THE LAGUNITAS CREEK watershed is home to one of the last significant coho salmon populations on the California coast. These salmon are as important to Marin, and to the nation, as any of the other natural wonders we have fought to protect over the years.
But, despite decades of studies, plans, hearings, recommendations, educational efforts and lawsuits, the salmon in Lagunitas Creek, and its main tributary, San Geronimo Creek, remain endangered, and the population continues its downward spiral to the point that Marin's salmon face imminent extinction.
Freshwater streams, such as those in the Lagunitas Creek watershed, play a critical role in the salmon's lifecycle.
To sustain spawning salmon and their offspring, a stream needs to have clear, cold, and unpolluted water, with sufficient flow, lots of shade, pools, gravel and woody debris along its length. These are stringent requirements that must be met or the salmon won't survive. Human activity, especially land development, has been the main cause of the collapse of the Lagunitas Creek salmon population, and sustaining the salmon requires rigorous protection along the entire length of the creek and its tributaries.
The cumulative effect of many small land disturbances near a stream can be devastating.
Land-use restrictions to protect salmon streams have successfully been implemented elsewhere in California and around the U.S. Marin's failure to take action is all the more disturbing when you consider that other counties and cities have enacted stream protection measures while Marin officials continue to "study" the issue.
The need to control development to protect Marin's salmon population has been well known for decades. Officials watched as coho populations along the central coast dropped by 70 percent from the 1960s.
Marin's 1994 Countywide Plan contemplated enactment of an enforceable stream protection ordinance to ensure the survival of the coho population. But nothing was done by the county to enact an ordinance, and shortly afterwards, in 1996, the National Marine Fisheries Service declared that Central Coast coho were a "threatened" species, primarily due to habitat degradation associated with human activity along the streams salmon use for spawning.
Only nine years later, the dramatic decline in Lagunitas Creek salmon continued to the point that, in 2005, the federal service changed the listing of central coast coho to "endangered", stating that the salmon were "in danger of extinction" due to habitat destruction.
Still Marin county officials took no action. Instead, in 2007 they adopted a new Countywide Plan, promising to enact an ordinance to protect Marin's streams. But county officials did not enact the ordinance they had promised, and so in 2010 the non-profit Salmon Protection and Watershed Network sued the county for its failure to protect Marin's salmon, and the court imposed a ban on new development in San Geronimo Valley pending adoption of the ordinance Marin had been promising to enact since 1994.
Finally, this June, almost two decades after it had been proposed, the Board of Supervisors had before it a draft stream protection ordinance ready for adoption.
But when it was time to vote, its members lacked the political courage to protect our salmon. Instead, they chose to appoint a "subcommittee" to make recommendations to revise the Countywide Plan yet another time. Rather than taking the clear path of protecting our salmon that was staked out 20 years ago, Marin politicians have chosen more litigation, more studies, more hearings, more politics and no action.
The downward spiral continues while Marin officials continue to debate.
Enough is enough. Marin needs to move quickly to enact a rigorous, enforceable ordinance to protect its salmon, or they will all be gone.
David Schnapf of Greenbrae is a retired attorney with an interest in environmental issues. He is a Marin Conservation League director.