When the last 150 feet of Santa Cruz’s iconic wharf plummeted into the ocean Monday, city leaders were still grappling with damage it had sustained two years earlier during back-to-back winter storms.
With the construction equipment now at the bottom of the ocean, some local residents are asking why the city waited until the winter — when storms are common and the sea is rougher — to start a $4 million project to repair the popular pier.
The complicated answer is that the repairs were hamstrung by a common California problem: tension between protecting the environment and maintaining key infrastructure, a battle that has played out along the coast for years. Strict permitting requirements and lengthy litigation by environmental activists have stalled efforts to fortify the pier that could have helped it withstand the storm, current and former city officials say.
At the center of the delays: seagulls.
It was for the benefit of the western gull, commonly known as the seagull, that the city of Santa Cruz delayed the most critical part of the repair work, installing new timber piles — the columns that hold up the wharf — until September, because gulls and another bird, the pigeon guillemot, make their nests in the wharf’s wooden beams.
The protections for the birds are imposed by the state Coastal Commission, from which the city must obtain a permit before it can do repairs. Most major construction — including replacing the piles — must take place between September and March to avoid the nesting season.
“Our work window is a very narrow six months over the winter time when we tend to have storms and big waves,” said Tony Elliott, director of Parks and Recreation, which oversees the wharf. “The wharf is a 110-year-old structure, and it requires a lot of work. … It takes more than six months out of the year to maintain it effectively.”
Neither the western gull nor the pigeon guillemot are endangered species, yet the Coastal Commission says federal and state laws protect their nesting areas.
At the city’s request, the commission in February loosened some restrictions to allow piles to be installed during nesting season under certain conditions — only after 10 a.m., for a maximum of four hours a day, so long as workers steered 300 feet clear of any nests.
“Practically, it didn’t change the dynamics,” Elliott said.
Birds aside, the city also took several months to find a company to lead the repair work. Santa Cruz had funding for the project and engineering plans drafted by June, but it didn’t choose a contractor for the project until mid-August, just a few weeks before the permit allowed construction to begin.
Commission spokesman Joshua Smith said the commission has worked with Santa Cruz for years “to allow for wharf maintenance while also ensuring that sensitive species are protected.” The commission has granted emergency permits to allow the city to conduct repairs even during the nesting season, like one issued in July to allow the damaged Dolphin Restaurant to be removed from the wharf.
But Jon Bombaci, who managed the wharf for decades and retired in 2021, said that years of Coastal Commission restrictions have compounded stress on the wharf.
“There needs to be a reassessment of the policies that direct the Coastal Commission’s permitting process,” he said. “Their time restrictions were antithetical to getting repairs done.”
The Coastal Commission did not respond to questions about whether the permitting requirements led to the delays.
Bombaci also pointed out the irony of the permit restrictions.
“These birds are nesting in a manmade structure,” he said. “If you don’t do the repairs in a timely manner, you’re going to lose the whole thing anyways.”
Santa Cruz officials also say lengthy litigation has delayed a master plan first envisioned in 2014 that could have helped to buffer the pier from strong swells.
The plan called for new pedestrian walkways and retail spaces intended to get more tourists out to the wharf and increase parking and rental revenues, which was expected to support operations and maintenance in the long term.
By focusing on additions to the wharf, rather than simply retrofitting it, the city could tap more federal funds. Grant money was more available when it came to adding public walkways and bike improvements, and less available for simple repair projects, city officials said. The additions, including a walkway on the wharf’s western edge, were engineered to provide additional buffering to the pier’s main structure and protect it as further repairs were completed.
But the master plan faced opposition from Don’t Morph the Wharf, a group that sought to preserve the wharf’s historic aesthetic. It also took issue with the proposed Western Walkway, which they worried would be unsafe for pedestrians. Under pressure, city officials delayed approving the master plan.
In 2020, the council finally signed off. Soon after, Don’t Morph the Wharf sued the city under the California Environmental Quality Act, a law that was originally written to ensure projects consider their impact on the environment but has since been weaponized by numerous groups to impede new development. Activists have used CEQA lawsuits to challenge everything from student housing at UC Berkeley to electrical grid expansions.
This year, the city passed a version of the master plan without the controversial Western Walkway. City officials lament that, during the time the case took to move through the courts, the city missed out on millions of dollars in grants.
City Manager Matt Huffaker said it can’t be known whether the expanded pier would have stood up against the record-breaking swells Monday or last winter’s storms.
“But we would have been in a stronger position had we been able to move forward with some of those projects in a more timely manner,” he said.
Now, Santa Cruz officials face a difficult choice: Should the city rebuild the wharf, even as climate change threatens to bring stronger storms?
Gary Griggs, a professor at U.C. Santa Cruz and expert on coastal geology, sees the decision to rebuild as somewhat of a Sisyphean task.
“We can put in more pilings and put in more deckings every year,” Griggs said. “But there’s absolutely nothing we can do over the long term to hold back the Pacific Ocean.”