sea level rise – Enviro Updates

Op-Ed: Highway 37 traffic jam fuels fight over endangered mice, marsh birds

May 7, 2025

Ryan Sabalow, CALMATTERS

A bill by Assemblymember Lori Wilson could help finally break the Highway 37 gridlock despite worries about harming endangered species.

During his eight years on the Santa Rosa City Council, Chris Rogers spent hour after tedious hour in local transportation meetings discussing a proposal to reduce congestion on one of the main traffic arteries into the Napa-Sonoma Valley corridor.

That’s why Rogers, now a rookie Democratic assemblymember, said he had to chuckle when environmental groups complained that a bill making its way through the Legislature was somehow “fast-tracking” the long-stalled Highway 37 widening project in the North Bay.

“When you’re talking about a project that was started or at least conceived before you were born … and somebody’s calling it ‘fast tracking,’ it just doesn’t track,” Rogers said at a committee hearing last week. “The project should have been done already.”

Assembly Bill 697 by Lori Wilson, a Democrat from the Fairfield area, would allow state highway officials to potentially harm three protected bird species and endangered mice as workers add new lanes to a stretch of Highway 37 to wine country.

It’s another example of California Democrats trying to speed up major construction projects such as housing and public infrastructure that can sometimes stall for decades due to the state’s stringent environmental regulations.

Last week, the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee voted to advance the measure. The 13 members of the committee, including Rogers, weren’t persuaded by the objections from a Native American tribe, environmentalists and transportation advocacy groups that oppose widening highways. They argue that research shows that adding lanes doesn’t reduce congestion.

Transportationbicycle paths, Highway 37, salt marsh, sea level rise, trains

Caltrans to hold Jan. 14 meeting on Highway 37 project, environmental opportunities

December 23, 2024

Mary Callahan, PRESS DEMOCRAT
Plans for an overhaul of Highway 37 between Sears Point and Mare Island to ease congestion and gird the road against the rising waters of San Pablo Bay will be aired at Jan. 14 meeting hosted by Caltrans.

The meeting will be held from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Jan. 14.
Interested people can participate remotely on Zoom, using the link https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85317647303#success.

The hybrid meeting was scheduled to allow for discussion of a newly released draft supplemental environment impact report, now open for public review and comment. It incorporates changes to near-term road improvements, as well as the addition of a major marshland rehabilitation effort.

But there should be room for discussion beyond that, as well.

“The meeting on the 14th is going to mostly focus on the content of the draft supplemental EIR,” said Skylar Nguyen, senior environmental scientist with Caltrans. “That’s the focus, and that’s what we are presenting on, but we would be trying to answer as many questions as we can.”

The newly released environmental document relays in detail plans to restore and reinvigorate about 1,200 acres in and around what’s called the Strip Marsh East, a degraded area of tidal salt marsh west of Mare Island on the north shore of San Pablo Bay. The marsh provides habitat to multiple protected species and offers the chance for a nature-based buffer against sea level rise and flooding along about 3.5 miles of highway.

Transportation, WildlifeHighway 37, salta marsh, San Pablo Bay, sea level rise

BARC agencies join forces to prepare Bay Area for sea level rise

July 22, 2024

BARC Staff, BAY AREA REGIONAL COLLABORATIVE

Seven regional and state agencies have executed a Memorandum of Understanding committing each agency to a joint work program to address increased threats of flooding and sea level rise in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area region.

The agencies participating in the agreement include the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG); the Bay Area Air Quality Management District; the California State Coastal Conservancy; Caltrans District 4; the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC); the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board; and the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC). The partners’ amplified coordination will be guided by the inter-agency Bay Area Regional Collaborative (BARC). The memorandum is intended to align the partners’ efforts, expertise and core functions to deliver priority, multi-benefit projects to reduce flooding risks in vulnerable communities along the San Francisco Bay shoreline.

“The scale of the Bay Area’s need for projects to adequately adapt to the threats of flooding and sea level rise is vastly greater than the resources available,” explained BARC Chair Jesse Arreguin, who also serves as mayor of Berkeley and as vice president of the ABAG Executive Board. “By working together with a shared purpose, the Bay Area will be in a better position to compete with other metro areas for the limited dollars that are available.”

Climate Change & EnergyBARC, BCDC, Hwy 37, sea level rise

Op-Ed: A right way and a wrong way to fix Highway 37

May 1, 2023

Victoria Brandon, PRESS DEMOCRAT

Everyone agrees that Highway 37 needs fixing.

