Assembly Select Committee on Select Committee on Sea Level Rise and the California Economy

Okay, I'm going to call. Hello, everyone. That's very loud. I'm going to call the Select Committee on Sea level rise in the California economy hearing to order my. Good afternoon. My name is Tasha Berner and I represent Assembly District 77, which accompanies encompasses coastal San Diego from Carlsbad all the way down to Coronado.

And because they're funny, they gave me the water off Imperial beach that has the sewage from Tijuana. And so welcome to the Select Committee hearing on sea level rise in the California economy. We had a hearing in Foster City in 2020, and so it's great to be back in San Mateo county.

I'd like to thank the City of San Bruno for hosting this hearing, and I think Sandy Alvarez from a Council Member from San Bruno wanted to join us. I don't think she's here yet, but we'll welcome her when she gets here. And also my colleague, Assembly Member Mia Bonta from just across the bay.

The Select Committee was established by assemblymember Rich Gordon to consider the challenges ahead and address the expected impact of sea level rise on our communities. We know that the climate crisis is affecting our weather patterns, especially in coastal areas that are more prone to flooding.

In San Diego, at the start of this year, we received almost three inches of rainfall, which is our entire winter allotment for rain in San Diego in about 1 hour. And that caused flooding, landslides, mudslides, devastating the region, especially affecting the most vulnerable segments of our community.

Sea level rise is also a result of climate change, which affects our marine ecosystems and coastal areas. We're now beginning to see how this can have unforeseen and disastrous impacts.

One of the things we learned in our 2020 hearing is something we should all know from 7th grade science, but all of us kind of forgot, I think at least those of us legislators who are at the panel, but I think many people in the audience did as well.

As sea levels rise, there's equilibrium, so groundwater will also rise. So one of the things we were really concerned about was how sea level rise affects cap toxic sites. And we know California is leading the way in addressing sea level rise across the state's coastline.

In 2022, the Ocean Protection Council and 16 other state agencies created a groundbreaking state agency sea level rise action plan for California, paving the path for reducing the impacts of sea level rise. The Department of Toxic Substances Control, DTSC, in February of last year issued a new policy requiring sea level rise vulnerability assessments every five years.

Now, considering the effects of what I said before with groundwater rise for the first time. The goal of this hearing is to better understand how contaminated sites and cap toxic sites are at risk of groundwater flooding due to sea level rise.

The steps that are being taken to mitigate this issue, and what more needs to be done by the state, local governments, and state agencies to ensure that we address the impacts of groundwater rise and protect Californians up and down the coastline. Before we begin, I want to go over some rules of the hearing.

We'll have two panels with each organization allotted 10 minutes for their presentation. Please stay within your time. I don't like to, like, call you out, but we have a timer that will go off, and I'll have to, you know, shut it down, so don't make me look bad.

And after each panel, we'll leave a few minutes for Q and a from our panel up here. And after two panels conclude, we'll provide an opportunity for public comment.

For those of you here for the public comment portion, please note that each person will be allotted two minutes for their remarks, and we may have to limit it because I do have to get on a plane back to San Diego.

Before our first panels begin, I'd like to open the floor to Assembly Member Bonta for any opening comments that you would like to make.

Thank you so much, chair. Thank you so much, chair. It's wonderful that you've continued on this very important Select Committee so that we have an opportunity to really consider the impacts of sea level rise and groundwater rise as well. I am Mia Banta. I represent Assembly District 18, which includes the beautiful cities of Oakland, Alameda, and Emeryville.

Three cities that have a coastline where this is a very deep concern. Last season, when we experienced yet another atmospheric river, there was a front page article on the Alameda Post that had a picture of a young person in a canoe down our main street.

Because the sea level and groundwater was so significant and we had not done enough to mitigate that, that it was impacting our everyday quality of life.

And certainly not only are we concerned about our everyday quality of life, but we're also concerned deeply about the ways in which our, our overall health is impacted by the toxins that are emitted from groundwater rise as well. So very interested and intrigued by this topic. Thank you for inviting me to participate.

And also thank you for having us at skyline. This is a beautiful. Sorry, where are we? We're at Skyline. Yeah, at Skyline. I was like, I have a skyline in Oakland, but we're not in Skyline. zero, my goodness. At Skyline. It's such a beautiful campus.

And I think this is a wonderful space to be able to both consider the impacts of sea level rise while also looking at our beautiful bay.

Thank you, Assembly Member Vanta, and thank you for being such a leader on environmental issues, also in the State Assembly. It's a pleasure to be able to work with her on so many issues. And I'm very lucky to call our colleague. So I wanna thank you for your opening remarks. It's really important that we're discussing this.

And with that, let's open it up. For our first panel, we have Karen Mogas, Chief Deputy Director of the California State Water Resources Control Board. Miss Mogus, thank you for joining us. And we also have John Baestra, so you can come up here. And we have Jeremy Smith. So take it away.

Teach us all the things we need to know about what you're doing to mitigate this issue.

Good afternoon. Thank you so much for inviting me to speak today. I'm Karen Mogas, Chief Deputy Director at the State Water Resources Control Board, and I'm pleased to talk about the work that Water Boards doing to evaluate and mitigate effects of sea level rise on contaminated sites across the state.

I also wanted to mention, before I get started on that issue, that we're evaluating climate change impacts on all of our program areas, one of them being the Arslight cleanup program, and the issues related to inundation from level rise and flooding, groundwater rise, drought that changes regional pumping and infiltration of water into aquifers and wildfires.

All of these impacts have great impacts on the work that we do, and we need to be thinking about them as we move forward. And we are doing that. We focus on cleanup sites and underground storage tanks, which is the topic of the day today.

We also have responsibility in the Sustainable Groundwater Management act, which is very much about groundwater supply, mostly in the central valley, but also very much related to climate change, water supply related conservation. And I'll just put a shout out. Our conservation regulations just went into effect yesterday.

So really excited about that stormwater capture and water recycling, as well as materials and waste management and coastal and watershed protection. And so with that sort of overview of all of our program areas that climate change touches, I'll focus in on the subject of today, which is our cleanup programs, and I'll go to the next slide.

Do I have. I do not have the power. That's my microphone. Yeah, I know.

We'll give you the power.

Thank you. Silver. Small film. Silver. All right. All right. There we go. Excellent.

So, back in 2016, the Water Boards and DTSC partnered up to initiate a statewide analysis using GIS technology to evaluate the impacts of sea level rise on contaminated properties, the agencies evaluated the number and locations of both active and closed cleanup sites, recognizing that even closed sites could be impacted and remobilize contamination that would be inundated under various sea level rise scenarios from one to 5ft.

And so this slide just shows the various sea level rise impacts from two to 5ft in the different areas. Our regional board offices across the state.

And you'll note here and in the next map that you'll see on the next slide that it's probably obvious to all of us that most of the impacts are on our coastal regions. So that would be the north coast, the San Francisco Bay, the Central coast, Los Angeles, Santa Ana and San Diego regions.

So 5ft of sea level rise could potentially inundate 545 waterboard over led oversight of contaminated sites.

And if you go to the next slide, you can see that our coastal regions are most impacted and the region we sit in right now, the San Francisco Bay region is by far and away the most impacted, likely because of a couple of things.

There's lots of cleanup sites, from military activities to industrial activities across the Bay Area, but also we have the San Francisco Bay that is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise. In the San Francisco Bay, 1ft of sea level rise would impact 100 cleanup sites. Sorry, go ahead and go to the next slide. Yeah.

1ft of sea level rise would impact 100 cleanup sites. 5ft of sea level rise on the next slide would impact 454 cleanup sites. So as you can see, it's a pretty severe issue here in the Bay Area. That's not to mention that there's other regions of the state that also will be impacted by sea level rise.

So what are we doing about it? So the regional boards, the nine that you saw in the first table on the second slide, are requiring vulnerability assessments and adaptation plans for sites that are likely to be inundated as part of our cleanup orders. So assessment and adaptation plans include requirements that are based on site specific conditions.

So each is analyzed on a site specific basis. But generally they require responsible parties to assess and manage climate change related effects, including inundation and groundwater rise project impacts for the next 50 years.

So projecting out the impacts from sea level rise and doing the planning to ensure that impacts that are projected out into the future are addressed and identify needed upgrades to existing assets and new infrastructure that may be needed to address those impacts.

We're also identifying, requiring responsible parties to identify steps to minimize greenhouse gas emissions as part of that cleanup program. I do want to mention, too, that the Water Board has committed to integrating racial equity and addressing environmental justice into all of our programs and policies. So, looking back at.

Thinking back to the programs I mentioned earlier, all of those programs are also looking at layers of data related to vulnerable communities and communities that have historically experienced environmental injustices.

And so we are working also to identify vulnerable communities affected by sea level rise and groundwater rise that would mobilize contamination, and then using that information to prioritize our work in those most vulnerable communities.

And finally, I just wanted to mention, and I know my colleague from DTSC will talk about this as well, is that we're also teaming up DTSC, the Water Board, and the Ocean Protection Council to initiate a collaborative effort that builds on the analyses that I just showed you in our maps to develop a vulnerability assessment and prioritization tool to evaluate the vulnerability of coastal and Low lying cleanup sites to sea level rise and groundwater rise.

