Assembly Select Committee on Sea Level Rise and the California Economy

Thank you, everybody, for joining us here today for the Select Committee on Sea Level Rise in the California Economy hearing on Infrastructure, Pollution and Climate Resilience. My name is Tasha Boerner, and I am proud to serve as the Chair of the Select Committee. We are here in beautiful Coronado, one of the most beautiful cities in California.

And I'd like to thank the City of Coronado for hosting us today. Joining me on the dais later today will be Assemblymember Alvarez and Assemblymember Jessica Coloza. I know Jessica's staff is here somewhere in the room. If you want to raise your hand, you can. There she is.

They'll be coming in and out, as will a couple other people I want to acknowledge. Also Councilmember of Coronado, Carrie Downey, former Councilmember Bill Sanke. I have former Mayor of ib, Serge De Dina.

I have a representative, one of my favorite representatives of one of the council Members I overlap with from Dr. Jen Campbell's office in the City of San Diego. Margaret, where are you? Margaret? There she is in the back. And I just saw Donna Cleary come in from Assemblymember Laura Davies, office. Donna, raise your hand. There you go.

Thank you for joining us today. This issue is important to all of us in the state. And we're also being joined by Christian Silbron, my legislative aide. He's done all the preparation. If you like what I say, it's me. If you don't like what I say, it's him.

So we do have some ground rules for appropriate conduct in the State Assembly that applies to these hearings as well. When we're in the District, the Assembly has experienced a number of disruptions of Committee and floor proceedings in the last few years in order to facilitate the goal of hearing as much from the public.

Within the limits of our time, we will not permit conduct that disrupts, disturbs, or otherwise impedes the orderly conduct of legislative proceedings. Will not accept disruptive behavior or behavior that incites or threatens violence. The rules for today's hearing include no talking or loud noises from the audience.

Public comment may be provided only at the designated time, place and as permitted by the chair. ME. No engaging in conduct that disrupts, disturbs, or otherwise impedes the orderly conduct of business and hearings. Please be aware that violations of these rules may be subject, may subject you to removal or other enforcement actions.

We'll have three panels with each organization allotted 10 minutes for their presentation. Please stay within your time. I'm like, usually a very good timekeeper. I'll give you 54 and then I'm going to cut you off. After each organization presents, we'll leave a few minutes for Q and A's.

After our three panels conclude, we'll provide an opportunity for public comment. For those of you who are here for the public comment portion, please note that each person will have two minutes for their remarks. Thank you for helping today's hearing run smoothly.

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

In San Diego last year we received almost 3 inches of rainfall causing flooding, landslides, mudslides and devastating our region, especially affecting the most vulnerable parts of our communities where flooding wasn't anticipated. Sea levels are also rising as a result of the climate crisis, which affects our marine ecosystems and coastal areas.

We are now beginning to see how this can have other unforeseen and disastrous impacts. For example, it has resulted in massive bluff collapses. The real world impacts to my district in our region is why I authored AB 66 in 2021 and AB 72 in 2023.

These bills established a pilot program which tasked the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD to conduct a research study to improve coastal monitoring capabilities and observations necessary for the state's development of a coastal bluff collapse early Warning notification system.

Rising sea levels can also impact infrastructure and as we saw last year with flooding impact our most vulnerable communities. California is leading the way on addressing sea level rise across the state's coastline.

To that end, in 2022, the Ocean Protection Council and 16 other state agencies created the groundbreaking state agency Sea Level Rise Action Plan for California, paving the path for reducing the impacts of sea level rise.

The goal of this hearing is to further understand the challenges that the state will face with a warming climate and rising sea levels, the impacts that this will have on our public health access and our economy, and the innovative solutions that the state is pursuing to mitigate these impacts.

Before our first panel begin, I would like to open the floor to my colleagues who aren't here. So when they come in I'll let them have a couple minutes to make their opening statement. And with that we will go ahead and call forth our first panel.

We're going to start with Panel one, the challenges that California coast faces from rising sea levels. Today we will have two panelists joining us from the San Diego area. Our first panelist is Dr. Mark Mirafeld, PhD. I used to live on a street called Meerfeld so if I screw it up, it's my childhood trauma.

Speaking from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at U UCSD. And Dr. Merrifield was a lead author of the Sea Level change chapter of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and studies sea level rise and the history of climate change as a roadmap for future impacts.

And for a matter of fact, he was one of my first panelists on my Select Committee in 2019. And it's great to have you back. I think you're supposed to go over here, right? You could come up and go to. As I introduce you, you could be like Vanna White and go ahead and take your stage.

Our second panelist is Dave Gibson from the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. Thank you both. Yeah, go ahead. Thank you both for your attendance and participation. Dr. Merrifield, you may begin your presentation. You press the little push button in the middle to start it, and then when you unpress, you won't be caught on the mic.

You each have 10 minutes.

Okay, thank you for that introduction. I wanted to give you a quick rundown of where we are with sea level rise, what the most recent scientific evaluations have been, and just briefly introduce some of the impacts that go with that. So we've been lucky to have a tie gauge in San Diego harbor that goes back to 1906.

And it's been really, it's collected one of the great climate records for California you can see here compared to the tide gauge at San Francisco. So this is sea level rise over a century and 125 years. And it's documenting the rise that is about 0.8 to 0.9ft at both locations.

So about a foot of sea level rise since the beginning of 1900. There's some differences. If you go along the state coast, you'll get slightly different rates depending on vertical land motion due to a lot of different effects. But that's basically the two bellwether stations here are basically documenting what's happening to California.

You can see that there are these high peaks that go along the record. These are associated with El Nino events.

So not only are we seeing this rise, but we're seeing these periods of kind of a glimpse into the future of what sea level's going to be going forward because it can be 20, I mean, many fraction of a foot higher during these El Nino events than the slow background change. So that's where we are.

Where are we going? By the middle of the century, 2050, there's been a lot of work on climate models. There's an interagency report put out by noaa and NASA took the lead on that, summarizing what the current State of climate models are and where we expect to be by the middle of the century.

So the dark line there is the observation from all the California tide gauges going forward are the models. The different colors represent different scenarios, low to high, depending on what the emissions are going to be going forward. You can see there's quite a range, but it's in a sort of in the middle there.

That uncertainty is the projection from the actual tide gauges. So if you just take the data, do the projection, it's basically following the intermediate pathway of all the climate scenarios. So right in the middle of those predictions.

And that means that by 2050 we're expecting to see another feet of sea level rise relative to the beginning of this century. So you can kind of see here we're seeing acceleration. It took 125 years to get that much sea level rise. It's taking now 50 years.

And that keeps on doubling and doubling and doubling as we go. Going out to the end of the century and beyond.

It gets fuzzy and scary and there's all sorts of a wide range there going from the black line, which is if we did the most aggressive mitigation efforts, up to the top line where things really get out of hand.

But we're looking at, I mean, just to be just so that we have the context, it's not that we get to 2100 and we've somehow reached a goal. This is going to continue to march on beyond the century.

And if things are not, if steps are not taken, we're looking at up to sort of 10ft of sea level rise as we go forward. For San Diego, that means by the end of the century, depending on which scenario we're on, we could see flooding every day. So that every high tide would be a flood event.

So the things that right now we're used to seeing only during king tides would be our daily experience. And the plot on the bottom is just showing the number of days we expect to see a flooding based on these different scenarios. Again, so red being the highest rate of rise, blue the lowest.

And so by the middle of the century we're going to start to see this acceleration. Once we get to the middle of 2050, we're going to start to see this really pick up. The implications for low lying areas of San Diego are obvious. This is San Diego Bay.

