The City Let Wetlands Take Root and Complains It Can’t Remove Wetlands to Prevent Floods

Wetlands, a muddy, weedy and endangered ecosystem, protect coasts from storm surge and sea-level rise. They provide habitat for countless threatened species and they clean rainwater from storms before it flows to the surf. 

But they also clog up channelized creeks designed to send flood water into the ocean before it destroys homes and businesses. To prevent devastating floods in the future, the city of San Diego will have to figure out how to better balance its responsibilities to protect them while protecting people and their property. 

It is not doing either very well. The city got a lot of heat from residents after record-breaking rain and resulting floods destroyed their homes Jan. 22. The southeastern fork of Chollas Creek topped its banks and flooded houses and apartment buildings with five feet of water in some places.  

Beta Street in the Shelltown neighborhood got some of the worst of it. Residents there have been pleading with the city for years to take better care of its stormwater system – specifically demanding the city clear out the creek that had become an overgrown wetland where water backed up on its way out.  

City officials said Jan. 22’s storm brought 100 times more water than the Beta Street’s storm channels were built to contain. But the city’s deputy chief operating officer, Kris McFadden, also blamed the wetlands growing in them. 

During a press conference on Jan. 25, McFadden, said regulations force the city to go through an “arduous” permitting process before workers can remove wetlands in San Diego’s storm channels. Regulators require the city to replant whatever wetlands workers removed somewhere else, he said. 

The city is already woefully behind on that mitigation. And it was obvious to everyone in Shelltown.   

I walked the length of the Beta Street channel two days after the storm. Whole trees and thickets of brush tall enough to hide a small homeless encampment survived the rushing water. Jesse Preciado, who swam through floodwaters to unclog a storm drain on that street, walked with me. He understood the creek contained protected habitat, but he didn’t see why the city still couldn’t keep the channel clean enough to diminish catastrophic flooding.  

“We have ducks and stuff, and it’s all great but a duck isn’t going to help our houses not get flooded,” said Preciado, pointing to a Mallard as he walked me along the creek’s banks days after the storm. “I personally don’t care about the ducks.” 

That section of creek, with concrete lining each bank, was next on the Stormwater Department’s to-do list to clean this year, according to a presentation given to the City Council’s environment committee in November. But the work didn’t start before  the rainy season.  

Todd Snyder, the director of the city’s Stormwater Department (who’s been on the job for less than a year), told the council that 60 out of 200 channel segments (like the one along Beta Street) needed major maintenance. But the department only budgeted enough to clean four per year.  

The city estimates it needs  $1.6 billion to build and repair all the infrastructure that ensures storm water does not flood neighborhoods while still flowing into the ocean with as few contaminants as possible. Part of that includes replanting vegetation designated as wetlands under state and federal laws, which are routinely torn out of storm drain channels to keep them clear.  

Usually, the city must replant an acre for every acre it tears out. As of November, the city still owed regulators 27 acres of wetlands. Snyder told the City Council the department didn’t have enough money to do that. 

Wetlands must be replanted within the same watershed that lost them due to channel cleaning. Or, the city can opt to purchase credits at a wetland mitigation bank. Those banks pool that money and plant wetlands somewhere else. 

Credits are pricey. One credit for an acre at a wetlands bank on the San Luis Rey River costs approximately $575,000, said Craig Gustafson, a spokesman for the stormwater department. 

“The longer we wait to mitigate, the more it costs,” Snyder said in an email. 

The city has been waiting a long time. In 2020, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers informed the stormwater department it took too long to replant wetlands lost during an emergency channel cleaning after winter storms in 2015 and 2016. Consequently, San Diego must do more – the city now must replant five acres for every acre lost, the Army Corps wrote in an email. That replanting project is out for bid, according to an October 2023 report from the stormwater department. 

Even with all the red tape city officials said paralyzed them from taking action, just days after the Jan. 22 storm, the stormwater department stripped the section of Chollas Creek behind Beta Street down to bare soil. The city pegged 39 other locations for similar emergency storm cleaning, according to records obtained by Voice of San Diego. 

The stormwater department will eventually have to either replant or pay for the number of wetlands lost in this latest emergency. Snyder said the department is subsisting thanks to a huge loan from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that could help fund up to $733 million in stormwater upgrades. But it’s still not clear yet how much the emergency work will cost them.  

Cleaning Moves Slower Than Wetlands Grow 

Wetland regulation is its own special circle of hell for the stormwater department. Even if San Diego had enough money to routinely clean all 200 storm channels that need it, protected wetland plants can quickly regrow in those former creeks and streams.  

“The willows, which are commonly the first thing in … grow like gangbusters,” said Jeff Crooks, a wetlands expert at the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve.  

The stormwater department’s standards manual says routine maintenance is critical to ensure channels “don’t inadvertently become wetlands, waters of the state or sensitive species habitat” which are regulated by either the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the State Water Resources Control Board, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  

In other words, the stormwater department is stuck in a positive feedback loop: It can’t keep up on routine maintenance of its storm channels, so protected plants take root in them and can turn channels back into regulated wetlands. And that makes it more difficult to clean them out. 

“Time is a critical factor there,” said Kyle Dahl, chief of the Army Corps regulation division for San Diego and Imperial counties.  

And then there are the birds. 

Because San Diego exists in a major north-south bird migration flyway, channel cleaning generally has to take place outside of bird nesting season which lasts from February through September. That’s a short window to get maintenance work done, Crooks said.  

“There’s endangered species everywhere we go in coastal California because all their habitat is gone,” Crooks said. “Where there’s any habitat, there’s almost certainly to be an endangered species.”   

Days after the storm, city officials blamed a difficult wetland permitting process for slowing down channel maintenance. But state and federal regulators told me they’ve given broad authority to the stormwater department to do what they need to do to protect life and property in emergency situations.  

To the stormwater department’s credit, Crooks said, they have a lot of bosses to answer to.  

“There’s too many cooks in the kitchen regulating these things,” Crooks said. “We’re so protective of our systems here which has served us very well California, but sometimes when you need to be creative, it becomes a little more complicated.”