Tool development is ongoing, and the planned rollout is in the summer of 2026. The final tool will be one that will include a public dashboard and an integrative interactive GIS map that will be available for the public to use. And where am I in this map? And is my community vulnerable?

So that's exciting work that we're collaborating on, and I look forward to seeing the results of that. And I'll end with, again, thank you for inviting me to come speak. I really appreciate the opportunity and look forward to listening to the rest of the discussion.

Thank you. We were just at the beginning when. We saw those numbers. I think we knew it was a problem, and I knew the Bay Area was more impacted from our 2020 hearing. But I was telling my colleague, like, Bay Area screwed, you know, there's not, like, a nicer way to say it.

And so I'm happy you're on it. But, you know, we're going to have to look at what those risk assessments. Are and what the cost will be. And make sure that we're monitoring the groundwater as we go through this process so we catch any things that we maybe don't expect early enough. So, with that, thank you.

And we're going to go to our next panelist with the Department of Toxic Substances control. John Baestra is the hazardous substances engineer with DTSC. Take it away.

Thank you. It's nice to be here, everyone, thank you for inviting us to present some information. Like Assemblyperson Berner just said, I've been with DTSC, and I've been on the sea level rise workgroup, which DTSC has been running since 2022. I don't. I haven't run out of time yet. Okay, excellent.

So DTSC has developed a sea level rise guidance document for evaluation and adaptation of contaminated sites where sea level rise may negatively impact communities along California's coastline due to climate change. Sea level rise is an increase of water level of the Earth's oceans.

Generally, at DTSC, we're focused on mitigating the impact sea level rise can have on contaminated properties that we're tasked with cleaning up or overseeing. Without proper protection, sea level rise may adversely affect public health. It can degrade the environment and increase threat of release of contaminants in surface water, groundwater, air, soil, and sediment. Approximately.

Much like Karen said, 350 active DTSE projects are potentially subject to the effects from sea level rise, either from inundation or storm surge or from the rise of groundwater as a result of sea level rise.

These concerns are at the core of DTSC's mission, which is to protect California's people, communities, and environment from toxic substances, to enhance economic vitality by restoring contaminated land, and to compel manufacturers to make safer consumer products. And I have the power now.

So DTSC developed our own sea level rise guidance document for use in our site mitigation and restoration program. This was prepared to ensure and promote consistency across our Department. This guidance will help us train our project managers in managing these sites and to maintain sea level rise efforts all across California.

DTSC used the Ocean Protection Council's California Sea level Rise Action Plan and their guidance, originally finalized in February 2022, to prepare our own guidance.

Early on in preparing our own guidance, we recognize that while we have the expertise in the investigation and cleanup of contaminated sites, we needed to rely on other experts for the most up to date science on sea level rise, including projections of the amount of sea level rise for different areas of the state.

Our own original guidance was prepared in 2022 and early 2023. We publicly noticed our guidance in February 2023, and we allowed for a nine month comment period for the public, other agencies, and other parties to give feedback on our document.

We received over 400 comments because the OSHA Protection Council actually revised their action plan and guidance in 2024. We further revised our guidance to both address public and other comments and address changes in the OSHA Protection Council's action plan and guidance. We believe our revised guidance better reflects science and addresses public comments.

And as it would happen, our revised guidance and responses to comments have been prepared, and it came available today, this morning on our sea level Rise webpage on our website. Great timing, Abby.

So we identified the sea level rise viewer, which we call our mapping tool to identify sites that could be subject to sea level rise or associated groundwater rise. And that may require an assessment of the project's vulnerability to sea level rise, which DTSC and, as you heard, the Water Board labels as a vulnerability assessment.

We'll discuss what vulnerability means in this context and vulnerability assessments a little bit more in the next slide to give you a sense of what they're about. Our resources will be initially focused on those active DTSE projects which lie within inundation areas and in areas where groundwater rise could affect known contamination.

So if you look at this slide, each point labeled with a d is an active DTSC site. And you can see that's part of the bay. The image at the upper right represents DTSC sites that will potentially be affected by sea level rise inundation.

The lower right picture, it represents active DTSC sites which will potentially be affected by associated groundwater rise as a result of sea level rise. And it can be. It's a sobering picture to look at.

So this slides an overview of how DTSC would evaluate a site or a project, and how we would implement activities to address sea level rise and associated groundwater rise.

So first, we would ask a responsible party, or other appropriate party, such as like a developer, to evaluate whether the site is vulnerable to sea level rise or associated groundwater rise, or both, as necessary.

Based on our online mapping tool screening, this party would prepare a vulnerability assessment to document whether the site is susceptible to sea level rise or associated groundwater rise, or again, both as necessary, and DTSC would review this information. If a site's determined to not be vulnerable, and DTSC concurs, the sea level rise evaluation process stops there.

For now.

If a site is determined to be vulnerable, or potentially vulnerable, however, the same party would evaluate how they could address this vulnerability or vulnerabilities if there's more than one, and create an adaptation plan, much like Karen was making reference to, to describe their planned efforts to adapt the site to future sea level rise and groundwater rise as necessary.

Now, if DTSC approves that adaptation plan, the appropriate parties would then implement it, and they would have to improve site conditions or an existing remedy that's already there to make the site resilient to the anticipated sea level rise or groundwater rise, or both, as necessary.

So, as Assemblyperson Berner spoke of, we, through the California OSHA Protection Council, based on Senate Bill one, signed by our Governor in September 2021, created the statewide Leadership Collaborative, which was intended, which was attended by the state agencies whose name are on this slide as well as others.

All of these agencies met on a quarterly basis between 2022 and 2023 to discuss what actions each agency was taking to address how sea level Rise was affecting their area of responsibility.

Based on this coordination, DTSC determined that we needed a sea level rise guidance document to coordinate our site mitigation and restoration programs staff across California and before, during, and after creation of our guidance, DTSC and other agencies have been communicating, partnering, and coordinating various efforts evaluating sea level rise and identifying issues that may arise in doing so.

For example, DTSC and the Bay Conservation Development Commission have discussed how the regional shoreline adaptation plans may be affected by DTSC sites in those areas, and we've worked to determine how to share data and processes to improve. Prove this. Maybe I lost the power. zero, okay, I made it in my head.

So where is DTSC going to address sea level rise? So some of what we're doing is on this slide.

Presently, we're working with the State Water Board to develop a public accessible dashboard to give access of information, to help the public understand how our collective sites in a particular area may be affected by sea level rise and groundwater rise, and to focus on what efforts our agencies are making to ensure that these sites remain protective as sea levels and groundwater levels increase.

We're also collaborating with other state agencies and with the and with some University of California researchers that are part of environmental justice advocacy groups to understand what different communities may be concerned with that we're not aware of, and to find ways to aid to add those concerns into our day to day work.

Recently, in fact, DTSC has received approval for a permanently funded climate change unit that we're establishing over the next year. This climate change unit will be integral in supporting the project management and continued capacity building activities listed there.

This unit will assist and support DTSC project managers in planning and implementing future sea level rise work, and will also begin looking at other climate change phenomena that need to be incorporated into our processes, such as wildfire response, mudslides caused by excessive rain events, and all other potential climate change affecting our work in protecting human health and the environment.

This is why I didn't call this new unit the sea level Rise unit. While the sea level rise is most of what they'll work on at first, eventually any climate change effects that can influence how we work on hazardous substances and hazardous waste sites will need to be considered. Boop.

So I hope this presentation allows you to get a sense of the work that DTSC does. We are immensely grateful to the legislative leadership to Assembly Member Berner and to the Governor in addressing climate change and sea level rise through needed investments.

We're just at the beginning of this work, and there's still much to be done to enforce and protect our sites from groundwater and sea level rise.

The Legislature can continue to support these efforts by ensuring the affordability and use of the best available and environmentally friendly science equipment and technology, and to continue supporting research, initiatives and research on groundwater and sea level rise impacted areas. This last slide identifies how you can contact DTSC if you have any questions about sea level rise.

And again, thank you for allowing us to speak here.

Thank you so much. And we have the clicker, so, I don't know, we might have to take back the clicker, Mia, you know, but. Next we have John Bajstra. Now, next we have Jeremy Smith, who. Is going to talk to us more about the coast Commission's work on sea level rise, and.

And then we'll open it up for. Questions from Assembly Member Bonta and myself.

Thank you, and good afternoon, chair and Subcommitee Members. I'm Jeremy Smith, coastal engineer at the California Coastal Commission. Thank you for the opportunity to join this panel today to speak about the Coastal Commission's work on planning for the impacts of sea level rise and associated groundwater rise. Boop. Let's see. Did you have a trick?

I didn't. I promise I didn't have a trick.

Huh. Okay. Well, I'll just keep going. Maybe someone in the back can figure out how to do the next slide. There we go. zero, yeah. The Coastal Commission is charged with protecting and enhancing California's coast for present and future generations.

We do this through careful planning and regulation of environmentally sustainable development, rigorous use of science, strong public participation, education, and effective intergovernmental coordination. The Commission implements the California Coastal act.

The Coastal act contains broad statewide policies intended to guide planning and development along California's coastal zone, which you can see on the map in red and outside the windows. There. You'll note that the coastal zone covers California's outer coastline, islands, and first 3 miles of ocean waters.

The Commission does not have jurisdiction within San Francisco Bayou or the Bay Shoreline. Those are covered by our sister agency, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, or BCDC.