Looking at what it's going to look like under these different scenarios. And you can just, without getting into a lot of detail here, just see the colored areas are the places that expect to flood. The green is by the end of the century, bluer colors are sooner.

And the pink areas are areas that are just going to be underwater all the time. They're below sea level and ground water is going to rise and cause inundation. So broadly speaking, all aspects of our coastal community are going to be impacted by sea level rise, whether it be the coastal property and infrastructure, commerce, ports, tourism, transportation.

A lot of our bases are on the coast. So national security is also a big issue. And is this going to work? Maybe not. We're building up at Scripps. We're working with local communities. This was with Imperial Beach. We're working also with other communities to come up with tools to understand what the risk is.

When is flooding likely to occur? And sorry, this was supposed to be a dramatic movie of flooding. Okay. But we're working with local communities to try and build capabilities to understand what this risk is, how to prepare for it, and what it's going to look like going forward. It's okay. It was. Yeah, it was.

Yeah, I think only. Yeah, I think only 2 of the buildings were left after this flood event. But we'll see. It's not just the overtopping. The water's coming up. It's also raising the groundwater. So this is going to going to affect our strategy for preventing flooding.

It's not that we have to just put a seawall and stop the water from coming in. We're going to have to contend with water coming up from below.

And this is particularly an issue for Imperial beach and Coronado, where this was a study we did using groundwater wells along Imperial beach coastline and another one of these plots showing that by the end of the century. So it's 2020 to 2100.

By about 2050 or so, the number of flooding days, just because the groundwater is coming up and flooding the land is going to rise considerably until by the end of the century. It's every day at this particular spot, which was Seacoast Drive we were looking at.

Seacoast Drive is going to be experiencing considerable flooding just from the groundwater. In fact, it looked like the groundwater is going to be more of an issue than just the water coming over from the top. So that's flooding is a big issue. Erosion, the beach, erosion associated with that. We're also looking at coastal.

This is another movie that's going to be hard to show. But basically, this was a cliff erosion event. Cliff erosion is exacerbated when you have sea level rise and waves attacking the base of the cliff. This was a cliff erosion event that was captured by a tourist.

And it just so happened that two minutes later, again, the drama, you'll have to imagine that the coaster goes right by, right over the top of this erosion event. Just highlighting how vulnerable some of our main modes of transportation are along the coastline here.

The cliff erosion issue has been a big focus of Scripps, and I would say it's one of the big scientific breakthroughs is just understanding, just getting a sense of how cliffs respond to rain and wave forcing. And it was a surprise to me.

But at Asha Tasha's encouragement, Scripps embarked on a warning system for cliffs along this coastline. And it actually works. There's actually a way to detect in advance when a cliff is going to be unstable and is likely to collapse. And so one of the advancements I think that we can point to over the past years.

So just in summary, what are we facing, in some cases, just permanent submergence of the land increases in the duration, the frequency and the severity of coastal flooding. So we're going to just. What we are used to now is a wintertime event will happen in the summer. We're going to see it year round.

We're going to see every high tide be a concern. With all that energy comes beach and cliff erosion. The groundwater is going to be impacted, so we're going to see salinization of soils. The groundwater and the surface water are going to rise in concert. That's going to destabilize coastal infrastructure.

Things that are meant to be buried and not sitting in salt water suddenly will be immersed year round. Our whole sewage system is based on a gravity system that was not intended for high sea levels. And there's all sorts of implications for public safety, transportation, power, water, sewer systems, tourism.

All of this is going to need to be reevaluated in coming years, giving the sea level threat.

Well, I'm glad you gave us a realistic picture of the future. And now for our next panelist.

Next slide. Is my presentation loaded? Well, I'm Dave Gibson. I'm the Executive officer of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. I have a wonderful presentation, but it doesn't seem to be showing. Isn't it on? I think it is. There we go. Now I'll talk into it. There we go.

Unfortunately, Dr. Merrifield covered everything I need to say, so I'll take questions instead. No, what I do want to share with you is that the state and regional boards, Cal, EPA, we've long recognized that sea level rise and climate change are very real. They're happening.

Other agencies that we interact with, like the US Navy, have long had a climate change and adaptation plan. So and we have benefited from the the opportunities to have Scripps, Institution of Oceanography and others come and present to our board on several occasions workshops and issues in terms of climate change and sea level rise.

We're going to talk mainly about sea level rise, but the regional board also has regulatory decisions that concern ocean acidification and harmful algal blooms and how we respond to atmospheric river flooding events on the landward side before it reaches the ocean and sea level.

But as Dr. Merrifield indicated, you see what some of the net results are from those events. So the state board adopted its climate change resolution and then the regional board adopted another climate change resolution that identified staffing, resources and priorities for board's actions.

The actions that we take are waste discharge requirements, mpds, permits under the Clean Water Act, Clean Water Act Section 401, certifications for Bluff stabilization and river and stream projects enforcement actions. I'll talk a little bit about those. And supplemental environmental credit projects. We have a strategic plan, our practical vision.

And in that practical vision, with this update, the board asked that climate change, already an integral part of the 2013 copy, would be pulled out in a separate chapter itself and worked by the office as a separate chapter and our vision for climate change and sea level rises to proactively safeguard beneficial uses.

We'll talk about those from the negative impacts of climate change with an emphasis on equity and environmental justice. And as you saw this graph, a very similar version of this graph a few moments ago, we are facing a tipping point in terms of the impacts and the costs to our communities.

I'll touch on briefly as I can in terms of the Regional Board's actions that can mitigate and ameliorate or manage some of those with our partner agencies.

So there are many infrastructure issues, storm surges and coastal flooding, for example, as you saw some of the dramatic photos and we Saw the video there in our minds, at least, about how these things can really affect our communities and our infrastructure.

And thank you, Dr. Merrifield, for pointing out that the subterranean water is as important as what you see on top. For example, sewer lines are not hermetically sealed, so when they're underwater, there's a lot of inflow and infiltration and rapid aging of the pipeline and failure. When it's above water, it exfiltrates.

So water, wastewater comes out of those pipes. Both of those are issues that we're contending with in terms of climate change and sea level rise, but also buried our electrical lines, communication lines. Again, they were never intended to be submerged underwater.

And as sea level rises along the coast, we're going to see infrastructure costs there to remove or replace them or to repair them after they failed. Rail. I chose this photograph from one of my staff, and it does block out some of the text. And so for that I apologize.

But we have had to form a joint powers authority in the state, Losan, to address the rail alignment along the coast from San Diego to San Luis Obispo. And the cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars to relocate track lines and disturbed communities is beyond my reckoning.

The Regional Water Quality Control Board does have a representative on there because we have permitting decisions that will help expedite and make efficient and low cost some of those. And we have a lot of opportunities to slow it down, which we don't want to do. Then there are the adaptation costs. Case in point, a sewer line failure.

If it costs $500,000 to pay the fine, according to the Moulton Niguel, it's going to cost $27 million to move the pipeline and replace it. This is an example of where we're going to see costs begin to mount and mitigate and manage up.

The City of San Diego had a major Sewer spill in 2020 in April of about 11 million gallons, and it was a $4.6 million fine. Unfortunately, they repeated that again in January 2023, and it was an $11.4 million fine.

The repair costs and maintenance costs to address those failures are going to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

But it's an example of how that infrastructure that was installed literally in the 1960s is coming to a point in its age where it has to be maintained and sea level rise and flooding have to be considered in that some of the issues we see with pollution and sea level rise are not ones that would immediately come to mind.

