Slow removal of occupied boats is better

The Richardson’s Bay Regional Agency’s request for a temporary moratorium on removal of boats on which people live makes sense.

The RBRA cannot make a strong argument that it has been vigilant in cleaning up the bay’s anchor-out community. Even after being at work at it since its founding in 1984, the number of anchor-outs in the bay had grown to more than 250, by some counts.

That rise even led Sausalito, for many years one of the RBRA’s strongest members and frustrated by its ineffectiveness, to leave the agency to start cleaning up the city section of the bay.

Today, RBRA is under new leadership and there have been signs of progress in meeting the state’s longstanding order — and a recently imposed tougher timeline of five to 10 years — to clear the anchor-outs, many of whom have been living on the bay for years, despite laws that prohibit anchorage for more than 72 hours.

There have been valid concerns about damage to the bay’s fragile environment and reports of criminal activity. But there are also justified concerns that those living on their boats need affordable housing on land, which is hard to come by.

In recent months, those boats have been where their residents comply with the shelter-in-place order due to the coronavirus.

Forcing them to leave their floating residences at a time when people are being told to stay home lacks empathy. RBRA needs to continue to connect anchor-outs with local social services to find displaced boat dwellers places to live.

Patience may be running out, but appropriate empathy shouldn’t.

These days, that may require a short slowdown in the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission’s strict timeline for RBRA’s progress in cleaning up the bay.

RBRA has repeatedly offered proposals to create a small mooring field in the bay that would make it easier to monitor and limit anchor-outs, but BCDC has been cool to the proposal.

Sacramento, meanwhile, released an audit in 2018 that showed both BCDC and the RBRA were dragging their bureaucratic feet in clean-up efforts, prompting BCDC to issue a call for a tougher deadline.

In recent months, RBRA has stepped up enforcement and has red-tagged dozens of boats. Many are classified as “debris,” either no longer seaworthy or filled with debris — too often both.

Over the past year, RBRA has stepped up enforcement and removal, getting the number of anchor outs down to around 125.

That’s significant progress, especially given the period when numbers skyrocketed, apparently beyond RBRA’s capacity or intent to ramp up its enforcement.

It has asked BCDC to extend the deadline to 20 years, but that was denied.

That’s understandable given RBRA’s record, especially before it brought aboard stronger and more focused management.

But BCDC should take another look at the deadline given the ramifications of the pandemic.

A short-term moratorium on removal of occupied vessels — ones that are willing to comply with standards that reduce their impacts on the bay’s environment — should be weighed. RBRA’s enforcement team should continue to monitor the anchor-outs and redtag the worst offenders. Violence against those issuing the warnings, such as the alleged pepper spray attack against the harbormaster this week, cannot be tolerated.

Continuing to remove boats that have been dumped or abandoned, or those that are potential environmental hazards, is a fulfillment of RBRA’s promise from 1984 to revive the ecology of Richardson Bay.