or more. A discussion of litigation against Bayer has been updated with more recent settlement numbers and to clarify that pending cases don’t need settlement approval from a judge. A mention of a proposed scientific panel has been corrected to note that liability protections for Bayer would have applied only if the panel had found that Roundup use did not cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

The post Scientists Split Over Herbicide Risk, Leaving Public in Lurch appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

That herbicide is glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s top-selling weedkiller, Roundup. Monsanto owner Bayer agreed in June to pay more than $10 billion to plaintiffs in thousands of pending lawsuits over claims Roundup caused cancer.

As legal victories against the company pile up, several Bay Area cities have faced a tough choice — keep using a chemical that evidence increasingly shows is dangerous and exposes them to legal risks, or switch to other, often less effective methods. San Francisco has limited its risk through a strategy known as integrated pest management and its move to scale back dramatically on glyphosate since 2015.

By 2020, most Bay Area cities and counties had prohibited use of Roundup in public spaces. San Francisco’s decision to keep using a tiny amount — just 5% of what it used to regularly spray on plants in parks and street medians — still makes it an outlier.

Chris Geiger, director of the integrated pest management program at the San Francisco Department of the Environment, said despite the city’s drastic cutback, it won’t ban glyphosate because it has yet to find a more efficient or safer alternative for controlling some weeds. “In habitat management, there are certain plants you cannot remove from a natural area by hand,” he said.  

Environmental activists also urge the public to take a nuanced view that weighs the relative health risks of various chemicals.

“Banning a single pesticide isn’t going to achieve what they think it’s going to, particularly if they move along to another chemical that’s not so widely studied and that — years from now — we may find health issues with it,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson-based nonprofit advocacy group.

Multimillion-dollar lawsuits

In 2018, German pharmaceutical giant Bayer bought Monsanto for $63 billion. Just weeks later, a San Francisco jury awarded a Bay Area school groundskeeper $289 million, tying his non-Hodgkin lymphoma to long-term use of Roundup. Bayer’s stock price sank 10.6%. The groundskeeper’s settlement was later reduced to $21 million, a decision affirmed by the state Supreme Court.

Over the next year, two more San Francisco juries awarded plaintiffs suffering from cancer millions of dollars. All three suits relied on a 2015 report by the International Agency on Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, that found glyphosate to be a probable human carcinogen.

These court decisions spurred a number of Bay Area cities, including Benicia, Richmond and Sonoma, to ban Roundup use in parks and public facilities. Costco and other retailers pulled the product from their shelves, some under threat of class-action lawsuits.

Despite the rulings and bans and usage cutbacks by cities, Bayer stands by glyphosate’s safety. “There is no evidence that municipalities moving away from glyphosate for vegetation management, including invasive and noxious weed control, are enhancing safety, given there is an extensive body of research on glyphosate that confirm these products are safe when used as directed,” said company spokesman Bob Chlopak.

As part of Bayer’s June settlement with plaintiffs, the company did not admit any wrongdoing. The legal agreement initially called for the establishment of a five-member science panel (See “Scientists Split Over Glyphosate Risk, Leaving Public in Lurch”) to deliver a more definitive verdict as to whether Roundup’s active ingredient causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma, but the judge has indicated he will likely not allow that part of the settlement to move forward.

As early as July 2015, before the lawsuits concluded, San Francisco’s Department of the Environment raised the hazard rating of Roundup and other glyphosate products to the highest level, restricting use but continuing to apply it, provided other alternatives had been exhausted. None of the recent court decisions will change how the city uses this herbicide, Geiger said.

Undoing the ban

San Francisco took a much more rigid stance several decades ago. It banned all pesticides and herbicides from use on city properties in the mid-1990s. That made it difficult to address common pest problems. “Pesticides are a very broad category of products,” Geiger said. 

Any commercial chemical applied to kill another organism is registered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a pesticide. That includes disinfectants in hospitals, agents to control mosquitoes and chemicals to kill weeds. During the ban, city employees refrained from spraying, Geiger said. Weeds, rodents and mosquitoes proliferated. The ban was unworkable because hospitals had fewer ways to disinfect, and public works crews had limited options to control vermin to protect public health.

