People of the Creek: Search still on for answers to flooding creek People of the Creek: Search still on for answers to flooding creek (March 23, 2005)

Editor's Note: This is the 15th part of the story of the people who have lived on the banks of the San Francisquito Creek and its tributaries through the centuries.

By Nancy Lund

Perhaps it is because San Francisquito Creek affects so many varying groups that combining flood control and habitat protection have been so hard to come by.

The creek is the border between San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, and Menlo Park and Palo Alto. The towns of East Palo Alto, Woodside and Portola Valley are also stakeholders in any decisions.

The multiple governments, creek neighbors subject to flooding, and various other agencies have compounded the already complicated problems of decision-making about creek issues. For example, Jasper Ridge Administrative Director Philippe Cohen receives input from 35 different agencies on Searsville Reservoir issues. Little wonder that ideas about solutions have been weighed for decades. . The key proposals put forward between 1958 and 1995 were: expand Searsville Lake, remove the Searsville Dam, replace bridges with wider ones, build diversion conduits, widen the channel, create more upstream storage with another high or low dam, or line the creek bed with concrete. None of the alternatives won sufficient public support to be implemented. One plan, proposed by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1958, pitted town against town and was argued in meetings and in the Palo Alto Times for a decade. The idea was to build another dam, as much as 2,500 feet wide, two miles downstream from the 1891 Searsville Dam. It would have held collected water in a reservoir during heavy rains and would drain slowly during the dry season. Its proposed name was the Ladera Dam. The reservoir created would have been some two miles long, covering as much 525 acres including much of Webb Ranch and part of what has become SLAC. It would lie essentially between Alpine and Sand Hill roads. Approximately half of the estimated cost of $8.4 million would be born locally; the federal government would pay the other half. Opposed to the plan were Menlo Park, Stanford (on whose land the dam and reservoir would sit), Woodside and Ladera. In favor were Palo Alto, and both San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. In public meetings Palo Alto City Manager Jerry Keithley and Stanford's Donald Carlson traded hostile barbs, as did supervisors from San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. So bitter was the debate that proponents of the dam came close to threatening that any flood damage or drownings would rest solely on the heads of the opponents. Nevertheless, opposition was so strong that the idea was tabled. New attempts to alleviate these jurisdictional problems arose in the 1990s. A Coordinated Resources Management Process (CRMP, pronounced "crimp") was created to bring together dozens of public and private agencies, groups and individuals in an effort to devise a cooperative plan for managing the creek. Flood control is one major issue; also at stake is the preservation of the hundreds of plants and animals whose lives depend upon the creek ecosystem. CRMP members knew that any decisions made would affect the entire San Francisco Bay ecosystem of which the San Francisquito watershed is but one part. Decisions had to be made that looked at the long-range big picture. Efforts to preserve the riparian environment have continued through the decades alongside the flood control work. A group of conservationists who call themselves The Streamkeepers has worked independently and with the State Department of Fish and Game to restore the creek and its tributaries as steelhead spawning grounds. Another group, Friends of the Creek, have sponsored annual garbage cleanups. Their first year of activity, 1989, produced six truckloads of debris, including 16 shopping carts, tires, pieces of furniture, and hundreds of cans and bottles. (Garbage in the creek is nothing new. Buried in the bank of Bull Run Creek are the remains of some kind of large cart, perhaps a stagecoach. Parts of a newspaper-dispensing machine are lodged deep in Corte Madera Creek. Remnants of 1906 earthquake rubble, such as colored designs and gold pieces of the Stanford Memorial Church, have turned up in the creek near the campus. Trail riders cleaning the creek in 1970 found a bathtub.) People of today understand more than our ancestors did that the creek system isn't a dumping ground. Still, regular clean-ups take place, now sponsored by a new agency.
Next: More efforts at habitat preservation.

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