The Coastal Act's origin in the public interest is evident in the policies of the act, which are very much oriented around protecting public resources on the coast on behalf of the people, particularly the public's ability to access the coast.

While the Coastal act contains policies for a wide array of topics, some of the policy priorities most relevant to today's discussion include maximizing public access, protecting sensitive habitat and marine resources, minimizing risk for new development, and considering sea level rise. In planning and development.

The Commission translates these broad statewide policies into concrete actions through its dual role as both a planning agency and a regulatory agency. On the planning side, one of the Commission's key statutory functions is to assist local governments in developing and maintaining local coastal programs, or lcps.

Lcps are the planning tool by which local governments in the coastal zone implement the Coastal act within their jurisdiction, and they contain land use policies and ordinances to guide coastal development.

As part of this function, the lcps are the core document in which each coastal local government plans for community scale challenges facing its coastline, including challenges such as sea level rise.

One of the Commission's priorities in recent years has been partnering with local governments to update their lcps to assess the risks posed by sea level rise and related coastal hazards, and to develop local plans for community scale sea level rise adaptation.

The Commission has been actively working on sea level rise issues for over a decade, along with our state and local partners. This work received a boost from the Legislature last year through the passage of Senate Bill 272, which requires all local governments to address sea level rise and associated coastal hazards in their lcps.

In line with this legislation, the Commission is coordinating closely with coastal local governments who haven't done so already, to complete coastal hazards vulnerability assessments for their coastal zone, develop adaptation plans, and use those plans to inform specific land use policies that will guide future development within their vulnerable coastal areas.

The Commission recognizes that this assessment and planning work is complex, and our agency supports local governments in several different ways to help them be successful. Since 2014, the Commission has awarded over $16 million in grants to local governments for the purpose of updating their lcps to address sea level rise and other climate related issues.

The Commission also provides informational support by publishing guidance for local governments on how to plan for sea level rise in their communities. The Commission released its first seal of rise policy guidance in 2015 and has updated it multiple times.

Incidentally, just this past August, Commission staff released a public draft for our latest update to the seal of our policy guidance, which includes updated best available science that draws from the OPC state seal of rise projections adopted earlier this year, integration of environmental justice principles throughout the guidance and guidelines for local governments to with SB 272.

Also as part of this update, the Commission's latest guidance contains a significantly expanded discussion of groundwater rise. Groundwater rise poses additional risk to things like buried infrastructure and roads, in addition to contributing to flood risk in Low lying areas, including those that may be protected from surface flooding by levees.

To help local governments understand how to assess these risks, the Commission's updated guidance provides more detailed discussion of current science based on the latest groundwater research, including from another panelist here today, Doctor Christina Hill.

The Commission also connects local partners with tools for assessing potential risk from groundwater rise, such as the United States Geological Surveys statewide groundwater rise model, which can be accessed online. You can see a screenshot of this viewer on the right in very nearby Pacifica, with red indicating a potentially very shallow groundwater table.

This tool has been helpful in working with local governments to identify areas where groundwater rise may warrant additional studies or LCP policies, including as it relates to the potential impacts to contaminated sites. So now we're getting into today's topic here.

As science and policy around groundwater rise has grown in recent years, the Commission, local governments, and developers have increasingly had opportunities to draw on this knowledge to inform responsible development proposals in areas where both groundwater and toxic contaminants are present.

One example of when the issues of groundwater rise in contaminated sites came before the Coastal Commission was this past July, when the City of Huntington Beach proposed to amend its LCP to allow for a hotel and residential project at a former industrial site near the shoreline.

Similar to the historic development patterns in the San Francisco Bay Area, large areas of Huntington Beach are filled or diked historical wetlands, which means there are large swaths of Low lying areas that rely on a system of levees and drainage infrastructure for protection from coastal and rivering flooding.

In this instance, the proposed project site was immediately adjacent to a flood control channel and a former landfill and state Superfund site that is in the process of being remediated. It's called the Ascon landfill. Contaminants at the Superfund site are actively monitored, as required by DTSC, and were shown to be contained within the site.

That said, there were questions whether sea level rise and associated groundwater rise could change the conditions at the Superfund site, such that there might be a threat of contaminants impacting the proposed residential development next door, particularly the units that would be set aside for Low income residents.

Commission staff coordinated productively with our partners at DTSC and learned that upon completion of the remediation, the state superfund site would undergo a seal of rise vulnerability assessment, as John just described, to inform the operations, monitoring and maintenance plan, and that based on the available groundwater data and shared understanding between our technical staff, there's no evidence to suggest that the groundwater rise would be a concern for the proposed residences next door.

This close coordination between the Coastal Commission and DTSC staff also led to appropriate mitigation measures that will be implemented by the developer to ensure that toxic contaminants that could be mobilized by groundwater will not impact the residential project, including additional monitoring for any potential contaminant transport.

So, in conclusion, sea level rise poses many challenges to our state, and the Coastal Commission aims to continue its work in advancing planning for the various effects sea level rise will have on communities and coastal resources.

The science continues to advance on how sea level rise is expected to impact contaminated sites, and as an engineer, I would be remiss if I didn't underscore the importance of monitoring in order to continue growing our understanding as conditions evolve the case study I mentioned was an example of where site specific groundwater monitoring was essential for scientists and engineers to figure out the dynamics at play around the project site.

Based on this understanding, the Coastal Commission and its agency partners and the developer could identify a project that delivered public benefits while protecting public health. This sort of data driven approach will be important for the state, local governments, and developers to follow when development is proposed in places where coastal hazards and toxics are both present.

Fortunately, as you are hearing from other panelists today, the amount of data on groundwater is continuing to grow. As this occurs, it is important that data be effectively aggregated and that local governments incorporate this data into their seal of Ayes vulnerability assessments.

This will ensure that local governments are taking advantage of the best available science in order to have a comprehensive understanding of the coastal hazards that threaten their community, including groundwater rise, and plan for that development. Accordingly, the Coastal Commission will continue working with local governments to develop adaptation plans and land use policies that achieve those policy objectives.

The Commission is also continuing coordination with our regulatory partners at all levels of government, including our sister agencies on this panel, to leverage state expertise and best protect communities and the environment as it relates to contaminated sites. Thank you, and I'm happy to answer questions at the appropriate time.

Thank you so much, Mister Smith. I have so many questions, but I'm going to turn it over to my Member Bonta first for her first couple questions.

Yeah, I'll just ask one. I would love it if you all kind of in combination could basically square for me the first part of our presentation to the last.

So Miss Mullins indicated that we had 367 sites in the San Francisco Bay Area that are cleanup potential cleanup sites or that we know are potentially impacted sites, and we also know that all of them need to be addressed in some way.

You shared that basically the ongoing changes in sea level rise and groundwater rise are potentially undoing or making us have to look again at whether or not sites have been contained and decontaminated.

Can you first give us a sense, if just on the scale of 367 sites for the Bay Area, what would the cost of that potential cleanup be, just so that we can throw out a funny money number out there? And then.

And then second, could you give us a sense of how we should prioritize those cleanup areas so that we're actually doing so in a way? And all three of you referenced environmental justice principles in your adaptation plans.

Could you give us a more in depth sense of what that actually means, as opposed to just being a phrase that we all use?

And if I can, I'll add on to that first part of that question, because I think it is important to have, just for the Bay Area, what's the cost, but who pays for the remediation? That was going to be one of my questions. So if that just tags on really well.

I'm not going to throw out an actual number, but it'll be big. How about that? Okay.

Like b billions or m millions or t trillions? zero, trillions.

Zero, shoot. I mean, I would think it starts with nine zeros, but how many? Whether it's a billion, 10 billion, 100 billion, that is.

Apparently. I was on and scared. Some staff were in the Capitol because they heard my voice on TV and they didn't know I was there.

That's a great use of your voice. So, yeah, I don't know that I would love for us to be able to say, zero, it's going to be exactly this amount. But part of the. Part of the problem is that Karen talks about sites that the Water Board manages. We talk about sites that we manage.

Jeremy talks about sites that they manage. There's overlap with all of them, but they're not all the same. Where they do overlap, we obviously will work together like we have in the past and like we will in the future, but coming up with an actual number that. Yeah, but if.

I'm not going to guess, but the idea that it is only millions of dollars, or even tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, seems pretty far fetched to me, as far as who pays for that. So it depends. There are sites where we have a responsible party.

If we have them, that responsible party is the one who has to pay for that. There are sites with multiple responsible parties, and then there's some agreement where they have to figure that out as part of the agreement. And then there are sites.

There are a number of sites that we have that are orphan sites where we get money already to characterize these sites and try to clean them up. But sea level rise and associated groundwater rise throws an additional wrinkle in there for if it's a coastal site that was abandoned, that was just found by one of our agencies.

Coming up with the idea of how much that will cost, in addition to all the other projects that we already actively work on. It's not something, it's not a number we could easily come up with right here. And I'll say, zero, this is it, down to the penny.

I'd love to be able to, but because we're all engineers and scientists here, we love numbers and we use numbers to do our jobs. But I would be remiss if I said, zero, it'll just be a few $1.0 million and everyone will be fine.

I definitely don't think that's the case, especially if over time, sea level rise becomes more pronounced. And I'm sorry. Yes.