“When you ban things, as some cities have done, they’re having some impacts on their landscape or on public safety,” said Jen Jackson, who manages San Francisco’s toxics reduction and healthy systems program.

What followed that early, ban-everything approach was integrated pest management, adopted in 1996, which emphasized using the least harmful approaches. That included weeding by hand, blowtorching, weed whacking and using goats to graze weed-infested areas. If none of these work, managers can select substances from a list of reduced-risk chemicals that is reviewed each year.

Those chemicals are classified according to a three-tiered system based on the hazard they pose to the person applying the chemical and to endangered species. Department managers wanting to use tier 1 products must justify the need at an annual public hearing. Tier 3 chemicals, such as soaps and oils, are the least hazardous and face the fewest restrictions.

Tier 2 chemicals are considered not as dangerous as tier 1 chemicals like the U.S. EPA-regulated herbicide dicamba. The city placed Roundup and other glyphosate-based products under tier 2 until mid-2015.

Tracking every ounce

San Francisco tracks chemical use by the fluid ounce of the active ingredient, not the entire formulation of the product applied. But determining risk to public employees and residents from continued use is hotly contested — even among expert scientific institutions.

All city departments, including Recreation and Parks, the Public Utilities Commission, the Department of Public Works and the Airport Commission, file monthly reports detailing chemical use, which the Department of the Environment aggregates and posts on its website. 

The department provided the Public Press records of San Francisco’s use of restricted chemicals from 2001 to the present. Over this time, San Francisco has phased out certain herbicides. Dicamba, a Monsanto product found to drift in the air and kill non-target plants, was on San Francisco’s restricted-use list until 2010.

Dicamba was classified as a tier 1 chemical, with instructions that it be used only in spot applications when hand weeding would not work for the golf greens where it was applied. By 2011, the chemical was off the list for approved use because the city found equally reliable products that did not cause the harm to non-target plants dicamba did. (The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in June that dicamba use is illegal, though the U.S. EPA said farmers could still use up their stocks. Bayer agreed to pay $400 million to settle claims against dicamba as part of its Roundup settlement.) 

According to Department of the Environment records, the city has continued to use several formulations of herbicides containing glyphosate made by Monsanto, including Aquamaster, Roundup Pro, Roundup Pro Dry and Roundup Promax.  City records detail a steep reduction in the herbicide use across San Francisco by all departments from 2010 through 2019 on public areas including Golden Gate Park, ballfields and Natural Areas Program properties such as Twin Peaks, Glen Canyon Park and Bayview Park, where many people walk along paths with their dogs and children, and where they pick and eat blackberries. In this period, overall use on city-managed lands declined by 98%. 

A pivotal year

When the World Health Organization classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen in 2015, it based that decision on a review of publicly available scientific studies by a group of scientists from around the world. The panel said there was only limited evidence linking exposure in humans to cancer, but sufficient data on cancer in lab animals to warrant cautioning users.

Prior to this report, San Francisco departments did not have to submit their glyphosate use for annual review. From 2010 to 2015, San Francisco used 64,444 fluid ounces of glyphosate, or 504 gallons, enough to fill two medium-size hot tubs.

Because San Francisco is both a city and a county, it maintains lands and facilities outside city limits. These include the San Francisco International Airport and Crystal Springs and Hetch Hetchy reservoirs. The Public Press calculated the overall San Francisco use to include application within city limits and at the airport. Glyphosate use at lands controlled by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission outside the city were excluded because they are subject to state and federal regulations for habitat restoration and other agreements for herbicide use. 

From 2010 to 2015, San Francisco applied just over half of its glyphosate at the airport. The Federal Aviation Administration does not allow groundskeepers to use weed whackers on grassy areas around runways and taxiways. 

