Budget doesn’t rise to this challenge
San Francisco Bay tides likely will rise more than a foot and a half by century’s end, according to the California Ocean Protection Council, with a substantial risk that over 4 feet of shoreline will be submerged. A special Chronicle report detailed the alarming and costly consequences for San Francisco’s Mission Creek and airport, suburbs such as Foster City and Hayward, and other neighborhoods, infrastructure and environments around the bay.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s otherwise generous budget proposal doesn’t rise to the level of this challenge to the region he calls home. While Newsom’s spending plan is swollen with a $38 billion surplus he plans to spend on cash payments to middleincome households and more, it doesn’t specify any funding for restoring Bay Area wetlands and otherwise protecting the region against the inevitability of rising seas.
The budget, which the Legislature must approve by next week, does dedicate about $200 million over the next two years to restoring wetlands and otherwise protecting coastal communities across California from higher sea levels, among other statewide expenditures on wildfire prevention and other climate adaptation measures. But a coalition of Bay Area environmentalists and business groups — including Save the Bay and the Bay Area Council — argue convincingly that the “record budget surplus affords the state a once-in-a-generation opportunity to directly strengthen our resilience to climate change.”
The groups are advocating $300 million in spending on bay restoration to augment $500 million in local spending, funded by a parcel tax that Bay Area voters passed resoundingly in 2016, as well as a push for up to $250 million in federal spending on the effort being led by Rep. Jackie Speier, DSan Mateo. Nor is Newsom the only Bay Area politician in a position to understand and respond to the need, with Bay Area legislators Phil Ting and Nancy Skinner chairing the Assembly and Senate budget committees.
Despite the unprecedented economic shutdown forced by the coronavirus pandemic and the attendant drop in fossil fuel consumption, the amount of planetwarming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached its highest level on record last month, according to a report this week from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. California and the Bay Area have to prepare for the consequences with an urgency that the national and global response has lacked.