I want to also mention that you're citing the number of sites that we have on our books. Those are the sites we know about, because there are either complaints, issues that have been identified, or there is a desire to redevelop that site. And so we focus on sites that we know about.

There are unknowable numbers of sites that are out there that we don't know about. And so that just is going to make the number bigger if we really want to focus in on the most vulnerable areas, regardless of whether there's money there to develop a site and clean it up in order to develop it.

So that's an issue we didn't talk about. But there's way more sites that are contaminated than what was shown in my presentation.

And then the second and third part of my question was around prioritization and how we go about developing a process that ensures that we are actually operating with environmental justice principles.

Yeah, so I mentioned our commitment to environmental justice and racial equity. And we have an effort in our site cleanup program to layer our data with demographic data, as well as enviro screen data from the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, where we.

We can look at the sites that are located in areas where there's most vulnerable populations. Those sites. I'll just say that industrial sites and military sites are where the most vulnerable people live.

So I don't know that that gives us a layer very well of how to prioritize, because they'll all be prioritized when it comes to vulnerable communities, or at least to a large degree in terms of, and John can talk about this as well, in terms of prioritizing the work that we do and the effort we put in is all around risk, and that is exposure to contamination and the toxicity of that contamination and to what degree we are able to contain it and reduce future mobilization of that.

And, of course, that's what we're talking about here, is sea level rise is going to cause that more and more and more. So did you want to, if I could add. Yeah, please.

I think there's also a sort of synergy with the Coastal Commission and our partner agencies here in that we work a lot with local governments. And, you know, these issues are not constrained on a site by site basis. They're affecting regions.

And so the Commission's been thinking a lot about how to plan for and address challenges at a regional scale or at a larger scale than just a single, you know, specific property boundary and even within a local government boundaries, working more as a region.

So I think that's one potential sort of opportunity here that is thinking about these problems as affecting a larger area and addressing them with policies as the appropriate scale of government, whatever that is.

And then just adding, too, on the issue of environmental justice, I'll just add that for our seal of our policy guidance update, we had a paid environmental justice Advisory Committee that worked with us in thinking about how to integrate environmental justice principles throughout the entire document.

I'm not necessarily the person who spearheaded that, so I can't speak to too many specifics, but happy to follow up additionally after. But one way to think about it is, or at least one way that I think about it is who is impacted, who benefits?

How are those being considered in terms of who historically has borne most of the damage from decisions environmentally over the course of our state's history. So, speaking at that high level, but happy to follow up for your additional.

Information, I'll just add that we actually have a practical application of our racial equity in environmental justice goals. We have a funding pot that allows us to put funding to locations that don't have a responsible party with deep pockets to pay for the cleanup. Now, it's a small amount of money. It's not enough to get everywhere.

But what we've done over the last couple of years is modify our scoring criteria for those sites so that we are focused on disadvantaged communities and those with historical environmental justice injustices associated with them, and to drive what little funding we have into those sites that don't have the funding behind them to do those cleanups.

So we're putting, so to speak, our money where our mouth is.

Is that good? So I actually found the combination. I want to thank my Edwin Bourbon, who's my ledge Director, for putting this all together, and my team in the back. You can all see my favorite color is Magenta. If you didn't know, you know now.

But I want to thank you for bringing this panel together because, you know, one of the things that we struggle with, I think sometimes in the Legislature is in the coastal zone. We have an ability through a CDP coastal development permit to actually look at these sites. But if you go outside the coastal zone.

So I'll take Carlsbad, for example. Carlsbad has part of its jurisdiction in the coastal zone. Part of it, it's not if you look, I used to represent Oceanside. It's just a sliver of ocean sides in the coastal zone.

If any of these sites are being developed outside and we are doing a lot of CEQA streamlining where we're not doing a full environmental review, we could be missing these toxic sites, though, especially the unidentified ones that have been historically unidentified. So I just want to put that out there.

We have to think about that because we know that Sacramento likes to do a lot of sequestreamlining, especially as it relates to housing.

But I'm not sure if we would have gone through that process necessarily with sites that either hadn't been identified or had been forgotten about, you know, if there's not a process with the CDP for other cities.

So one of the questions I have is, how do you work, and this is more for Department of Toxic Substance Control and State Water Board more than the Coastal Commission. How do you work with local jurisdictions to kind of capture that when they're looking at housing developments or residential developments?

So this, at least in the work I do from just day to day, this can come up fairly often. So we manage sites across all of California, but we're not alike, like the Water Board, like the Coastal Commission; we all have our specific areas of responsibility.

Most of the sites that we see are historically industrial sites, former military sites, current military sites, and things like that. But we have our orphan program where there are sites where people discover, and then we try to get funding to apply to those.

But it's far from like, on a day to day basis. In fact, just the other day, I reviewed a document that was put together by a developer who was developing a site for low-income housing. And so we try to use very rigid, very conservative values to--when we look at these sites.

And of course, we don't know about all the sites because like the Water Board or the Coastal Commission, we're not responsible. We don't have regulatory authority over all sites. So if a county identifies something and they say, oh--to us, we consider them, I believe, what's called a CUPA, a Certified Unified Program Agency.

So they handle a lot of these things at the local level. There have been situations where they find something at the local level that they determine they're not--they can't handle it. Can DTSC? And depending on what the site was, sometimes it was a little known storage area of another industrial site not even close by. So definitely, yes, we can get involved. We can find the responsible party. We can make sure they know, hey, you gotta investigate the site and you have to clean it up.

So I think part of the problem is having, like, having us at the table, I think, is great to get what our perspectives are, but it's important that we keep talking, we keep talking, and we keep informing and that there's some sort of feedback loop, like Dr. Kristina Hill, who's going to be presenting later.

The Water Board and DTSC normally have a weekly or biweekly call with her and her team of people because we know. We received a ton of comments from a few environmental justice groups, including Greenaction, and that we want to make sure that we try to address those things, even if their concerns are a little bit different than ours because they are going to be different, because they're living there and we're doing our best to just solve the little piece of the puzzle that we handle.

So as long as all of us keep talking and figuring out the best path forward, and for whoever's doing what work, as long as they have the time and the expertise and people to do it, then we'll be able to do our jobs if the amount of work increases and we just need more people looking at it, whoever that is, whether it's a local agency or something like that.

So overall, I would just say let's definitely keep communicating because like the cap sites you mentioned, there are a number of cap sites in the Bay Area that we manage that, you know, we want to make sure that those are safe and that's part of what we need to do on just a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. So it...yeah, I think that's all.

So let me just make sure I got the top lines correctly. You are requiring for the sites that each of you manage, or if there's a case of a CDP coming to the Coastal Commission, there's a risk assessment that's not required every five years. Do we have the first round of risk assessments to sea level rise and groundwater rise already published or is that coming in five years?

So at least as far as those risk assessments feeding into the vulnerability assessment, saying, 'hey, is the site at risk or vulnerable?' There are a number of DTSC sites.

Several of them, as far as I know, are mostly military because they're trying to get ahead of the curve because they recognize that their military sites, if they're going to remain there for a while, they are already looking at assessing vulnerability to those sites and working with the DTSC project managers on saying, hey, this is what--and I can't speak to exactly what they do, but they're assuming a lot of sea level rise at most of these sites, more, in fact, than we are right now based on best available science.

And I think part of that is due because they know that that facility may be there for decades and we might be looking at decades, but maybe just a couple and in the longterm as well. But they know that they have to be there that long. But the first round, like what--we've made some enhancements to the database that we use to display data, which is called EnviroStor, and right now there is now sea level rise information that people have to input, but that process is just getting started.

So even if 50 project managers have said, 'oh, yeah, I've already entered that information,' 40 of them might say, 'no, there is no vulnerability assessment yet,' but their sites may not be any of these on the map.

We're looking at all DTSC sites eventually, but in the short-term, we're trying to reach out to those project managers whose sites are more susceptible. And as far as the first round, we're never going to produce a report, I doubt, on our website that says the first round is available. It's these 20 sites.

But if you go to Enviro--we're trying to build into EnviroStor the information so that when you go there, you'll be able to see, to run a report that says: tell me all the sites that have performed a vulnerability assessment.

We have that data capability now, but we're still on the cusp of making sure our project managers are trained to know, hey, all of you need to fill this out so that once you do, then somebody could go to EnviroStor and say, 'how many sites are vulnerable or have this report?'

So the answer is kind of?

Yes.

Okay. So of the sites that we saw on each of the first two presentations, we do not have clarity for all of those sites that you have identified as being vulnerable to sea level rise and groundwater rise. We do not have that information yet?

No.

When will we have it? Because we said we required vulnerability assessments every five years and you've incorporated sea level rise and groundwater rise into the vulnerability assessments every five years. So in five years?

Well, we have--so you're asking if every side of ours which is potentially vulnerable to sea level rise or groundwater rise will have that done five years from now?

Well, I probably want it done now.

Well, I want it done now too.

So I'm asking when does the Legislature reasonably expect it to be done?

I think the answer is variable, depending on the site, at least from the Water Board led sites because we're on--every case is being done on a site-specific basis. So we're requiring these as we go through and evaluate vulnerability. We're updating cleanup orders to include these site assessments. So for us, it's not going to be in five years.

It's going to be a few sites every year. I don't know the numbers or how we're going to finally get to all of them, but we can certainly follow up and get you that information.