Within city limits, most of the glyphosate was applied by the Department of Public Works, which maintains the greenways where people walk, drive scooters or skate. The department applied most of its glyphosate on medians and thoroughfares throughout the city. Another major user was the Recreation and Parks Department.

In the years following publication of the WHO report— 2016 through 2019 — San Francisco cut glyphosate use at SFO and San Francisco public areas by 50%, with the steepest decline, 82%, seen within city limits, according to the data. 

Glyphosate is not completely out of the picture. From 2016 to 2019, glyphosate was the second-most-used herbicide, making up 20% of all products, after the weed killer quinclorac, which the city started using in 2014.

The change in glyphosate’s hazard level from a tier 2 to a tier 1 chemical in 2015 triggered additional training and other measures, said Jackson of the Department of the Environment. “We have many, many restrictions put in place on the use of glyphosate that protects workers as well as the public.”

The area that has seen the most consistent use is Bayview Park, which occupies a portion of Bayview Hill. Between 2016 and the end of 2019, the city used 165 fluid ounces of glyphosate there to get rid of fennel and French broom, among other measures to preserve natural areas. 

The city’s Board of Supervisors in 2018 established biodiversity preservation as a citywide goal. Bayview Hill is home to coastal grassland habitat, and Geiger said glyphosate allows maintenance crews to apply enough to make a perimeter defense to stave off invasive plants that would otherwise crowd out native species. 

Monsanto pummeled in court, and cities take action

Following the WHO report, thousands of people who had used Roundup for years and suffered from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and other cancers began suing Monsanto, which had long maintained that its herbicide was safe even for home use, as implied by a 2009 TV ad. 

All three of the lawsuits to go to trial resulted in multimillion-dollar judgments against the company. The first forced Monsanto to release reams of documents showing how it manipulated the science and suppressed studies questioning glyphosate’s safety. The company also hired a vast public relations army to discredit the report and journalists and activists investigating Monsanto. 

The scientific warnings and lawsuits combined to give city governments plenty of reasons to revisit their use of glyphosate.

The East Bay city of Richmond had adopted a pest management program in 2012, based in part on San Francisco’s. Glyphosate was to be used in an emergency. Trouble was, city maintenance staff “didn’t stop using glyphosate,” conceded Mayor Tom Butt. “To them, everything was an emergency.” 

Butt got calls from residents complaining about Roundup spraying. So the vote by the City Council in 2015 to ban glyphosate was easy. Now, he said, residents are no longer complaining about the weeds, but “Richmond looks terrible.” 

The city’s Department of Infrastructure and Maintenance complained about budget-related staffing cuts and not having glyphosate as a tool. It recently estimated that it would need an additional 8,400 person-hours to restore the landscape to its pre-ban condition.

Other jurisdictions reported similar trade-offs. The East Bay Municipal Parks District voted in July 2019 to ban glyphosate in picnic areas and other public zones while phasing out use in developed areas by the end of 2020. “We’re going to take a hit in the general fund as we have to do more manual weeding,” said spokesman Dave Mason.  

The city of Sonoma’s public works staff had already cut back on use of Roundup to 6 gallons in 2017, from 18 gallons in 2000. The department looked to Roundup as a last resort in tough-to-reach areas for large mowers along fence lines and bike paths, and in areas too dangerous for hand weeding.

But Mayor Amy Harrington and her fellow City Council members had been getting an earful from residents for years, saying they didn’t want Roundup used to manage weeds on any city property because of concerns about cancer and other health risks. Not only did the WHO report factor into this pressure, but also a 2016 study finding glyphosate in the region’s top cash crop — wine grapes.

Harrington and the council did not want to ban one chemical and then turn to another that might be worse. So, at first they took the middle ground, voting in December 2018 to continue the last-resort use for four months, while requiring a follow-up report on where it was being used.

The report showed weed killer being applied near waterways, a cemetery and other places to avoid labor-intensive hand weeding. This was not a good argument for continued use, Harrington said. “You can’t just take a chemical and spray it all over the place just because it’s easier.”