Are any of you familiar with convair Lagoon in San Diego Bay. I think a few of you are, it's a contaminated site with PCBs, and it was capped with a clean cover of sand.

We had a storm event, I believe it was, in 2017, in which that sand ended up in the equipment yard of solar turbines and on Harbor Drive. And so the call that came into our offices, what do we do with this potentially contaminated sediment?

And our answer is, well, first of all, analyze it and see what it is. We all got lucky that it was clean sand. But eventually, Convair Lagoon, that cap may not be stable under storm surge, and we may see breaches in it or loss of it.

And so for all of the cleanup sites in San Diego Bay, over 10 of them, and for all of the landward side and bayward side, we're considering sea level rise in terms of how we manage them going forward in the future. Dr. Merrifield show you beach and bluff erosion.

Our agency issues permits to stabilize beaches with groins, for example, and the toes of slopes of armoring. But there are also advocates in the community who want to preserve access to the beach. If the beach becomes a bluff protection, then there's no longer public recreation opportunities.

And the board is concerned not just with bacterial indicators, but continuing access to the beaches that are an important part of our tourism economy.

Then coastal wetlands habitat, the services and functions that they provide in terms of the beneficial uses like recreation, commercial, marine, estuarine, wild, rare, migration, spawning and shell fish harvesting are all important part of us. Then Dr. Merrifield also mentioned salt water intrusion. And this is where the board has a particular concern.

Many of our communities and districts are now turning to what used to be considered unusable sources of water, coastal brackish groundwater basins. But they're now becoming coastal saline groundwater basins. At some point, the treatment costs exceed the value of the water. So protecting those means using techniques like wellhead injections with recycled water to maintain the shoreline.

So we don't have seawater intrusion into those basins even as they extract water and would pull water in from the sea. How we regulate the use of that water is of concern to the communities. And this affects our drought resilience and our ability to manage the treatment cost so the public can afford that water once it's served.

So we have. Unfortunately, though it's not all doom and gloom. There are things that we can do. So for climate change, we have been asking our sewering agencies the publicly owned treatment works for climate change adaptation plans.

We still have time to manage some of our infrastructure and planning that can be built into rates so that the public is not overwhelmed by bills and by fines. We are doing that now with our stormwater program. The permit for the region will be updated this coming year.

And a key component of that that will be new will be how the cities, counties, and districts adapt to sea level rise and stormwater flows. I mentioned atmospheric rivers. We all saw the devastation in South Bay from major atmospheric river event.

Hitting an undersized channel with sea level rise, blocking the outflow of that creek, preventing that creek from draining so that you had flooding in the community that devastated some of our least capable and affordable homes.

We need to address that as proactively as we can going forward by retrofitting those undersized channels where we can and accommodating the community needs overall. We also need to look at hardening our storm sewers and our sanitary sewers. This has been a key question for our board. City of Oceanside had a major sewer spill.

They paid a $1.5 million fine because their pump station, which was surrounded by a berm, flooded. But the parking lot next to the pump station did not flood. Our priorities as a community do need to be updated so that we not only protect our parking spaces for a shopping mall, we protect a highly vulnerable sewer pump station.

So the City of Oceanside is to be congratulated for confronting that fact with the board and addressing it. But they are now looking at several options to replace that. Again, none of those are cheap. So we're looking at sea level rise reviews for our cleanup sites for both the landward and the bayward side.

And the Southern California coastal wetlands recovery project is looking at a number of areas in terms of its strategy for adapting to sea level rise. In addition to coastal wetlands that we see like bautichitas lagoon, we should also be thinking about the kelp forests offshore. Unfortunately, not only are they habitat constrained, they are also temperature constrained.

So as sea level rises, while kelp forests can help provide some buffering effects from storm surge as the water warms, it won't support the kelp forests that we've taken for granted, that provide many of the Fish and Wildlife that we've come to take for granted. The adaptation has to be durable as well as affordable and adaptive.

So we provided the City of San Diego, for example, with a progressive permit to clean channels so they can manage and maintain them. We provided that several years ago, and we're now looking at reviewing and informing it based on the experience of the last several atmospheric river events. And I will be wrapping up here now.

We have several mitigation programs. But at the heart of all of this and in our practical vision are the partnerships. I don't need to go down the list. I think one of the purposes of today's select hearing is to talk about how we can work together to address sea level rise and clad deployment adaptation.

So I've covered a lot of ground in a very short period of time, a lot of details. I'm happy to take questions later. Thank you.

Thank you. You both get a for timing and density of information. That was very good. I want to welcome Assemblymember David Alvarez, who's joined us here today. I don't know if you want to do with some initial comments before we go into Q and A.

I will be brief. Chairwoman, thank you. Thank you to our panelists that are here now and those that are coming. Really appreciate the interest from the Members of the public.

I would like to just acknowledge the work that the Chairman has done on this issue in the Assembly and making sure that her coastal communities but really the entire California coast is centered in the discussions that we have as it relates to adaptation and climate change in general.

As Mr. Gibson just shared, we're talking about a climate that's changing, warming that's occurring not only in the as a result of that do we see impacts like wildfires and others, but what is happening in our waters as well.

And certainly to the concern of those of us who represent coastal communities, I represent Imperial beach and so that's and then the Bay Area of South Bay, San Diego, those are concerns.

But a particular note of interest that I heard Mr. Gibson share about was the issue of we often just think about the coast when we think about these issues. But there are impacts inland and if you're not necessarily just on the coast. And those impacts are quite significant.

We lived it here only 2 Januarys ago with the atmospheric rivers that caused so much damage and devastation. That's why this issue should matter to all of us. And that's why I'm really appreciative that we're able to have this conversation.

This is the time of the year where we're focused on really diving deep on issues to comprehend and understand and then to bring forward legislative solutions, whether it's through bills and regulations that we adopt at the state or through things like the climate bond that we approved last year that included a lot of focus on climate change adaptation mitigation.

And certainly the Chairwoman was front and center of that and so proud to partner in that way. And Just here to continue to learn. Thank you very much for having us here in San Diego.

Thank you, David. Thank you for joining us. I want to thank both of our panelists. Very informative. I did not know that part of the flooding problem in your district had to do with the fact that the water couldn't get out. And I'm not sure I heard that at any of the things before today.

I do want to say we had a couple, we had to pause the Select Committee hearings during Covid But one of our last Select Committee hearings, we had a Professor from Berkeley and she was like, retaught us seventh grade science. And you know, so you have all these legislators. We're smart, we're educated.

We've done all these smart things. And she's like, as sea level rise, groundwater rises, equilibrium. And we're like, oh my gosh, we forgot about equilibrium. How did we forget about equilibrium?

But I think that underscores a lot of the points you were saying about the impacts that we see, the impacts often on the coast of the king tides. The very dramatic video that we couldn't see. Oh, I'm sorry. And we are also joined by Assemblymember Jessica Coloza.

Let me just wrap this up and then I'll open it up for comments for you. Opening comments. And Jessica, maybe to also share with people what area of LA you represent when you do that. And so we see the dramatic impacts of king tides and houses being washed out or with the flooding, the floods going through.

You know, you have the devastation of your heart, that those are families losing their homes and children without food. And you forget about the cost of the sewage lines, about what happens when toxic sites become uncapped because of groundwater rise.

So when I talk about Subcommitee hearing when I have these hearings in Sacramento, sometimes people look at me and they're like, she's the San Diego coast. So to Assemblymember Alvarez's point, it's not just the coast. And it's a very, very big infrastructure Proposition to address this.

But with that, I'll pause and hand it over to Assemblymember Jessica Caloza for opening remarks and an introduction.