That would be wise.

That's a good question.

I want to thank you for our panelists. I don't know if you have any final remarks, but I think we're running late on time, so thank you for shaking your head. And I want to thank you for your contributions and your extensive presentations. I think we already learned a lot, and there's more to learn there.

And so next, we're going to invite our next panel up--you already mentioned--Dr. Kristina Hill--she's the one that reminded me about equilibrium and 7th grade science--is the Program Director at the Institute for Urban and Regional Development at UC Berkeley and is a researcher exploring the impacts of groundwater rise on the contaminated sites, especially those here locally in the Bay Area. So we have Dr. Hill. Is that the only person on the phone? Yes. Oh, she's virtual. I didn't think I saw her in the audience. Dr. Hill, let's see if our technology is working.

Great. Can you hear me?

Yes.

Excellent. Thank you. And I apologize if I'm a little wilty. The heat is stuck on in my building, so I'm trying to speak from my office where it's quite warm and I teach class right after this. So I apologize for not being there in person.

I just wanted to start, if I could show my slides. Are they up? I just wanted to start by saying thank you to DTSC and to the State Water Board for partnering with us on a system of prioritizing contaminated sites, which is in development.

And we'll produce a research version of that within a few months, probably six to eight months, and then they will do a much, you know, more comprehensive and systematic approach statewide. Our view is only of the Bay Area so far, and that's funded by OPC. Could I have the next slide, please?

So the Dutch--I just want to give a little bit of background on groundwater rise and what we know about it and then talk about the contaminated sites in the Bay Area, if I may. The Dutch have been planning for rising groundwater since 2009, so they've known it's coming and we're a little late to the party but now we're trying to catch up and address things like contaminated sites and the other issues I'll mention in just a moment with some illustrations. Next slide.

Shallow groundwater is of course, that groundwater that comes from rain and it's unconfined and very shallow. It's that water you find if you dig down in the sand at the beach and it's dirty. It has everything in it that we spill on the surface of the land or that's buried in the soil. Next slide, please. It's very sensitive to rain because it comes from every rainstorm.

So it actually fluctuates more in the Bay Area in a wet winter than it will by sea level rise in the next 50 years. So we need to pay attention to the way that it rises in wet winters as well as tidal impacts and sea level rise impacts on that whole process. Next slide, please?

The US Geological Survey has been showing us for years, and we're just kind of catching up with this, again, that this equilibrium that our host just talked about, the Chair, is a matter of saltwater sticking under the land, actually being present under the land.

So we're concerned about the way that that ocean rising actually pushes that toe farther under the land and causes freshwater groundwater to rise, and also where the saltwater boundary is because that changes the impacts on metals that are buried in soil, which may become more mobile in the presence of saltwater than they would be in the presence of fresh, and other kinds of chemical impacts.

Next slide. And of course, we know that the state has issued guidance that I was fortunate to be a part of the process for, that we might see 3 feet of sea level rise as soon as 2070, but the real issue is that rising groundwater is a game of inches.

If there is something in the soil just above the groundwater that could be inundated, that could happen in a wet winter as well as sea level rises very gradually over a period of time. So it's an immediate risk. Next slide.

And of course, levees won't prevent shallow groundwater from rising on the landward side, particularly in areas that have a kind of bowl shaped topography. Next slide. I use these slides to try to illustrate the process of things happening underground before we see anything at the surface.

And the lighter blue is freshwater groundwater, the darker blue is that toe of saltwater groundwater sticking under the land. Then there's our infrastructure, contaminated soil capped with a concrete parking lot, and the levee. If you could show the next slide, please? The first thing that happens is that sewer pipes start to fill with inflow. Next slide.

And then contaminated soil begins to be inundated if it was dry. Some of it is already wet, but not necessarily in motion. And then the last slide shows that water reaching the surface, which is really the last step in a train of impacts. Next slide.

And the City of Alameda has decided to close this street in one of the first street closure actions as adaptation to sea level rise.

Next slide.

And this is just an illustration of what it looks like in a pipe. If a pipe starts to fill with groundwater, the capacity is no longer available for either human waste or stormwater to be conveyed away by that pipe. So it makes the pipe less effective and eventually fills the pipe completely ineffective at that point.

And toilets would start to back up, or basements receive sewage water, potentially, and rain won't drain away.

Next slide.

Corrosion is a process that's happening all the time. But if saltwater groundwater rises towards the surface, foundations will corrode faster because salt ions can migrate through the concrete around rebar and steel. And as that steel starts to corrode, it expands, cracks the concrete, and the whole process accelerates through a positive feedback loop.

So it's very concerning to see foundations beginning to be sitting in salty water that weren't necessarily designed for it.

Next slide.

Coastal cities have basically been built in a dry crust of land five to 10ft thick. And as groundwater rises, that all is going to get wetter, softer, saltier, and people are going to start pumping. Next slide. As they pump, they are actually going to have an impact by elevating the saltwater boundary.

I think the next slide has a note about that. Yes, the Guyben Herzberg principle is something we've known about for 100 years in groundwater science. If you pump the freshwater groundwater down 1ft, you can actually end up elevating the saltwater boundary by as much as 40ft.

And that could have a huge impact on contaminated sites as well as building foundations. And some people think that the condominium collapse in south Florida may have been partly a result of foundation corrosion from saltwater entering at the surface with high tides and coming up from below with pumping. Next slide.

So partly because pumping could draw contaminants towards a building and allow contaminants to enter indoor air through cracks and foundations and other kinds of sewage leaks, I'll talk about in just a second. Pumping needs to be tracked, and right now, I'm not aware of any community that's permitting pumps on a broad scale.

Each individual property owner may begin pumping, and that could change the directions of groundwater flow in a very important way. And it would also make sense to think about foundation inspections and infrastructure, foundation inspections as well as buildings. Next slide. There are liquefaction risks throughout the Bay Area. And those orange areas have very high risks.

And those are the areas where we want our building foundations to be in decent shape. Because when the earthquake energy wave comes through. Next slide, please. This is a slide from Christchurch, New Zealand after their earthquake.

And it shows that a vehicle dropped into the sand next to a river when that sand behaved like a liquid during the earthquake that they had. So we can expect very dramatic impacts in liquefaction zones if the earthquake is in the right location to trigger those soils. So foundations need to be in good shape. Next slide.

In 2023, my team identified more than 1800 open contaminated sites, just the administratively open sites in a scenario of 3.3ft of sea level rise and groundwater rise in the San Francisco Bay Area. And I don't know why my number is so different from the one that the agency folks have shared with you.

I think that would be an interesting question to compare our methods. But the real issue is the depth of the waste and that's what needs to be compared to the elevation of the groundwater. We found also a higher likelihood that these legacy contaminated sites that are vulnerable to rising groundwater are in more socially vulnerable neighborhoods.

And that surprised me, honestly, because I know the agencies care about this. So we clearly have to prioritize more socially vulnerable neighborhoods. They are more likely to have these vulnerable sites. Next slide. So we've made maps of where some of these locations are. The red circles are. This happens to be the Richmond South Richmond shoreline.

And the red circles show open contaminated sites. The light blue is areas where groundwater is rising at least four inches with 3ft of sea level rise. And the dark blue is areas that would actually be tidally inundated at that point. So you can see there are a lot of sites. Next slide. This is West Oakland.

Also a lot of sites in that zone that groundwater could rise by at least four inches. We're also showing where the groundwater is within 10ft of the surface because we think that's significant given that many wastes are buried that deep.

Next slide.

And then this is East Palo Alto. And you can see there are a lot of sites and quite a cluster in zones that could have both inundation and groundwater rise or just groundwater rise. So the area affected by groundwater rise is larger than the area that might be tidally inundated. Next slide.

So the immediate risk for public Health that we're concerned about is that higher groundwater or a change in flow direction related to pumping, for example, could allow vocs to enter indoor air through a sewer connection. And many vocs are serious health risk contaminants that could cause cancer. Next slide.

My little cartoon here shows contaminants potentially entering a sewer main. There's a gas component to a VOC, so it's the only type of chemical that can travel uphill. And it could travel uphill through a side sewer or lateral, and it could be observed at a cleanout.

It could enter the building through an old seal at the base of the toilet that hasn't been changed. Seals at the base of toilets last about 20 years.

So if something hasn't been updated in 20 years, there's a strong likelihood that it could leak and dry p traps, as well as cracks and foundations or improperly stubbed plumbing pipes. Next slide. So this is my last slide. And it's possible, given what I heard in the first panel, that I'm wrong in my third point here.

But I appreciate that DTSC requires managers of contaminated sites to consider rising groundwater statewide. And that both DTSC and the Water Board are helping us develop this screening tool. And we are helping them think about what their screening tool will be like, which may be different.

We're looking at things like old buildings and public buildings that may have deferred maintenance, where we may find old seals in plumbing, for example, or dry P traps. So it is connected to EJ in the sense of the maintenance level of a building.

My understanding was before this meeting that the State Water Board hasn't issued statewide guidance that site managers must look at rising groundwater and rising sea level. So if I'm wrong, pardon me, but one of the issues that I'm seeing, and I'll close with this thought, is that much contamination has already left the site before regulation occurred.