The council voted unanimously to ban Roundup on city property in April. “All entities that are requiring employees to apply this chemical have liability,” Harrington said. “We’re a small agency.”

Other cities are not formally banning, but declaring areas glyphosate-free zones, like Novato, in Marin County. There, Mayor Josh Fryday acknowledged the increased burden on the public works department and called for volunteers to step up — or perhaps stoop over — to help clear weeds.

The first legal decision against Monsanto in August 2018 — involving former Benicia Unified School District groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson — led Benicia to discontinue its use of Ranger Pro, a generic equivalent of Roundup. The school district stopped using Roundup and Ranger Pro in 2018. 

Not bowing to an internet petition

Jill Fehrenbacher recalled spotting a flyer in San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood in the summer of 2015 that made her worry about the health and safety of her two young sons. The notice, posted by the city around the baseball field, advised that Roundup would be used to get rid of eucalyptus stumps. “I thought, ‘Why are they doing this? Roundup is dangerous and I don’t want my kids around it,’” she said.

Like many residents, Fehrenbacher regards city parks as her own backyard. Discovering that Roundup was being sprayed there made her take action. She posted her own flyers next to the city’s, alerting others to an online petition she started, calling on San Francisco to once again ban Roundup. The petition got news coverage when it had 7,000 signatures, and Fehrenbacher said this support eventually doubled.

But the city scoffed at the effort. “That was an internet petition,” said Geiger, noting that not every signature was from a San Francisco resident. 

Fehrenbacher attended meetings at which city officials discussed Roundup use. She said they told her they were meeting to rank the relative risks of various pesticides. Fehrenbacher and others had looked to the city for certainty about their safety, but what she said she got was much less. “I felt they were being dismissive,” she said. “It was such a nonanswer to the concerns.”

To Geiger, the Department of the Environment’s actions in reclassifying glyphosate and restricting its use just months after the WHO report was proof that his agency took safety seriously. He said it was in line with the city’s decade-plus mandate to be cautious when changing its practices.

Standing on precautionary principle

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in 2003 voted to adopt the precautionary principle, a philosophy that urges caution in adopting new practices when data affirming their safety are not yet available, to guide its work on policy and purchasing. The resolution makes up the first chapter of the city’s environmental code. It acknowledges the role that the integrated pest management system and other Department of the Environment issues played in the supervisors’ move to make it a citywide policy. 

Geiger said the decision to continue using glyphosate is justifiable under this principle. San Francisco has reduced its use and added measures to train and protect workers. It has examined alternatives and asks land managers to exhaust other options before turning to chemicals for pest and weed management. Public disclosure is also managed consistently, he said, through signs indicating chemical use across the city, at public meetings and in records. 

But Geiger said one part of the precautionary principle is tough to apply because of the way the U.S. regulates chemicals. To protect trade secrets, manufacturers do not have to reveal all ingredients, so city officials lack some certainty about safety. Also, the U.S. EPA requires companies like Monsanto to show only that a chemical doesn’t pose any unreasonable risk to people or the environment. The agency also considers the economic, social and environmental costs against the benefits that could come from the chemical’s use.

The EPA certifies that glyphosate products are safe when used according to labeled guidelines. But California, using information from the WHO, has issued a safety warning. That places some responsibility on Monsanto. “In the absence of conclusive proof that something is harmful, the burden lies with the producer to prove that it is safe,” Geiger said.

The Department of the Environment oversees many environmental initiatives, including efforts to get to zero waste, sustainability in transit and buildings, and the reduction of toxic substances such as nail salon chemicals and paints. The lack of clarity around products like Roundup creates a burden for local governments.

“In this country we don’t have full transparency on chemical data and chemicals in products,” Geiger said. “If we had a good chemicals policy, we wouldn’t have to have so many people working here.”

Meanwhile, Glen Park neighborhood activist Fehrenbacher has noticed some changes, five years removed from her petition drive. Last fall, she said she saw workers spraying in the park. But on a hike through Glen Canyon one recent morning, she said she spotted a group of workers on the hillside, pulling weeds.  “It made me feel good — they are tapering off.”

