Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
developers seeking to fill an area off Alameda Island claimed it had no
important avian species, Professor Junea Kelly of UC Berkeley responded
by pulling one stuffed bird after another out of a dress box. McLaughlin in
a Bancroft Library oral history recalls the incident as a “sensation.”
McLaughlin also remembers dressing up in a blue linen suit, a straw hat,
and red high heels to impress a key finance committee. She was thankful
that she'd done her homework when they asked her to explain the nature
of an anadromous fish.
The McAteer-Petris Act passed in 1965, creating the San Francisco Bay
Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) to take charge of
the bay's future. The commission got to work immediately—putting a stop
to fills, dams, and other developments threatening the bay. McLaughlin,
Kerr, and Gulick attended nearly every commission meeting in those days,
sitting “where we could always be seen,” she says. Gulick regularly got on
the phone to bend the director's ear on policy issues.
One early triumph occurred when the fledgling bay commission saved
a mountain from ending up underwater. Real estate moguls David Rock-
efeller and Charles Crocker had hatched a plan to shave the top off Mount
San Bruno south of San Francisco and use it to create new land of Red-
wood Shores. An area of old oyster beds the size of Manhattan was to be
filled. But BCDC and Save the Bay soon put the brakes on the mammoth
development project.
Whereas Save the Bay's early leaders were feisty women, the commis-
sion's early leaders were strong men, among them
Sunset
publisher Mel
Lane and director Joe Bodovitz. These men set a new tone for bay-
related business, and it was not “as usual.”
Today, BCDC is a commission of 29 members drawn from diverse pub-
lic agencies and transportation interests, and headquartered in downtown
San Francisco. These days, a BCDC permit is a prerequisite to do almost
anything in the open water, from repairing a dock or mooring a vessel, to
dredging a marina or placing any kind of solid in the liquidity of the bay.
Since its creation more than four decades ago, BCDC has guarded the
interests of the bay in many ways. The organization has protected wet-
lands and championed their restoration, negotiated with ports and air-
ports seeking to dredge or fill for new projects, and overseen mitigation
for oil spills and habitat losses. It has weighed in on military base reuse
planning, facilitated public access to the bayshore, fined lawbreakers, bro-
kered environmental agreements among diverse interests, and reviewed
every imaginable proposal to fix a bridge stanchion or build a deck on a
waterfront cafe.
“Passage of the McAteer-Petris Act brought overnight changes to San
Francisco Bay,” says Phyllis Faber, a wetland biologist who once served on
California's Coastal Commission. “The creation of BCDC with its Bay