On older contaminated sites, like the Zeneca site in south Richmond, before regulation actually was used to manage these sites. In effect, the horse has left the barn in some of our former industrial areas. And offsite issues need to be considered, as well as the monitoring that's done on a parcel.

And I hope that the state will provide funding at some point to look at clusters of sites in areas where contaminants may have already left the boundaries of the private parcel. And I think that's a critical issue for us to look at.

Agencies reasonably are not required to look at because their relationship is with the site owner, the property owner. Thank you.

Thank you. And Doctor Hill has to go teach a class. So we're going to do a quick q and a right now for Doctor Hill because that way you can get out of your hot office and get to your students. So, Assembly Member Bonta, did you have any questions to start out with?

I did. Thank you, Doctor Hill. You showed two slides that are part of my district, West Oakland and Alameda. And I also live in the City of Alameda. So I'm very, quite frankly, traumatized by your presentation, recognizing that we are so concerned.

You started off your presentation by essentially saying that Finland started to do this work in 2009. If you were to put the State of California kind of on an expedited timeframe or plan of action for addressing some of the concerns that are coming up, particularly with groundwater rise, attendant contamination, that happens.

What would be your top three orders of action for the state to take?

Well, I would look at areas where there are clusters of contaminated sites, and if there are school buildings as well as residences attached to sewer lines that could be impacted by those sites, I would do modeling now to look at those clusters, even if contaminants may have left the boundaries of sites.

So this is really a public protective action, not just the action that's needed to be taken by a private property owner. It needs more investigation. The City of Alameda has tried to begin that process, but other cities with fewer resources, Richmond, Oakland, unincorporated areas like Marin City, they have not.

And that's something that really, they need help from the state to be able to do those modeling studies to understand who may be vulnerable this weekend if it rains or in the last two winters when it rained a lot.

Two more. Two more orders of action.

Well, I know that the agencies are working closely with us on the prioritization tool. We are trying to cast a wide net on the research side so that we won't have to explain to communities why we left a site out and have to add it in later, because that causes distrust.

So I hope that everyone will cast a wide net and consider communities that are saying they have sites that have been uninvestigated. East Oakland has old industrial sites that haven't been investigated. Marin City has sites that have not been investigated. So I think I would ask communities if they have sites and believe them and go check.

And then the third one would be starting to do pump registration. So tracking where people are pumping, because as that occurs, that could change the direction of groundwater flow and put people at risk in a building. And that could be children in a school, that could be daycare center. That could be an apartment building.

Thank you so much. Doctor Hill.

And if you got a fourth one, I heard foundation inspections in your presentation.

That's right. That may be a way to address some of the issues of people who own apartment buildings or other kinds of buildings that haven't been. That may be at risk and that have been doing pumping to protect subgrade parking. So I would think inspections would make sense because there are things people can do.

Like changing a toilet seal. You can put sacrificial metals into the ground around your foundation to protect it. But if it's already rusted, then you can't fix it. It's very expensive, at least to fix a rusted foundation. So I would think that inspections of foundations would make sense.

Just like inspections of soft story buildings made sense about seismic issues.

Yeah, I mean, I think every time you speak, I learned something new that I should have probably learned in 7th grade or 8th grade science. Some of it, though, the very long principal that you named, I was like, that must have been grad school. So I didn't feel too bad about that.

But I want to thank you for all your work and working with our state agencies on making sure we are casting a wide net, that we are believing the public when they say they're contaminated sites. Because I think the agency said, you know, there's.

We know there are sites that aren't on any maps, and we know there are sites that aren't on any maps that are subject to sea level rise and groundwater rise. So thank you for your continued passion for this and your research. And with that, I think we'll now go to job Nelson.

He's the Vice President of strategy and policy for the port of San Diego, and he's going to speak more about the unique challenges that ports face when addressing sea level rise. Joe, it's up to you.

Well, I will just tell you some of the burner. I now feel like we're screwed after hearing Doctor Hill talk a little bit about all that's going on.

I told you that when I first met with you guys and I. With redistricting, I got the port of San Diego and I told you, what have you done? And you're like, zero, everything's fine. I was like, is it fine? And now you're saying, we're screwed. So, okay, now you can talk.

Thank you. It's just. It's. Thank you for inviting us to be here. Because we're in many ways going to be the end recipient of much of this. Right. As we start to see issues related to sea level rise pushing up groundwater and groundwater contamination.

I thought Doctor Hill's first slide where she talked about the four kind of directions of water, we end up being the end recipient of stormwater and creeks and other things.

And so as the groundwater becomes a problem, then we find ourselves in a position where we end up being the end recipient of that in the bay and in the ocean that we are passed by the state to protect. I will just also say that I want to talk a little bit about.

We talk about the impacts of all of the sites in the Bay Area, but I will say for San Diego Bay, and by the way, we're thankful that you have the Tijuana river valley, because it's about bringing action.

And I know that it's not fun for you, but we're thrilled to have an advocate like you that can work on the Tijuana river valley. But we're looking at one of the largest Superfund sites. It's not a bunch of little sites. It's one giant site.

We're talking about the ocean down there, the beaches down there that we're responsible for again, on behalf of the State of California. They had been closed for over 1000 days. Just recently. They reopened finally, and then they had to turn around and shut them again.

And so now we're on the next streak of days where we are facing the pollution crisis. The difficulty for us is as we are dealing with all of that pollution and as it sinks into the ground, and eventually we start to see that groundwater start to rise. Right.

We're kind of stuck in this horrible cycle, which is the contaminants that are kind of the lowest level now move up to the forefront. And we find that terrifying in many ways as we think about the impacts to those communities that we have responsibility for.

The other thing I would like to talk just a little bit about is the impact of stormwater. Right? So while we don't have groundwater ourselves, we are impacted very much by the stormwater. And what we're finding is that copper from bricks, things like that, ends up soaking into the groundwater supply.

And then as we start to see these increases, then that copper flows on down not only through stormwater, but now we have the copper that has been stored there for years and years and years now hitting the bay. And we're already dealing with stormwater, TMDLs from copper paint, things like that.

And all of a sudden, it's just almost impossible for us to stay ahead of the problem. As we think about that, I'll keep it quick because I know you all are pressed for time. I'll just close by saying, but I don't think that we should abandon all hope. I don't think that's an option.

One of the things, and, you know, because you've been a champion with us, is looking at ways that we can use bioremediation to try and address some of these issues that we're going to be facing as we try and think about cleanup. The port has been a leader in terms of the blue economy and blue economy solutions.

And so exploring things like looking at what we're putting together, shoreline atlas, to be able to kind of look at what potential nature based solutions we can look up at around the bay, looking at water and sediment remediation technologies. I think you and I went out on a boat tour, right.

We talked about the ecospheres as a way to try and capture PCB's and other things that were in the water column. And then also thinking about things, as I mentioned, that are bioremediation, things like seaweed, aquaculture, not aquaculture to be able to produce products, but aquaculture in terms of looking at Macroalgae. Right.

Like seaweed to be able to capture some of those pollutants in them as opposed to looking at other solutions. And so we think that there are some exciting possibilities there to be able to kind of look at as potential solutions.

But, you know, timeliness on those things is like, now we need to be exploring those things now, given the problems that are kind of right at our doorstep. And so I guess I want to close with a little bit of hope that there is some options. And with that, I'll wait around for some questions.

Thanks. I'm going to invite up our third panelist, Allison Chan, the policy Director for Save the Bay. She's here with us in person, and then we can ask the two of you the final questions. But thank you.

You know, we're going to bring back my blue carbon Bill next year, and we're going to have to do more work on it. So the Governor signs it this time.

Hi there. Good afternoon. Thank you, Assembly Member Mourner and the Committee for the Opportunity to speak today. I'm Allison Chan. I'm the political Director at Save the Bay.

I want to appreciate the Legislature and leadership of this Committee for Focusing on this problem, because groundwater rise and the associated mobilization of toxic contamination is an alarming issue in the Bay Area. That goes without saying at this point in the, in the day, in the afternoon.

But it's also an issue where equity is very much at the center of the conversation. Doctor Christina Hill, which, you know, we're all such a fan, gave a fantastic overview of this issue, and we're so lucky to have her expertise. I'm here, like I said, with Save the Bay, which is a regional advocacy organization.

We work to protect and restore the San Francisco Bay for people and wildlife and promote climate resilience in our communities. We work directly on the shoreline, so this issue directly affects some of the places where we are actively trying to restore marsh to protect communities from flooding and sea level rise.

And then my team, the policy team, works actively to advance local, statewide, and federal policies to address these issues. So we are very familiar with the issue and becoming more familiar as we partner across the region.

So my intention today is to elevate the voices of some 20,000 plus Bay Area residents living adjacent to contaminated sites that will likely be exposed to flooding.

I will also highlight the opportunities this Committee and your colleagues in the Legislature have to secure the funding and policy change necessary to address this issue before more people are put at risk and before solutions become more expensive. Next slide, please. zero, sorry, I have the power forward. zero, wait, backward. There we go.

So we've only begun to explore the extent of risk that groundwater rise poses to contaminated sites and nearby communities. But the data already clearly calls for action. I want to highlight Doctor Hill's warning that we experienced groundwater rise during wet winters, which makes it a now problem, not a future problem.

