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Farming - Creek Seeps Raise Local Ire
Environmentalists hope that the 435-acre, $1.1 million Tolay Creek wetlands project will help provide badly needed habitat for such rare creatures as the California clapper rail, the salt marsh harvest mouse and the Suisun ornate shrew. But farmers near the project, located just off Highway 37 in Sonoma County, worry that their own livelihoods may be endangered by the restoration work.
On December 1, U.S. Fish & Wildlife breached a levee, restoring tidal flows to a three mile section of creek and creating a fifty acre pond on a field formerly used for growing oats. According to the farmers, however, the agency got more than it wanted: they say water levels are higher than predicted and that salt water is seeping into their land.
"It's higher than high tide, and it's higher at low tide," asserts Norm Yenni, who farms 2,300 acres adjacent to the project. There has always been some seepage through the levees, but it's gotten considerably worse since December. Fred Dickson, owner of 650 acres just to the west of the creek, says the soil is in danger of becoming permanently waterlogged. "We may never be able to get into our fields."
Repair work can be expensive. Yenni's landlord, the Vallejo Sanitation District, has already spent $85,000 to shore up 3,400 feet of its levees and, says the District's Ron Matthews, "That's not even half the levees we're responsible for."
Fish & Wildlife's Louise Vicencio acknowledges that the water level "does appear" to be higher than predicted. She says that the agency is currently trying to figure out whether engineers miscalculated the elevation of the land, or if predictions about the amount of water flowing through the breached levee were wrong. Fish & Wildlife will also determine if seepage is as extensive as farmers claim.
Restoring the wetlands around Tolay Creek has been difficult from the beginning. A tidal lagoon built part way up the creek in the early 1980s diverted tidal flows, leaving two miles upstream largely dried out and bereft of wildlife, although it proved to be fertile ground for mosquitoes. In order to bring back the tidal action and restore historic wetlands, the new project was begun in 1992.
The farmers are clearly frustrated. "They've got all the engineers in the world and all these mistakes to learn from," says Dickson, adding half jokingly, "the salt mice are swimming to our levees," in order to escape high waters. More seriously, he contends that farmers have been chafing under increasingly stringent regulations for decades. He says he now needs a permit to use mud from his own fields in order to do routine maintenance on the levees protecting his farm, and that farmers were once threatened with fines for plowing their fields because the displaced dirt constituted "fill" in one agency's eyes.
When the levees were first built in the 1890s, marshlands were regarded as useless, or worse, and reclaiming the land for agriculture was seen as a public service. "We were the farmers, the wonderful people," Dickson says. "Now we've become the bad guys."
Vicencio is sympathetic. "It's not just the farmers. Everybody is being subjected to more governmental restrictions than they were ten years ago."
"I know the farmers are very anxious to see this resolved," she adds. "But we need to understand the problem, and that's not going to happen overnight." Fish & Wildlife is planning to convene a meeting of the project stakeholders and evaluate the engineering data in the near future, she says.
Dickson says that he appreciates the agency's efforts to resolve things. "They've shown interest, which is good, but they haven't solved the problems."
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