But she said she would feel better with the certainty that a ban would bring.

The post As Cancer Concerns Lead Cities to Ban Herbicide, S.F. Scales Back Use of Roundup appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

If anyone should be excited at the prospect of $29 million in funding for the development of a waterfront park in India Basin, it’s Patrick Marley Rump — yet he’s not.

The longtime Bayview resident supports the future India Basin Waterfront Park, and he hopes that money — part of a $487 million parks and open space bond measure — gets approved by San Francisco voters in November. Rump sees in this 3.7 acres of land the potential for his nonprofit, Literacy for Environmental Justice, to take people on kayak and canoe trips from India Basin to the new state campground at Candlestick Point. To him, this new park will put the “Bay” in the Bayview — for its residents.

But as Rump thinks about the commercial and residential complex that will be built next to the park, he’s skeptical. The neighboring project will raise air pollution to hazardous levels during and after construction, according to the environmental impact report. For a community full of people who, like Rump, suffer from asthma, this is not acceptable to him.

Is the project “about selling new homes and making the area look beautiful for developers, or is it about making this site accessible for the community?” he asks. “What’s driving this project?”

The Bayview has the city’s attention — for better or for worse, depending on whom you ask. If voters approve the bond, it will help fund a park at 900 Innes Ave., the first waterfront land the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks has ever owned. It’s also a former small-craft shipyard site founded in the late 1800s by English, Dutch, German and Scandinavian boat builders.

High Line comparisons

There are lofty hopes for this area. Department Director Phil Ginsburg chooses his words carefully when trying to come up with an analogy for what this park, and the greater shoreline, is to become. Crissy Field comes up. He mentions the High Line in New York City, which redeveloped an abandoned railway into a heavily visited park. But the High Line also touched off a real estate boom that raised rents and pushed out long-time residents.

Ginsburg pledges India Basin will be different. He points to the involvement of many community groups in the planning process as proof. These groups are consulting on the design of the park, creating public art and developing nature, outdoor and arts programs in the area for local youth.

 “This is a park that we want to be designed by, built by and operated by and for the benefit of the Bayview community and specifically the Black community,” Ginsburg said. “This is the Bayview’s moment.”

But the adjoining property at 700 Innes is what concerns Rump and other community members. This part will be built by Build LLC, a developer that specializes in mixed-use projects. It will add 1,575 units of housing, with 25 percent priced below market rate. What concerns Rump and others is the final environmental impact report, which said the air pollution levels from particulate matter — especially PM2.5, the most hazardous —  will be at unsafe levels even after construction, due to projections of higher traffic levels. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District has also raised concerns over these impacts.

Poor air quality — from industry, traffic and construction — is a major issue for the Bayview. The community was cited in a 2017 report by the Department of Public Health as one of four neighborhoods in the city with the highest rate of preventable hospitalizations related to air pollution levels. District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton — who also represents San Francisco at the air quality district— said Build will need to come up with a mitigation plan.

San Francisco’s grand plans

The project is a big part of the city’s plans for bringing economic growth to a long-neglected area. In March 2019, the John Pritzker Family Foundation awarded the city $25 million for the India Basin Waterfront Park, the single largest private donation for any park in city history.

“This park is an important investment in the Bayview Hunters Point community and a big step in creating equity when it comes to healthy neighborhoods in our city,” Mayor London Breed said in a statement announcing the award. With that funding plus state, local and grant money, the park has raised close to $47 million.

The city has a lot of work to do with that money. It plans to renovate and knit together two other existing open spaces — the India Basin Open Space and the India Basin Shoreline Park — via the Blue Greenway, 13 miles of trails connecting parks from China Basin to Candlestick Point along San Francisco’s southeastern waterfront, that will add  roughly 10 acres of open space to the trail system.  