And we like to talk about groundwater rise associated with sea level rise, and that still, for many people, feels very much a future problem. Although I know that's not necessarily this audience, but I just want to reiterate her point that with wet winters becoming more common, we're experiencing this now.

We're going to experience it in the very near future as well. So I appreciate her for bringing that up. So this is just one example of the fact that groundwater rise is a compound climate issue that despite it taking us longer to study and publicly acknowledge, it poses current and future risk to people and infrastructure.

So advocacy around toxic contamination has been and continues to be.

And I want to be really clear about this, led primarily by people of color and under resourced community groups who have been ringing the alarm bells for decades around the health and safety impacts these contaminated sites are having on their families and neighbors outside of the sea level rise and groundwater rise risks.

So with the compounding risk that groundwater rise poses to these communities, we must ensure that these residents are supported in co developing solutions. We must support local leadership in working alongside state leadership.

And that, again, reinforcing Doctor Hill's comment that we should ask people if they know of contaminated sites in their communities and believe them very simple and very insightful.

So given this history of disproportionate threat and impact to some shoreline communities over others, it's important to acknowledge that groundwater rise is a serious environmental and social justice issue in the Bay Area. As is certainly true throughout the state.

Research shows that communities of color are more than twice as likely to live near hazardous waste sites compared to predominantly white communities due to environmentally racist policies like redlining and deed restrictions.

About half of Low income households in the Bay Area live within a mile of contaminated sites, and communities near these sites experience higher rates of health impacts like asthma and respiratory diseases and cancer.

And then just wanted to reinforce Doctor Hill's note that there are more than 1800 open sites in the Bay Area, notwithstanding whether or not there's confusion about how to calculate the number of sites.

But there are too many, and these are at risk of inundation by groundwater rise with about five or, excuse me, 3.3ft of sea level rise. And of course more. That's a moderate projection, so more will be at risk with higher projections.

And so, while open contaminated sites adjacent to the bay are arguably the most critical contamination threats to nearby communities, there are also closed sites. This has been mentioned that were managed without groundwater science in mind, as well as a number of undocumented sites that will be exposed to flooding.

And so these vulnerable, underinvested communities are those with the least capacity to relocate, making it imperative for state and local leadership and federal leadership to actively identify threats and implement solutions. So I want to highlight. Go.

Why won't it work forward?

Can you please advance my slide? It's not critical. zero, there we go. Just want to have a nice.

It's the Legislature. We give you power and we take it away.

I should be used to this by now. No? So, yeah, I want to highlight East Palo Alto, which is about 20 miles east from here. Yeah, 20 miles from here. Excuse me. East Palo Alto is a predominantly Low income community. There are more than 50 documented contaminated sites in East Palo Alto that contain very dangerous toxins.

And nearly all of these sites face exposure to groundwater rise by 2060. Some local efforts are happening to highlight these issues. Nuestra Casa, a local community organization in partnership with Spur, a regional planning organization, have documented some of the extreme threats that the community faces due to groundwater emergence, as well as to contamination mobilization.

In a recent report appropriately named lookout below, the report identifies the sites that face exposure and if inundated, these sites could unleash acutely dangerous toxins into homes and throughout communities. And looking, every time I see Doctor Hill's slide about how it's all going to leak up through our pipes and into our homes, it's just. It's haunting.

This would be catastrophic to public health and to drinking water, watersheds, all of it. Although some of these sites have been remediated, the remediation method often includes capping, which may be compromised due to flooding. And I appreciate the fact that that has been brought into question already today.

So, for decades, these community groups have been asking for full cleanups even before groundwater rise was part of our lexicon. And so this simply elevates the issue. There are very obvious social and ethical ramifications to letting this problem go unaddressed.

But planning for groundwater rise now, before it gets worse, could spare many millions or even billions of dollars in avoided emergency response. Having to address this vapor contamination issue in our homes and buildings. And I, you know, another, what would be a catastrophic impact, impact on our drinking water supply.

So we must invest in solutions now, which takes me to what probably you were looking for, which is solutions. I don't know. It doesn't want to work for me. Hoping for a little help here. There we go. So, what can be done?

So, thankfully, this Legislature passed SB 272 last year, which now requires cities throughout the bay to develop local sea level rise resilience plans. And of course, this also applies to coastal cities on the Pacific. And these plans are required to address the risk from contaminated sites due to sea level rise and groundwater rise.

So we're urging cities to incorporate zoning policies. Local zoning policies like shallow groundwater rise overlay districts, which will encourage housing and other development away from high risk areas, especially where known contamination exists. So, implementing local plans, though, are going to require resources that, as we all know, municipalities currently do not have.

So, this is where the state can demonstrate leadership by making those resources available. Prioritizing sea level rise and groundwater rise resilience funding in the state budget will help to ensure cities can carry out their plans for protecting communities. We were disappointed to see the climate resilient.

That climate resilience was deprioritized in state budget this year, coastal resilience faced an unprecedented cut. While Prop four, the climate bond, may help to backfill some of these losses, we know it won't pay the full Bill. So we need to prioritize this funding in the state budget moving forward.

In addition to funding for implementation by cities, we urge the Legislature to allocate budget to all the state agencies represented today and others who are tasked with addressing some of these sites, to do the research and to evaluate what infrastructure needs updating and improvement. So providing these agencies with that funding is critical.

We also urge you to consider equipping relevant regional agencies with additional authority, particularly the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, to help make more regional scale planning decisions.

I know I'm coming up on time here and, you know, additionally, to ensure that there are consistent approaches to site management in the face of sea level rise and groundwater rise, to, you know, ensure that the Water Board, DTSC, federal agencies, local agencies can provide a local clearinghouse of information.

One of the most consistent pieces of feedback we get from community organizations that are fighting for these issues is that they have to spend hours upon hours upon days looking for documents that are difficult to find, that provide the information that they can use to advocate for what they need.

Organizations like ours who are paid to do this work have a hard time managing all this information and tracking reporting can't imagine how difficult it must be for community organizations who are comprised primarily of volunteers. So having a centralized clearinghouse of this kind of information to improve transparency of process, it could be a very concrete step forward.

But it will require sort of unprecedented collaboration among, on all levels of government that I know are difficult, but we've achieved a lot of difficult things in the last five years and we can do that too. So with that, I want to thank you for your leadership and the time to speak today.

Thank you Misses Chan, for your presentation. I think you brought up a lot of really, really good points. I have Bill ideas coming up the Wazoo, so there's a lot of things. But for either job, Nelson or Alison Chan, somebody Member Bonte, did you have any initial questions?

So one of the things when we're talking about this, and I think you bring up a good point, I mean, we're coastal San Diego, so I mean, we all pay to live there because we don't have weather, so we don't think about rain sometimes the way the rest of California thinks about rain in Southern California, I'm usually grateful we have it.

We think it will help us with wildfires and stuff like that. But you brought up groundwater outside, you know, rise outside the context, and I think Doctor Hill did as well outside the context of sea level rise, which I think is an important point.

And when we think about it, and you brought up a really good idea, maybe you can touch up a little bit more. Miss Chan, is that. I don't know. When I was on the City Council, we did not have groundwater maps. We had sea level rise, increased maps. But we don't have maps of groundwater rise.

And I'm pretty sure projects that went through didn't look at where the groundwater was. So when you're thinking about the advocacy you have for the bay, what do you think local jurisdictions would need from the state and job?

You can also answer this question, but I think your issues might be different when we're thinking about our housing needs, residential needs, schools, where schools are. When you think about that, what are. What do you think cities need in order to be able to better manage building new housing where it's not going to affect the most vulnerable?

Wow. Yeah. I think there is probably a patchwork of data available. I know I am not the best resource for articulating all the different state resources that have done that kind of mapping.

I know that actually, we're lucky in the Bay Area to have Doctor Hill here, and she's working with a local organization, a science organization, to do really site specific mapping, like really localized mapping, very granular as far as location. And that's going to help cities with that planning.

But I think what you're touching on is something I didn't go to school for, which is like the complex hydrology of all of the different flood impacts in our region. So if we just take.

If we just talk about flooding outside of the contamination issue, flooding is going to happen from sea level rise, it's going to happen from groundwater rise, it's going to happen from precipitation events. And then they all have an impact on each other. So you could match each of them individually, but that actually doesn't tell the whole story.

So I think one of the things that cities could benefit from is having a comprehensive assessment of flood risk that assesses the sort of physical impact that all of these different sources of flooding can have on each other. I think that science is in development, and so that's probably why we don't have comprehensive maps like that now.

But the siloing of planning at the local level is similar to the siloing of planning at all levels of government, which is that you've got people managing stormwater, you've got people managing shoreline assets, you've got people managing groundwater, and they don't always talk effectively to each other. Yeah.

Having that level of science to understand the relationship of all these different types of flooding can then help cities understand what assets are at risk, what sites are at risk, and therefore, how do we plan accordingly for zoning ordinances and things like that? So that's my first take on answering that question.

Thank you. I think that the coordinated science would be very helpful because I think. Do you have anything to add, Joe?

No, I totally agree. I think that as we think about things like King tides and rain events, right. That it pushing flooding back up into some of our most vulnerable communities. Right. We saw the horrible incidence of that here in San Diego. county. In terms of the impacts on national city and other folks.

Where there was no place for the water to go. Because storm events were also creating King tides. At the same time. Having a more integrated approach I think would be very helpful.