Thank you so much, Chair Boerner. Hi, Assemblymember Alvarez. And good morning, everyone. Jessica Caloza, Assemblymember for the 52nd district, which represents Northeast LA, East LA, and South Glendale. I know I'm in different territory today, but for those to orient yourself, the neighborhoods that I represent, it's Los Feliz, East Hollywood, Silver Lake, Echo Park, Highland park.

And I'm sure I'll get booed for this next part. Also the Dodgers stadium. And so I come, you know, as a friendly. But just thank the chair for her leadership in this space and for being so intentional about talking about sea level rise and the impacts on the climate. You know, the community that I represent is landlocked.

It's not a coastal community, but we know that everyone's impacted by sea level rise and the opposites of that. And so just thank all the speakers and also just wanted to appreciate everyone for being here to talk about this important topic. I had an opportunity to live in San Diego for about five years.

So I went to UC San Diego. So very familiar and always sad that I left every time I come back. So excited to be here. Thank you so much.

Well, you're always welcome back. And as you saw, walking in every day is a Beautiful day in 8077. Mark, I was wondering if you could walk us through what efforts are being made to better predict the impacts of sea level rise and provide early warning for events like bluff collapses, atmospheric events and flooding.

We're working primarily with state parks, but we're coming up with a statewide that kind of capability. We were showing for Imperial beach where we're giving seven days advance warning of a flood event. We're building that for the State of California. And an important part of that is a monitoring effort to validate.

So we're putting out information that's as accurate as possible. So along with the projects that you've helped to sponsor at Scripps in cooperation with state parks, I think by the end of, maybe the middle of next year, we should have a system in place that will be accessible to the public.

So the background of this is, of course, most people are familiar with the very tragic event that happened in Grandview in August. I think it was August of 2019. I had been, I don't even think I had been an Assembly Member for a year. And I was on our balcony off the Assembly floor.

We get locked onto the Assembly floor like our sergeants who are lovely, don't let us leave. So I was out on the portico and I read the news report of what had happened.

And I was with my chief at the time and it killed one of our pediatric dentist's wife, his daughter, who I believe had just gone into remission from breast cancer, and his sister in law. And if it had happened 10 seconds earlier, it would have killed 10 grandchildren. And so I was like, you know what we need?

We need a light and a sound. You need 10 seconds to run into the ocean. We need a light and a sound and we need a beacon. And my chief at the time looked at me, he was like, does that exist? I was like, I don't know, let's Google it.

And there was one little sensor on Lake Michigan. I was like, see? It exists. And then I went to Scripps, I was like, this is what I want. And you should have seen Dr. Merrifield's face. He was like, we don't have the science around bluff failures.

We could tell you after the fact what happened, but I don't know if we could predict it. And so that's what AB 66 and 72 did, was help Scripps create the science around bluff failures. Because I think what we're going to see, and we're lucky to have such great academic institutions. Go Tritons, Jessica.

Academic institutions across California who are really taking their academic knowledge and we're going to need them to translate this into real world solutions to help us address these really big crises. And so yes, there's money in the climate bond, yes, there's this. But it's this blending of academic knowledge and practical implementation to help people.

Because that's at the end of the day, academic knowledge is great. Go philosophy. But if you don't help people, I'm not sure that's where we should be investing our limited resources. And so that's why it's so fascinating that this idea that came out of this, like, you know what we need? We need this light and sound.

I was imagining like a little sensor that went off. I describe this all the time. This is not what it's going to look like, by the way.

I was like, I imagine these little sensors in the blast that make a sound and flash a light and then you run and then we'll do bluff collapse drills like we do fire drills. That's what I was imagining. This is not what it's going to look like because that's not how the science works. But it's very interesting.

And when we think about that, are we doing that similar thing right now for estimating the rise in groundwater? Because you showed a graph. I don't know if we can go back to it. You showed a graph that I think it's really illustrative of what's going to happen.

And I'm not sure we talk about it enough because we think about sea level rise as tides, right? So you think about things that have a proximity to the coast, like the bluffs or pump stations or sewage lines that are like literally going out to the water but the impacts and low lying areas are actually really.

Can we pull up that slide? Yeah. Thank you, Ian, for. Ian's also from Scripps. Go, Scripps. Pulling up the slide that I'm talking about. Are we doing predictions for cities and counties and jurisdictions? Nope, nope. Yep. Back there we go. That turquoise little thing. Are we doing a prediction for that? Right arrow.

So cities, counties, utility companies, communications companies could be. You know, when we do big projects that we're accounting for that groundwater rise for different levels. I know we have like the 100 year flood zone that we account for in construction. Are we accounting for that yet?

Capability, sorry, the capabilities there. There's a lot of issues with soil type and sort of the nature of the aquifers that need to be considered. And some more observations are needed to kind of nail that down on a local basis. But. And there are a. There are not.

Most of the groundwater wells are further inland than we would like to be able to do this accurately for the coastal zone. So, yes, the capability is there and with some, you know, additional monitoring, I think it can be. The system can be up to the standard that we have for the coastal flooding.

So I heard more money. More money, more science.

Yeah. But I just want to go back to what you were saying. The encouragement that you provided for us to think outside the box was an important part of all that. Not just the money, but just identifying the problem. Because we're working on a lot of different things. We're not exactly sure what the most impactful is.

Once we heard that, it was very helpful.

I'm good at coming up with new ideas that are hard to solve. And then, Mark, how does the Federal Government stripping of NOAA impact the state's preparedness for impacts of climate change and sea level rise?

I think we're still waiting to see what exactly is going to be cut at noaa. But fortunately, California has the capability to fill in some of the gaps. But of course that's a lot of funding.

And so I think in the next year or so we're going to be facing some difficult decisions in how to prioritize the limited resources we have for some of this.

And Dave, what local efforts are being conducted to ensure that infrastructure is equipped to deal with the rising sea levels? Additional work necessary. And how can we be a better partner?

Yeah, thank you, Chair. I'd like to even speak to this slide for a moment. The groundwater inundation that you were asking about is usually treated by the agencies as a local engineering problem. So for example, under Lake Hodges. There's a sewer line from Rancho Barnardo to Escondido that is sealed.

From pump station to pump station, it's sealed, but all along the coast, especially for example in Imperial beach, those are old fashioned sewer lines that are just loosely connected together so they exfiltrate in the summer that's bad. But worse during the winter, they infiltrate, they take in all, all the groundwater around them.

So your pump station is now seeing 100 gallons per hour. It goes to 1,000 gallons per hour over in a minute. And then pump stations become overwhelmed.

The short answer to your question is that we're asking the wastewater agencies and the stormwater agencies now to evaluate all of their systems, collection systems, distribution systems, to determine their vulnerabilities at low lying elevations, for example, where they need to harden and then how they're going to budget for that, how are they going to invest in that.

Do we need to see a bluff protection, for example, where a sewer line happens to lie under it? We see that in Laguna Beach, for example, the bluff that's potentially going to fall down also has within it a major trunk line for a sewer.

How do we move that line away to another location or how do we harden it in place and so on. So it'll be very expensive. And it's a long term land use planning program. So the coastal plans and the municipal stormwater permits will have plans that will evaluate that. And the wastewater facilities are planning for it already.

And how can this. So you don't need state help? Well, we. Absolutely. That's what I just heard. I apologize. You had it under control. You don't need more science and you. Don'T need more help.

I will change hats for a moment. And you know, as a stormwater agency, I would be looking for state funding. Ultimately, of course, always the answer to the question is more state funding.