For nearly a decade, the environmental community has debated plans to restructure Highway 37 between Vallejo and Marin County. Usually, environmental engagement on highway projects focuses on ways to reduce negative impacts, but in this case there is an opportunity for a genuinely positive outcome.

Replacement of the current road with a built-for-resilience elevated causeway would not only protect the highway from flooding, it would reconnect the San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge and other tidal wetlands to San Francisco Bay waters.

Wetlands sequester carbon dioxide, encourage biodiversity by increasing ecologically vital habitat and play a crucial role in meeting the state’s 30 by 30 goals — preserving 30% of land and coastal waters by 2030.

Elevating the highway would also increase the climate resilience of North Bay communities by buffering high-tide events and reducing nearby flooding and by allowing more sediment to flow into San Pablo Bay, which will help protect marshes and communities against sea level rise.

Everyone agrees that Highway 37 needs fixing. Not only does heavy commute traffic and the absence of a transit alternative create daily gridlock, portions of the road become impassable when bay waters are high, and climate change is only going to make that situation worse.

Sierra Club Redwood Chapter activists were therefore disappointed when instead of moving forward with an elevated causeway that its own studies have identified as the preferred alternative, Caltrans proposed an interim fix — an outdated conventional highway-widening project that will reduce traffic congestion and flood risk at best temporarily.

Transportationequity, Highway 37, sea level rise, wetlands

Hwy. 37 could be under water by 2050. Here’s how Caltrans plans to keep traffic flowing

September 18, 2022

Colin Atagi, NORTH BAY BUSINESS JOURNAL

The favored plan also proposes the route have a 60 mph speed limit, as well as two lanes in each direction with bicycle and pedestrian paths. The plan is in its early stages and officials haven’t identified a cost or funding source.

Caltrans, in order to keep traffic flowing decades from now, intends to build an elevated road along Highway 37 to combat rising water levels, which are expected to eventually inundate the North Bay arterial.

The proposed project essentially stretches across the existing route along San Pablo Bay and through Marin, Sonoma, Napa and Solano counties.

It preserves travel patterns, allows landward marsh migration and is resilient to sea level rises, officials said in explaining its benefits.

Climate Change & Energy, Habitats, Transportation, Wildlifebike lanes, bike/pedestrian bridge, flooding, habitat restoration, Highway 37, marsh migration, San Pablo Bay, sea level rise, wetlands

Sea level rise threatens Highway 37; leaders prepare billion dollar plan to stop it

August 24, 2022

Chase Hunter, NORTH BAY BUSINESS JOURNAL

Highway 37 serves as a key artery of Bay Area traffic from Marin County to Vallejo, but its low-lying place in former wetlands makes it susceptible to flooding and sea level rise over coming decades.

Leaders in transportation will need to address two issues at once to ensure the long-term sustainability of the key corridor: the creation of flood-resistant, sea-level impervious infrastructure and the environmental restoration of the wetlands.

“You can’t do the environmental restoration and address sea level rise without doing the transportation project. And you can’t do the transportation improvement projects without addressing sea level rise,” said Suzanne Smith, the executive director of the Sonoma County Transportation Authority.

Climate Change & Energy, TransportationHighway 37, sea level rise, wetlands

Wetlands advocates work to raise Highway 37

August 11, 2022

Dan Ashley & Tom Didion, ABC7 NEWS

There’s a vocal debate over building a better Bay Area, by building a better highway. At stake is not just traffic, but potentially vast stretches of restored wetlands.

When Kendall Webster gazes across the levees and farmland in southern Sonoma County, she can envision the tidal marshes that once flushed water back and forth from meandering waterways to San Pablo Bay.

“And so this whole flatland here was a mosaic of tidal wetlands,” she explains.

It’s a vast expanse of wetlands that the Sonoma Land Trust and their partners are working to restore.

“And you know, California is investing in climate, the way no other state in the country is right now. So we think that this is the natural infrastructure project that the state should be highlighting,” Webster maintains.

To make that vision a reality, the Trust has joined with Save the Bay and more than a dozen environmental and land management groups, urging Cal/Trans and the state to remove the one barrier that could open up natural marshland across the entire North Bay.

Land Use, Transportationflooding, habitat restoration, Highway 37, levees, sea level rise, tidal ecosystem, tidal flow, wetlands migration, wetlands restoration