Right now, the park lot is fenced off. It is an officially designated brownfield, land that contains hazardous materials. After shipbuilding ceased, the site was used primarily as a dumping ground for heavy industry and construction. An EPA assessment found the soil contains heavy metals such as mercury and lead, along with oil and polychlorinated biphenyls, chemicals used in coolants and lubricants that are considered by the EPA as probable carcinogens. San Francisco has received funds from the federal program to help pay for the planned cleanup of the land.

The plan for the cleanup states that up to five feet of shoreline soil and another four feet of sediment will be removed and replaced with clean soil and sand. All contaminated soil and sediment is to be hauled away to what the city calls “appropriately permitted” landfills. All replacement soil, along with soil samples taken during development, are supposed to be tested to make sure they’re clean.

On the actual waterfront, the plan calls for creating nearly a half-acre of wetlands and tidal marsh. This is all in line with Rump’s priorities for his LEJ members to get workforce training in restoration projects. He also sees it as safeguarding the low-lying community from sea level rise. Putting city money into the cleanup and restoration “ensures it, and a lot of people need to get to work,” he said.

The issue of cleaning up and redeveloping toxic sites is an open wound for the Bayview. The biggest development in the community — the Hunters Point Shipyard — has been on pause for three years due to fraudulent tactics by Tetra Tech, the contractor the Navy hired to do the cleanup.

Supervisor Walton said he’s mindful that this botched effort has sown distrust within the Bayview for cleanup operations on future development projects like India Basin, as well as overall distrust of the city. “We have to make sure that it’s going to provide an environment where people are safe and able to live, and you’re not going to be moving forward unless that is satisfied,” Walton said.

Finding the air to breathe

Some distrustful residents aren’t sold on the mixed-use development proposed for the land next to the park.

The report stresses the need to reduce truck trips during construction and the use of public transit to get people out of cars. But the pandemic has threatened public transit infrastructure. San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency cut MUNI service to just 17 routes during the shelter-in-place, and budget shortfalls could mean that up to 40 of its lines are suspended for years, or retired.

Even before COVID-19, the Municipal Transportation Agency called the Bayview’s public transit options substandard in a transportation plan released in February. The agency described the T Third rail service as slow and unreliable, stating that the community is served “by some of the most-delayed transit lines in San Francisco.”

The Bayview is home to the city’s largest Black population, and this community has increasingly fallen behind economically while the rest of San Francisco has thrived.

The MTA plan finds that nearly a quarter of Black households in the Bayview earn less than $30,000 a year. By contrast, 60 percent of white households in the Bayview earn more than $100,000. The Bayview as a whole had an unemployment rate of 10.1 percent before the pandemic, five times higher than the rest of San Francisco.

The India Basin project has promised jobs and affordable housing, but at a cost to their health some in the community like long-time resident Leaotis Martin are unwilling to accept. “It hurts me to see a neighborhood with kids that have asthma and can’t play like other kids,” Martin said, referring to the high levels of asthma among his fellow residents. “They’re supposed to protect people first, period.”

The final environmental impact report called the project’s expected impacts on air quality “significant and unavoidable with mitigation.” Nonetheless, the city’s planning department certified the environmental impact report in July 2018, and the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved it in October of that year.

Worries about mitigation

The Bayview is considered a health-vulnerable zip code by state officials due to its high levels of respiratory illness and related medical conditions. Because of this, a more stringent standard for particulate pollution was applied for the India Basin project than is used by the state or federal government.

“Any increase in air pollution above the current disproportionate burden in eastern San Francisco is unacceptable,” Greg Nudd of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District wrote in a letter to the Board of Supervisors a year after they approved the project. Nudd, a deputy air pollution control officer, said his agency is trying to provide direction to San Francisco to help minimize the effects of the construction, but ultimately the air quality district has no authority over the city on any project.

That means it’s up to city officials — department heads, the mayor, the Board of Supervisors — to ensure the project doesn’t worsen health in the neighborhood. This doesn’t inspire confidence among people like Michelle Pierce.