We will be able, I think, to use things like the state revolving Fund more effectively if we can broaden its scope and increase the awards and provide for low interest loans to agencies to manage infrastructure costs, especially ones that were never expected 50 years ago so we don't break the back of the ratepayers who pay for those bills.

That's going to be a long term cost. So there's an opportunity there, I think, two opportunities to streamline permitting as we've already undertaken. I think it is worthwhile for us to continue to coordinate on how we can identify ways to streamline that.

As the Federal Government pulls back on Clean Water Act, the State of California has stepped forward that also Gives us the opportunity to innovate in ways that we did not used to do under the Clean Water Act. So waste discharge requirements can be more flexible than an MPDS permit or a Section 401 certification has been.

So there are opportunities for us to continue to coordinate. So I would encourage regular contact with Cal EPA and the State Water Board on those types of questions.

Okay. With that, I'll turn it over to my two colleagues for any questions.

Thank you. That last point I'm very intrigued by. As you know, Mr. Gibson, we've done some streamlining work together. My prior role in the city and also in this role when it comes to storm water or channel maintenance work. So tell me more about so I can better understand the comment that you made.

As the Federal Government pulls back on clean water and we still believe that clean water matters in California, what role we could fill that's not duplicative or more burdensome for permittees to be able to get some sort of, if not relief expedited? It sounded like regulatory relief there.

Thank you. As each Supreme Court decision has constrained the definition of waters of the United States, California has expanded its definition of waters of the state to include those areas that were no longer covered. So we've increased our permitting authority using state authority.

I think the important part of your question, if I could delve into it, is what do we do about the most difficult impediment to getting those permits for a channel maintenance? And that's mitigation. I think that we see both in terms of the need. There's an opportunity.

The biggest problem has been a lack of mitigation banks that you can best pay as you go and result in a significant improvement to the environment. We had a mitigation bank in the San Luis Ray. It's all spent out now. So small developers with small impacts are looking for a place to go.

We could now turn the question around and say, what could we do on the coast to emphasize, expand, enhance the wetlands there, enable them to advance inland as sea level rises? Can we create mitigation banks along the coast in existing areas where they can be expanded?

And that gives builders and cities and districts a place to go to, to invest their money rather than trying to do on site vendors. Very specific, very expensive and very low value mitigation.

So the opportunity of expanding mitigation, especially on the coast, to be more inclusive of those types of opportunities would be an excellent way to streamline the permitting.

But what about for the cities or sanitation districts or any number of those that have the like for example, sewer line at a bluff that you mentioned. And I don't recall exactly where you mentioned Laguna. Thank you, Laguna Beach. So that's a local government is going to have to deal with that issue, whether it's hardening or realigning.

When you kept talking about that, the concern I kept hearing, because of the communities I represent, that means more cost. That means that's out of taxpayers and ratepayers, which is certainly not a place we want to be. So I heard you mention the revolving loan Fund, which gets used on a regular basis for others.

It sounds like from your testimony that that is not made available for projects that are related to potential coastal erosion or replacement of removal or realignment of any infrastructure related to that. That's my first question. Is that yes or no to that?

The priorities are several and they include water recycling, very important priority. But basic infrastructure costs are covered, but not always covered at the same rate. There's also a $50 million cap for many projects. And I think we can all estimate that the pipeline replacement is going to cost a lot more than $50 million.

So I think that it's valuable to go back in and look at the priorities and look at the dollar amounts that are available to agencies to see where we can put more dollars into fewer projects that have a bigger coastal protection impact. And that sewer alignment on the Laguna, they've already begun working on that and realigning it.

So it was an example I wanted to share, but it's not any longer the key problem. But there are other projects like that one that we also need to Fund.

So to close the loop on that, when I was asking in the first question about the permits that you mentioned that are maybe no longer required because of Clean Water act changes, or is that where we can find some potential efficiencies? Can you talk about that?

So, for example, in your district, Cholles Creek, for example, we issued a 401 certification. Should the law change even further and remove that as waters of the United States, we would protect the community with permits under state law. Waste discharge requirements. Now, the advantages of waste discharge requirements is that they don't have a limit.

So the board can adopt it and it can use it for 10 years. Certifications often have a five year expiration. We can also be more creative in terms of the mitigation. We no longer need the Federal Government to say okay to our mitigation proposal.

We can propose mitigation that works for our communities where we think it's most effective. It doesn't have to be Right there at Chollis Creek. It could be somewhere else. And I mentioned several coastal areas where we could enhance mitigation opportunities there.

So we could use state authority to create those opportunities and provide that streamlining permit for a longer time frame so that people can plan.

And that currently only applies to non federal water. And that's why it's limiting to some extent. There's no way. The question really is, is there no way for the state to try to request that the Federal Government allow us to do the longer term, the 10 year versus the 5 and those other things that you mentioned?

We can do that, but it's more clumsy and more cumbersome and takes longer, frankly. Any time you're working with the Army Corps, they work under the different set of regulations that we have in common. We can do waste discharge requirements where a 401 is required. We have done that. But again, they're constrained by this federal 404 permit.

Where we free ourselves from the federal 404. We can be more creative in terms of how we mitigate and where we mitigate.

Lastly, I'll ask for either one of you who may have this information. And I don't know if the information is available, but obviously as district representatives, we're always concerned about our own communities. I'm very obviously concerned about Imperial beach, the coastal community that here in South San Diego.

Is there a place where there's mapping that's been done in terms of what sewer lines exist and what, what risk areas? How do we, how are we, what access to information do we have to understand perhaps what actions we need to take to facilitate repair or facilitate regulatory reform, to realign wetlands, mitigation, any of that?

How do we best get informed about the risks that exist within our districts? That's where I think you're going to get a lot of attention from Members of a legislative body to want to take action?

Well, thank you. I think Dr. Merrifield showed some of the best sea level rise prediction mapping models that I've seen. What I don't personally have is a map of the City of San Diego or its Joint Powers Authority collection system map. And that's why we're requiring the climate Change adaptation plan.

So they'll provide us that kind of a map and identify problem areas they want to address in one year, five years, 10 years out. And we would hope the funding source that they'll use to address those.

Okay. Anything you would like to add, Dr. Merrifield?

I was curious. Well, I don't know if it's appropriate But I was curious what Mayor Dedina would say about that. From Imperial beach, did you have access to that sort of information and where did you get it?

Come on up, Serge. Well get to a mic.

Get a microphone somewhere. Where's your public microphone?

Yeah. Searched the unit X Maravi, Executive Director of Wild Coast. So in IB we had all the maps done, we had things ready to go. We just needed money. But what I would say is a brilliant work by, you know, Dr. Merrifield's staff.

And then a grant from NSF with San Diego State, they started working on mapping the whole groundwater issue. So at least for a city like IB the issue wasn't what we know to do, it was just getting the money.

Second thing is we should all be saying this streamlining and I know some Member Alberto, like me, obsessed with this streamlining. These projects should take a month to get a permit because we're really good at stopping things that impact the environment, but we're not very good at doing things to protect the environment. So that's it.

Thank you. Appreciate that. Mayor, it's good to see you. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Yeah, and to Dave's point, I actually wrote a Bill. I ran it four times. We're going to wait. The Governor just vetoed it. So we're going to wait for the new Governor. But AB399 would create blue carbon mitigation banks to do exactly what you want to do.

That is a problem that we have is there's not an easy way to do this. We do it with land banks, but we don't do it when it comes to water. And that's what 399 was meant to do with my blue carbon banks. So. Assemblymember Coloza, any questions?

