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The Trail Companion
Winter 2001
A Brief History of Bay Area Parks and Open
Spaces
Part 2. From the 1960s through the Present
Day
By Brian Kunde.
As detailed in Part 1, interest in setting aside
parklands in California took hold in fits and starts
during the last quarter of the nineteenth century in
a diverse series of preservation drives. In the 1920s
these separate efforts coalesced into a broad-based
movement, sparking a period of intensive
park-building activity lasting into the early 1940s.
Afterward development interests came to the fore, as
preservation gave way to the postwar housing boom.
The 1960s found people waking up to the consequences
of this neglect.
Vanishing Farms
One early concern centered on the disappearance of
regional farmlands. In a response characteristic of
previous years, local agency formation commissions
were established in each county to maintain the
integrity of agricultural areas while promoting
orderly development. A later step was the passage of
the Williamson Act of 1965, allowing farmers to
contract with counties for lower "agricultural
reserve" tax rates in place of the higher rates
assessed on potential urban land. Such efforts did
some good, but then as now, "orderly development"
often meant little more than a delaying action when
there was profit to be made. What was perceived as a
problem then only deepened and worsened with the
passage of time.
Saving the Bay
A greater concern was the fate of San Francisco
Bay itself. A century of dredging, filling and diking
for salt extraction had already reduced the natural
wetlands ringing the bay to a fraction of their
original extent. Salt production, consolidated by
1920 under the Leslie Salt Company, at least
forestalled more intensive development in the area
under its sway. One of the region's leading
industries, by the 1960s Leslie owned 50,000 acres of
salt ponds around the bay. But areas outside its
control were clearly threatened, as shown by the
explosive growth of San Francisco Airport in the
decades after World War II. Equally worrisome was
Leslie's increasing willingness to sell off
peripheral tideland holdings to developers, notably
Brewer's Island east of San Mateo in 1959, which was
transformed over the following decade into the new
urban community of Foster City.
To many, these and
similar projects seemed the beginning of a systematic
assault on the estuary, reminiscent of the widely
derided Reber Plan of the late 1940s. A huge bay fill
proposal in Berkeley proved the flashpoint for
reaction. Organized by some University of California
faculty and their wives, local conservationists
founded the Save San Francisco Bay Association in
1961. Within the year the movement had spread to the
west bay, and soon it was urging the University of
California's Institute of Governmental Studies to do
a study on public interest in the bay and possible
solutions to its environmental problems. The
institute's report, released in fall of 1963,
proposed a bay conservation and development
commission to make and implement a comprehensive bay
preservation plan.
Ultimately, Save the
Bay's efforts resulted in the state legislature
passing the McAteer-Petris Act, signed into law by
Governor Pat Brown in June, 1965. This act created
the Bay Conservation and Development District, and
set up the Bay Conservation and Development
Commission (BCDC) to regulate development while
formulating a comprehensive plan for the bay, which
it was to submit by 1969. The BCDC was the first
coastal protection agency in the country. In the same
session, the San Francisco Bay-Delta Water Quality
Control Program was created to study ways of avoiding
large-scale pollution of the bay and delta.
The need for bay
protection was further highlighted by a 1965 proposal
to remove about 200 million cubic yards from the top
of San Bruno mountain to provide fill for expanding
San Francisco International Airport. This plan
triggered formation of the Committee to Save San
Bruno Mountain, which helped defeat it. But as with
the struggle for the bay itself, the effort to
preserve San Bruno Mountain would be a long and hard
one, having to be refought each time some new
developer entered the fray.
In 1969 the BCDC
submitted its comprehensive plan for the bay to state
legislature and recommended its own continuance. The
legislature responded with the Knox-Petris bill,
enacted in August, which made the commission a
permanent agency with the power to control future bay
development. Its authority was enhanced by a grant of
stronger environmental enforcement powers a few years
later. Meanwhile, Save the Bay directed its attention
to the decline of the bay and delta fishery resources
and related issues. The early struggle for the bay
culminated in the creation of the San Francisco Bay
National Wildlife Refuge by Congress in 1972, which
with subsequent extension has become the largest
urban wildlife refuge in the nation. With its
establishment, many participants in the cause
considered the bay "saved." To them, later events
revealing the battle far from over came as a series
of unpleasant surprises. Human pressure on natural
systems does not simply end with greater safeguards
and land set-asides, nor are proponents of greater
exploitation forever beaten by a few reverses.
Government in particular can hinder as well as
advance preservation, depending on the beliefs and
agenda of those controlling it at a given time.
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