Pierce, executive director of the environmental justice nonprofit Bayview Hunters Point Community, said the planning department is not to be trusted. She pointed to its track record in approving projects like the Transbay Transit Center, which was closed down shortly after opening when workers discovered a large crack in a beam holding up the roof, or the Millennium Tower, which has been sinking since it opened.

“Nobody is holding them accountable, even for that,” Pierce said. “And when these things do not affect the wealthiest people in the city … what do you think is going to happen to us? I can tell you. It’s a form of genocide. You’re either removing us via gentrification or you’re killing us with the environmental stuff, and nobody’s talking about it like that.”

City leaders say this time really will be different. “I do agree there’s been lots and lots of broken promises in the southeast and in the Bayview,” said parks director Ginsburg.

Ginsburg said India Basin development has been slow and deliberate because they’re working to involve the community. “It’s not improving a space that’s negative; it’s displacing people as a result of that improvement that’s negative,” he said. “So how do you improve and invest in without displacing or at least mitigating displacement? That’s the secret sauce to this project.”

Managing expectations and uncertainties

Ginsburg points to the hiring of Jacqueline Flin, director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, to manage the equitable development program for the project. “We want the community’s expertise, and we’re paying for it,” Ginsburg said.

Flin is contracted through the San Francisco Parks Alliance to turn the promise of equity into a reality. “We’ve been working with a diverse group of community members to define the categories that we’ll need to address to create equity,” she said.

That group is the executive leadership team, made up of 20 members from various walks of life in the neighborhood that Flin has worked in for roughly 20 years. It includes representatives of the Public Housing Tenants’ Association, the Bayview Historical Society, several youth advocacy organizations and the multiple ethnic communities that make up the district, including Chinese, Latino and Pacific Islander. Flin said the team is working to address key issues including arts and culture, youth development and economic development. It is also  planning financial literacy training to inform people about resources to get a loan to purchase a new home, or to help them keep their current home, as part of the plan to make the development’s benefits more equitable.

The bond money, said Flin, would help underwrite the park and the programs her team is designing. “It’s going to allow us to put some of those ideas into concrete commitments and into what they’ll see in the future park,” she said.

Alejandra Chiesa of the Trust for Public Lands, who has worked on park development projects in other cities, said this extent of involvement in issues like housing security are unusual for a city’s parks department to take on but can help a community see a park as an asset — not a threat. “There are park projects where it’s, ‘We don’t do housing. We don’t do transit. We just do parks,’” she said.

Learning from past success

Chiesa points to the renovation of Bayview’s Hilltop Park, located just a few blocks from India Basin, as a small success story when it comes to listening to as well as following through with a commitment to work with a community. She recalls early meetings about what to include in the park and how it should look and, instead, she heard from the community that they wanted jobs.

Since this was a small project, they couldn’t promise a lot, she said. But ultimately, 10 to 12 people went through a jobs training program with the contractor, and two to three people were hired on to build the park.

This success is something that could scale up to India Basin, notes Chiesa. She said Ginsburg’s commitment to working through other departments within the city can get things done in a way that supports the community.

A companion report on the bond from the city makes a case by analyzing open space measures passed during and shortly after the Great Recession. These bonds helped create some 9,500 jobs. “Investing in public facilities and infrastructure is an important and necessary step that San Francisco can take to put thousands of people to work and help accelerate our economic recovery,” says the report.

Still, what happens if the bond doesn’t pass? Rec and Park spokeswoman Madison Sink answers in part by counting what’s covered by the $47 million the city already has in hand. This would include the remediation of the land and shoreline as well as the design of the park.

There’s no contingency plan. Nonetheless, the park development will happen, said Sink. “Rec and Park and our partners would need to secure funds from other sources, and that could slow things down,” she wrote in an email.

Lyslynn LaCoste, director of the nonprofit BMAGIC, a Bayview community organizing group, is OK with the wait. She noted that getting the Bayview access to other parts of India Basin has taken many years — all worth it since it allowed the community a voice in steering the development.

“We want to see the work move forward, and we want to make sure the folks that have lived in this community for generations are the ones that are benefiting from this future project,” said LaCoste.

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