Thank you. Chair Boerner. Just a follow up from what Assemblymember Alvarez asked really about some of the federal impacts. And I know the Mayor just mentioned some monies from NSF that was given to allow for some of these studies to happen.

So just curious for Professor Merrifield, could you just share, are there any impacts to any federal funding that maybe you want to share that we should be aware of that might impact the future work that you're doing?

We're very much invested in the here and now in terms of climate. We're worried about extreme events that are happening now and of course we want to be able to say something about what's going to happen in the future. So a lot of our research is on weather related phenomena.

So when we talk about flooding Imperial beach, it's the wave event associated with a big storm in the North Pacific that is leading to the problem. So in that regard, federal funding, federal support for weather related investigations or research from our point of view is still there.

So we're still, we're still going to be, I think, in a good position in that sense.

But anything that has to do with a long term projection, which, you know, a lot of the decision making is around that this is fine to be able to predict a storm now, but what does it mean in 10 years, 20 years, how are we supposed to, what are the choices in terms of adaptation that is going to fall away?

And we're fortunate to be in a state that values that. And so a lot of our efforts are pointed toward the State of California now to try and at least do what we can to see us through this time when there's still uncertainty about how to handle climate.

So just to clarify, there's federal funding impacts to the work that you foresee doing in the future is what you're saying, for your long term studies for.

Climate, not for weather.

Okay. And that's just helpful for us as we look at kind of the role that the state plays and is playing as it relates to how we're trying to be responsive to the needs, because we know that there have been lots of federal cuts to our public institutions.

And so I think for me, I'm a new Member of the Select Committee, that's something that's helpful for us to know. Is there something happening in this space as it relates to Scripps as an academic institution that you want to share or raise?

And it doesn't have to be, you know, during the public hearing, but I think for me at least that's very helpful to know so we can understand how do we protect the longevity of the work that you do, knowing that these studies take years, if not decades for you to conduct so that we can really understand the impact on our climate.

So, yeah, just to add to that, our research is based on reliable and accurate data sets. And when you talk about NOAA's contribution and NASA, that's really where our chief concern in that area is are we going to be able to maintain the data sets?

We need to be able to do the research that we're talking about today. A lot of what I presented here is based on a tide gauge from NOAA or a wave buoy that NOAA helps Fund. And cutting back on that scientific monitoring system is a chief concern.

Thank you for sharing that, Dr. Merrifield. I don't know if you wanted to add anything, Mr. Gibson, to that, I.

Think he covered the subject really well. But if there was anything specifically you'd like me to delve into in terms of the regional board's regulatory authority, I'd be happy to.

I think my colleagues asked some good regulatory questions for you. I concede my time. Thank you, Chair Boerner.

Thank you. So that concludes panel one. So thank you, Dr. Merrifield, and thank you, Mr. Gibson, for all your answers and ideas. We're like. We're all writing down ideas, so I appreciate that. And with that, I'd like to continue with panel two, which focuses on the impact to public health, equitable access, and local economies.

We have two panels joining us today. You are welcome. To make your way to the dais, we have Ramon Chaitas, Director of Education, Environmental Advocacy with Unmar De Colores, and Jessica Fain, Director of Planning at the San Francisco Bay Conservation and development Commission, the BCDC. Thank you for both being here. And, Mr. Chaitas, you may begin.

And you have each 10 minutes. I'll try to. Christian will poke me when it's one or two minutes. So every now and then, I try to get your attention by flagging you down. And go ahead and begin. Push the button in the middle.

There we go. Well, first and foremost, thank you, Assembly. Members and Chair, for having giving us an opportunity to share a little bit about our work and how this issue impacts access for the public. I'll start by speaking a little bit about our organization.

I'm having the same problem you were, Dave. There we go. Okay, so this is our mission. We're like a lot of outdoor equity programs that are kind of sprouting up across the coastline, up and down California, including San Francisco, Louisiana.

And our goal is to really introduce kids that have historically been kind of excluded from these spaces or there's barriers for their families and those communities to access the ocean. And so our goal is to introduce them to this space in a very welcoming, practicing, like, welcoming values.

But also, at the same time, we want to inspire, empower those kids to become active stewards of these spaces as well.

And as we're talking about something that's going to impact us for the next, you know, God knows how many years, then that's going to be a very important role that we have to play as stewards of the next generation.

And so one of the things that we really focus on is this idea of welcoming people back to the ocean. The history of human populations across the globe is rooted in us having access to water. And so the majority of our cities, our communities, our metropolitan areas are connected to water, are close to water.

And so we know that ancestrally, our communities, whether they're black, brown or white or whatever part of the world they're from, that there's an ancestral connection to water. And so we do this. We connect communities by playing. That's the first thing is they have to learn how to care for the space.

And what better way to do it than having programs where they get to play and be free and connect with other kids and other mentors. And so we consider these spaces a nest for our future stewards of ocean and land spaces. So this is where I grew up, in the Tijuana River Valley.

I lived in almost every single community alongside this river. And I thought it would be important to mention this briefly. I learned how to surf in Imperial Beach. I learned how to farm in the River Valley.

I also learned how to surf here in Coronado when IB Was kicking my butt and I couldn't handle those big hollow waves surge. And so I wanted to just briefly mention something about this space. So this is the last intact wetland that we have in Southern California.

And if you notice, once you go up North County, every single wetland estuary is crossed by either the train or. Or the freeway or both. But this is also the wetland, the estuary that's the most threatened by obvious reasons.

I don't have to tell the community Members of Coronado what this issue with the pollution and transboundary flows from Tijuana what kind of impact this has had on our community. And so in Imperial beach, we haven't had access to our ocean in a very long time.

Now, what's important here is that how wide the mouth of the river is here, you could play catch if you put two people on each side of the mouth, that's how close it is. About 70 years ago, 80 years ago, that mouth of the river was approximately a kilometer wide.

So the amount of sediment that has come from the canyons in Tijuana and kind of overwhelmed the estuary, and this is something that California State Parks is working diligently on every year. And it's a comes at a huge cost to essentially manage that trash and that sediment.

And so parts of the estuary here have been completely covered and buried by excess sediment, and especially those southern parts here. And so I don't know what that's going to look like when we start to see sea level rise. I know that surge was around in 2006 when the mouth of this river closed.

I think it was Hurricane Hillary surge. So I'd love for you to talk about that moment, but I know that that was a devastating event and it had a huge ripple effect on the health of that estuary.

I think I heard you tell a story about 100 or so dead leopard sharks inside the actual estuary trapped from that event. So here we're going to have is the collision of sea level rise with a huge environmental problem that we've been facing for a long time in this community. I won't talk about this.

I think Dr. Merrifield and Dave Gibson spoke about this really well. And I'm kind of fanboying over here because I'm on a panel with Dave Gibson. So I'm like, whoa, I made it. I think for us. And when I say us, I'm talking about all these different outdoor equity programs and nonprofits.

Sea level rise isn't just about infrastructure. And so we know that as we start to tackle this issue and we start to build sea walls, that access is going to start to close up. But we also know that this space is so important.

When I think about all the kids in the South Bay, not just Imperial beach, but San Isidro, Nestor, Chula Vista National City. You know, I grew up in that area. Our beach was Coronado often times during the Fourth of July. And Imperial beach.

And I went, not this year, but last year I spent 4th of July at Imperial Beach. And it was stunning to see hundreds, thousands of people at the beach enjoying themselves. And about three or four People in the water. It was a stunning view.

I had a hard time, like, just grasping the reality in front of me, like, wow. Because everybody knew, you're not gonna get in the water, but we're gonna enjoy the beach regardless.