Miss Chan, do you have any suggestions about how to address the issue of. It came up in the first panel too. But the fact that we have closed sites, as you mentioned, that are now. That haven't been evaluated with the groundwater science that we've come to develop. So.

No, you know, one thing that saved the base trying to better understand. Is the rationale behind why certain sites are managed by DTSC versus regional board versus State Water Board. And I think that's something that is difficult for folks to wrap their heads around. And so understanding the layers of jurisdiction.

And therefore, who might be the right entity to open back up the discussion of closed sites. Not open the sites open back up the discussion is probably the first place to start. You know, who's responsible for the closed sites and how closed are they?

What methodologies were used and are those methodologies solid in the face of groundwater rise? I mean, that's. Those are some of the first questions I would ask. And then to have an open dialogue with the agencies that have some level of jurisdiction over them. About what needs to be done.

And I think there's also, you know, I do want to highlight what Doctor Hill noted about the fact that a lot of the contamination has already left the site. I certainly don't know what authority various agencies have to address contamination that has left the confines of that site.

But I imagine some of those closed sites have experienced that kind of sort of bleeding of the contamination. And so asking the questions about that as well. And just being really expansive about exploring the extent to which this contamination has both mobilized already and could be mobilized.

Yeah, no groundbreaking insight there, but it just starting to ask a lot of questions of all the agencies that could be involved.

Well, thank you, Mister Nelson. Thank you, Miss Chan, for the really. And Doctor Hill, I think she's already teaching, but I really appreciate this. Every time we have a hearing, it's great that we're developing the science and it's terrifying what the impacts will be on our most vulnerable Californians.

And I think, you know, I speak for all my colleagues, and that is a goal that we have, is to try to do our best with the best available science to protect them from the impact of its groundwater rise, groundwater rise related to sea level rise or climate change. And so I think that's really important.

And I want to thank all the panelists here today. I know I've learned a lot about local engagement of organizations and academic institutions, learning more about this important issue to mitigate the environmental impacts that we're going to be seeing. I've also learned a great deal about what our state agencies are doing.

I think we were chatting that every slide had different numbers of what contaminated sites were. So we need to. I think it is important to be expansive. I always think about little children growing up and making sure that they're safe. Sorry. I get emotional thinking about sick kids. Sorry.

Making sure that they're safe in what we're doing and making sure the state's everything we can in our power to protect those babies. Sorry. And children and families. Okay, so with that, any closing, final remarks about to save me from my tears.

Thank you so much, Chair Boerner, for making sure that we had an opportunity to gather together. And I commit to you personally that we will work together to save the babies, because now I'll start crying. Because we should all be incredibly concerned and worried about what is happening for our children's future and our collective future.

And I really appreciate the fact that we had an opportunity to integrate new science around groundwater rise in particular, and the impacts that that has, and the inter dynamics that it has with sea level rise and, and stormwater and all the likes.

And I just wish we could wave a magic wand and have one mega agency that just dealt with water and the impacts of climate change and our need to be resilient in being able to address that.

And certainly I am not going to sleep well tonight, having had West Oakland, East Oakland, the City of Alameda, we didn't mention Emeryville, but every part of my district was implicated in this review. And I'm very thankful to you, chair, for making sure that there is a Select Committee on this.

Rest assured that there will be more than two of us working on this in the Legislature. And thank you to the panelists for your comments and for your expertise in helping us to address this in the state.

Yes, thank you. Thank you, Assembly Member Ubuntu. I've recomposed myself and I did not mean to skip over public comment. We are going to now open it up for our public comment period. For those of you in the audience who would like to make a comment, please step into the mic if you like to provide.

Each of you have two minutes, but you're welcome to speak for less because we're now over time, make sure you introduce yourself and any Association with an organization you'd like to be affiliated with.

Hi, I'm Sally Lieber, former state assemblywoman. And I'm very, very thankful that the Select Committee exists and that you're doing hearings around the state. This is a problem that is so big that I think it really demands that the foundation start to be built in terms of policy in the Bay Area.

As assemblywin Banta indicated, we have so many sites, and many of those sites, the Federal Government has started to back away from a cleanup. And they say, well, we'll just be pumping for 100 years to address TCE, a cancer causing chemical.

But we know that those chemicals are being forced closer to where we draw groundwater for drinking water through this. And one of the issues that we face is the local governments that want to place affordable housing around the bay on restorable Bay Wetlands that can be our shock absorbers to absorb sea level rise. Bay level rise.

And we've got to protect those sites in a stronger way so that they can be our shock absorbers for extra water so that we don't have intrusion into the chemical plumes that are in so many places around the bay. Thank you.

Next speaker. You have two minutes.

Yes. Hello, everyone. My name is Cade Cannedy. I'm the Director of programs with climate resilient Communities. We're an environmental justice organization that works in East Palo Alto, also in the adjacent neighborhood of Belhaven and North Fair Oaks.

In our five square mile radius, including Redwood City, we have 428 contaminated sites, both open and closed, and a good portion of which will be impacted by sea level rise, by groundwater rise.

We went through a process with our community, with consultants, and with researchers at Stanford to come up with a way to prioritize among those 428 sites which ones need more urgent actions, and included factors like groundwater rise, sea level rise, the proximity of sites to one another, proximity to sensitive receptors like kids schools.

And my question after doing that was now what? There are new contaminants that are minted every day. There are new sites that are minted every day.

And I have a few questions which maybe the agency folks could answer, at least could prompt some thought on y'all side, which is one, why do we have four agencies that are in charge over the different sites. How can we streamline their coordination with one another?

For example, in East Palo Alto, one of our largest sites, our federal Superfund site has been handed back and forth between agencies, and it's been under remediation for the last 17 years with no end in sight. With sea level rise and groundwater rise, we don't really have another 17 or 20 years to wait.

And I would go as far to say that 17 years itself is far too long. So another question to the agencies is how often are cleanup plans rejected for being too slow, and what is being done to speed up those cleanup processes, and why?

When I ask or inquire about a particular site, am I met with an answer that the case manager for that site retired four years ago? And that's why you haven't been able to get a hold of anyone to ask any questions about it.

So there's a lot of systemic problems, I think, in this process from top to bottom.

And I think one of the core ones is leaving it up to the site owner to largely dictate the pace and means of the cleanup process, with very minimal room for oversight and very minimal resources on behalf of the agencies to push for different solutions or to sue companies that aren't taking adequate steps to protect the community.

Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker. Two minutes.

Two minutes. Hello. Hi, I'm Stephen Goodale. Better. Hi, my name is Stephen Goodale. I'm here with my wife, Nina. We live in Redwood Shores, which is just about 15 miles south along the bay, right on the bayfront. We really weren't involved in any of this until there was a development that was proposed behind our house.

So there's an office park called Redwood Life that used to be called Westport that we didn't know, but beforehand was a site, and it was actually a dump from about 2020 to about 2070, where there's undifferentiated waste that's been put there. And that means, really, it could be pretty much anything that's at that site.

The site has definite recognized environmental conditions as of 2019. It has contaminants of concerns and it has vocs. It is a capped but online site. Yeah, so. Yeah, exactly. I kind of generally understood what groundwater was until this kind of. Until this process started. Then it became apparent. It was like, zero, what do you know?

When the bay water rises, then the groundwater is going to rise, and that's going to get into the site, and then it's going to come leaching out, potentially or maybe it already does. So we've kind of been thrust into the deep end with this stuff, so to speak.

One thing real quick, if there's any hydrologists here, I'd love to talk to you. Because groundwater is weird and really cool. The way that it works. Like it's. It might be right underneath our feet or it might be 20ft underneath our feet. It's really, it's really neat. Anyways, so main point, I believe it was SB 272.

And somebody from the Water Board might correct me if I've got it wrong. There was an order that went out to all the dischargers. Dischargers are basically the owners of sites, or former sites that said, come up with your plan for what you're going to do in the face of sea level rise.

And I think groundwater rise was included as well. Were keenly aware of what happens at our site, Westport Redwood Life. And we read the report and it was mostly dismissive of the problems. And it kind of seemed to say we're going to kind of kick the can down the road.

They said they're going to raise a manhole, they're going to raise a manhole. They're going to do more vegetation, and they're going to reevaluate in five years. And for those of us that kind of follow these conditions around the bay, that was really disappointing, honestly, to read that report and see how they didn't really address it.

And especially because they want to develop the site. They want to knock down every building on the site and build it back up again over 25 years. But they didn't even address like sea level rise past five years from now. So I would say, please reinforce and support the people that are, that are.

And the agencies that are getting this stuff out there now. And, you know, a unified approach would be. Would be wonderful towards this stuff.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay. Any other public comment? Okay, so thank you, everybody for coming today. I want to thank Skyline for having us here with this beautiful view. And maybe that makes it a little better. All the depressing things. I want to thank Sally Lieber for being here.

I thought it was you, but like, you're a halo with the Pacific Ocean behind you. And I want to thank Assembly Member Bonta, who's such a champion the Legislature, for joining us today. And just know that, you know, Senator Josh Becker wanted to make it, but he wasn't able to make it today. This will be live.

And I know there are Capitol staffers watching this hearing. They're hearing your voices. And I want to thank everybody here today. And so with that, we conclude this hearing of the Select Committee on Sea level rise in the California economy. Have a great day.