And so this is incredibly, critically important for underserved communities that have historically been, I don't know, not welcomed at the ocean is the best way to put it. And so what does that do? What is that gonna do?

It's gonna erode cultural continuity and effectively, the work that we're trying to do as all these nonprofits that we don't charge kids for what we do, we don't charge families. Everything that we do is for free. And so we want to make those connections.

We know that a lot of our families, especially our families from Mexico, they grew up around water, around rivers, around estuaries. And I know that when I grew up here in the US My parents were from Mexico. I never had access to the ocean until I moved to Imperial Beach.

My parents moved us, and I went to Mar Vista High School, where half of the kids were surfers. It was culture shock for me. And so this is super important. And so one of the things that came into law this year was AB 2939.

And so I thank the Assembly Members for voting on this Bill, because this is going to play a huge role moving forward.

Now, we got a little bit of resistance from the City of San Diego when this kind of rolled out, and, well, I won't go into the specifics, but they've kind of laid off a little bit and realized that we're doing really important work, because on top of the things that we're offering, we're also offering environmental education, water safety, and we're teaching families, especially brown and black families, that.

That have high rates of drowning, whether it's at lakes, rivers, ocean spaces. We're teaching them about water safety and how to navigate that space in community. Two minutes. Thank you. And so this is the collective of organizations that are doing this kind of work across the state, the Surf Justice Collective.

We sound like something out of, like, Marvel or Superman or something, but. And this is a picture of what our community gatherings look like. They're so beautiful. Like, we don't cut off kids from their parents. Everyone is invited.

And if they want to bring, you know, grandma, if they want to bring the Tia, if they want to bring cousins or the neighbor, everyone is welcome in this space. And it's making sure that that's exactly what it is, a welcoming space for kids to explore an Incredibly vital resource for all of us.

Our most important resource in this state. And so I'll close on a couple things. I think what's going to end up happening as spaces become much more limited with sea level rise and communities that have been historically excluded from those spaces, it's going to be harder and harder for us to access those spaces.

If you think about the challenges that the YMCA Camp Surface had, outdoor outreach, ourselves as well, we have to move all. We have to move our program north. We have to go to cleaner beaches. We're not going to expose our kids to pollutants in the water, to bacteria. And so we're up against all these different access barriers.

But there's also one more barrier that I want to mention before I close here. When I first started surfing, and I know surge can validate this, I was so excited. I had a group of friends that just gave me the basics. And then I started going out by myself in Imperial Beach.

I was so excited that I'd go out into the lineup and I would say hello to everyone. And I can't tell you how many times I was ignored. Nine out of 10 times, people ignored me. And that happened over and over and over again at every single beach that I went to. It wasn't just Imperial Beach.

And I get dirty looks, almost like, what are you doing here? And I'm an adult. I can't imagine what it's like for a little kid.

When I took a trip to Oaxaca and I started surfing some of those beaches out there, I went to a little town called Barra De La Cruz, and I went down to the lineup and there was three tiers. There was the older folks, there was the kids, and then there was the visitors, the tourists.

And the first wave that I tried to catch, I started hearing an older gentleman coaching me on how to pivot. He was like a ladrecha a LA Esquer. He was telling me which direction to pivot my board.

And so the second wave I caught, I heard all the little kids and all the older gentlemen congratulating me, cheering me on, like, dale, dale, dale. It was so beautiful that I got tears riding that first wave. And it took, like, the trajectory in surfing, how long it took me to be welcomed like that by complete strangers.

It hit me in the face. And I brought that back with me, especially with the work that we're doing here, like how important it is for communities to feel like the space is also theirs.

And that's part of the work we're doing, is trying to challenge some of this dominant culture at the beach, that the space belongs to only one culture or one community, and that those public spaces belong to all.

You made me cry. Annoyed. But thank you. It was very moving. And now, Ms. Fain, you may begin. 10 minutes. Good morning, everyone, and thank you so much for this important topic today.

I think we're loading. My name is Jessica Fain. I'm the Director of Planning at the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. So I am really pleased and enjoying my stay here in beautiful Coronado and San Diego. Thank you for hosting this. I'm representing today the California Coastal Management Program. California has three coastal management agencies.

The California Coastal Commission, the California Coastal Conservancy, and my agency, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. The three of us together comprise California's coastal management program. Unfortunately, the Executive Director of the Coastal Commission is at her meeting today and my Boss had surgery earlier this week. So I'm here with you today.

So we're going to take a little journey up to San Francisco Bay. This is obviously a statewide issue, and so hopefully this will be a little insight in terms of what we're dealing with up in the Bay Area. If I can forward. Okay.

So San Francisco Bay has always had an evolving and dynamic shoreline ever since the days of hydraulic gold mining up in the Sierra Nevadas that pushed sediment down into the bay and started to create the fringe marshes that we see all around the bay.

To the more human induced changes created by the filling of the bay, the reclaiming of those wetlands for all sorts of uses, housing and industry for many, many years, which really led to the creation of my agency, BCDC in the 60s, which started from a grassroots movement of folks who saw this filling of the bay and wondered, why is this happening?

Started the Save the Bay movement, came together to adopt the McAteer Petrus act, which is the underlying law that supports BCDC, and created BCDC as the first coastal management program in the United States. A model for the Federal Coastal Zone Management act and a model for the Coastal act that now is throughout the state.

The bay was going to look something like that picture on the right. There was a fear that it was going to turn into a small river. And that was really why our agency was created, to manage the filling of the bay and to create more public access to the bay.

Now, none of those wonderful folks that started the Save the Bay movement in San Francisco were really thinking about sea level rise, unfortunately, back in the 60s. And so what we're dealing with today is no longer really a shrinking bay, it's a growing bay.

And so over the last 10 years or so at BCDC, we've been pivoting as an agency to figure out how do we change and modify and rethink the those rules and laws and kind of underlying mission to think about a bay that's no longer Shrinking, but it's actually growing.

And many of those same areas that were filled or were going to be filled are the ones that are most at risk for sea level rise today. Oops. Some folks might not realize that San Francisco Bay is actually. If you were to stretch out, the California coast represents about one third of the California coastline.

And if you look at the economic damages that sea level rise is anticipated to create, from an economics perspective, it actually represents two thirds of the economic damages. And that's because of this unique feeling and the way that we've really developed the land uses around the bay.

So I thought today's session was going to be focused on tourism and sea level rise. So I'm going to take us on a little tour. This was kind of a fun exercise because I hadn't really thought about tourism and sea level rise that closely.

So I talk to some of our tourism bureaus, and so I'm going to take you on a little tour of San Francisco Bay. So imagine you are landing at sfo, one of the biggest airports in the United States. And San Francisco attracts over 23 million visitors annually.

Despite maybe what you hear in the news about San Francisco, tourism is spending is nearly equal to pre pandemic levels. International visitation is challenged. But we think in 2026, with events like the World Cup and the super bowl coming to the Bay Area, it's going to pick up.

So as you land at SFO and you have these wonderful views of the bay, you're landing on a Runway that's jutting out right into the bay. That airport is built on artificial fill that's about 3ft above sea level and will start flooding soon.

They're planning to build a seawall around the runways to protect the airport until about 2085. And that's going to require about 26 acres of New Bay fill. And so this is just one of the places that's at risk. From there, you might head up to San Francisco's Embarcadero.

Not too dissimilar from San Diego's Embarcadero, which I got to explore a little bit this morning. This is an iconic historic part of the San Francisco shoreline. And at a King Tide event, you might. Your feet even might get wet as you stand along the bay.

This area of San Francisco, of downtown San Francisco, is constructed on bay fill. It used to be part of the bay and is now held back by a giant under giant, massive aging seawall that's under the Embarcadero roadway there.

It basically holds back the entire City of San Francisco is size seismically at risk and is threatened by sea level rise. So the Army Corps of Engineer and the Port of San Francisco are developing plans about how to strengthen and protect this really important infrastructure rich and historically significant corridor.

But we're really just at the early days of really thinking about what's going to radically reimagine this shoreline. You might walk over to Fisherman's Wharf. I think these guys floating on their floating piers are going to be just fine.

Or you might take a ferry across the bay over to Oakland to Jack London Square right next to the Port of Oakland, which after LA and Long Beach is the third largest port in California. From there, you might take a bike ride over the Bay Bridge and head into beautiful Marin County.

Here's an image of the Bay Trail along the Marin coastline shoreline. This happens on regular King Tide events where our Bay Trail is right along the shore. And from there you might head up to do some wine tasting in Napa.

On your way there, you'll traverse Highway 37, State Route 37, which is a major corridor connecting Vallejo to Marin. Here's an image of, seen from 2017, which reoccurred in 2019, of that important corridor being submerged by flooding.

There's some plans in place to do some interim protection for that corridor, simply to widen the roadway to allow for more traffic. It's extremely congested as well. And there's longer term plans to consider how to elevate that roadway.

We didn't stop in the South Bay in Silicon Valley, but here's an image, it's a little bit outdated, but of just all of the different important economic drivers of the many companies that exist in the south part of the bay.

So as you can see, and I'm really just focusing on the tourism and economic impacts of sea level rise, but it's abundantly clear that all of these, the system that we have around the bay as a region, are all going to be impacted and doesn't even begin to speak to the impacts to specific neighborhoods, specific communities, natural resources, parks, open space, and all the critical infrastructure that Bay Area residents rely on, and tourists as well.

So one question we often get is, so what's it going to cost? And so a year or so ago, BCDC, in collaboration with our regional agency partners at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Government, did a study to try to answer that question.

And I will just say this number is probably wrong, but we get asked it a lot. And so we tried to put our best foot forward. So we estimated the cost of, based on projects we know are in planning or proposed projects that could be. We imagined projects along the shoreline.

What would it cost to adapt to mid century levels of sea level rise and coastal flooding? We came up with this figure. $96 billion. It's a big number. We also looked at the cost of inaction. So that's that $230 billion if you're simply looking at a estimated values of certain properties and certain transportation assets.

So it's abundantly clear that we stand to lose much more if we do not act over that same time period. We also looked at what anticipated revenues we have coming in either at the federal level, the state level or the local level. And we were able to identify about 5 billion over that same time period.

So the bottom line here is it's going to cost a lot of money. It's better to act, but we don't have nearly close to what we need. And so we need to be strategic. We're not going to have, we're not going to get to that $96 billion. So how do we prioritize?

How do we think about what needs to happen first? I don't know if that was my timer. Okay. An important. I don't know. So as a region, the Bay Area has been planning together for quite some time and sea level rises sort of our next call to action.

We were really pleased that two years ago Senate Bill 272 passed in the State of California. This was a really important bill and thank you for your support in passing this important legislation.

And it's interesting because of that different legislative history of BCDC and the Coastal Commission, the way this law is playing out on the coast and in the bay is slightly different.

Within the bay, we use this as a way to strengthen our regional planning and create a new way to partner with local governments to, to plan as a region for sea level rise. In December of last year, our Commission adopted what we call the Regional Shoreline Adaptation Plan, which sets out a vision for the bay.

It identifies some of those most important regional priorities and importantly, it creates guidelines for local governments. And so our task ahead of us now is to work with over 50 cities and counties in the Bay by 2034 to help them develop plans that meet these guidelines.

We're grateful for the funding support that agencies like the Ocean Protection Council have been able to provide to give money to local governments to create these plans. One of the number one things we hear is local governments are overtapped and they don't have the funding to necessarily do this.

So we're so pleased that with even less than a year of this plan underway, over 51% of Bay jurisdictions have funding allocated to do and work on their plans.

And then lastly, and I know there were some folks that touched on this earlier and we can discuss it later, but we recognize that regulatory innovation is going to have to go hand in hand if we're going to need to see these projects created and built on time so that we can adapt to these challenges.

And so we're working on a range of solutions, and I'm happy to talk more about them during the Q and A. And then lastly, I'll just end with two quick slides.

First, an event from an image from an event we held at the Exploratorium in San Francisco two weeks ago, where we are focused on how we bring the community together. A lot of folks working on this, and as in a regional agency, we hold that job.

We take that job seriously about bringing together not just the projects and the permits, but the people. And in closing, I'll just say that we are so grateful for the support of the Legislature in SB272 and the climate bond. We think partnership is key.

And in order to really deliver the resilience that I think we all want to see, sustained funding, not just for plans, but for the projects, that's where it's going to be really expensive, sustained support for science, as we were discussing earlier, and leadership, like you're demonstrating today, to just keep this important issue on the table.

So thank you.

Thank you. And I, it was totally the intention that you were supposed to take us on a tour that was a great tour because I can imagine that.

And it was like, oh my God, that's all on Phil, which is like some of our, you know, what we call islands, they're not really islands, but some of our islands here are also based on Phil, because we've evolved what we think environmental protection should be like.

And one of our Select Committee hearings, I want to say it was like a second one for the audience here. For those of you from San Diego, I thought we were screwed between the Tijuana river sewage problem and King Tides. I was like, okay, we're screwed.

We go up to Foster City one, we learn about equilibrium again, and we're like, oh, we're even more screwed because it's not just sea level rise, it's groundwater rise.

And then I believe in that hearing, they did the maps like Dr. Merrifield did for us up in the Bay Area, and it showed with just the minimal amount of sea level rise and groundwater rise combined because the groundwater is very, very high in the Bay Area.

It was a displacement of 90,000 people and not even the cost for the infrastructure. Right. To the communities. 90,000 people, almost exclusively low income people of color. And that's just displacement. That's stuff you can't mitigate. That's a sea level or a seawall around SFO is great.

The water is going to come up from inside because equilibrium doesn't care whether you believe in science or not. Right. Equilibrium is going to do what it's going to do. And so I really appreciate that you've walked us through.

And with that I'll turn it over to Assemblymember Alvarez and then Assemblymember Coloza and then I'll come back to any of my questions if they're not asked.

Thank you. I want to ask a what I think will be very controversial question, but I hope that we can have a dialogue around it here. We start a dialogue here and then follow up.

The slide that caught my attention the most was the one where in the Bay Area you've done the rough, maybe not more than rough, but the analysis on the cost and where the impacts are going to be and what that cost could be. I think you're right, it's probably more. And it just got me thinking.

Well, one, we don't have those resources currently available. And perhaps even being very realistic over the course of, I think you had 2050 as a sort of time frame, that's 25 years of billions and billions of dollars every year would be challenging. And so you've prioritized, which I think is the appropriate.

So the part that may be controversial to this conversation I certainly would be interested in both of your thoughts is I'm assuming some of those costs are related to environmental regulatory processes, mitigation issues. I mean you must have used. Some. Instrument that measures cost of both time in addition to just the hard cost of infrastructure.

And I'm just wondering for the sake of the impact of something of this magnitude, when do we start talking about what environmental mitigation is appropriate? Because that cost may be way too much beyond protecting current communities, assets and other things.

And, and I think that's more that might be a very strong position that people may hold that we should protect everything in the environment at all costs, no matter what. But I think when we're facing something of this magnitude, we need to at least have a conversation around that.

And I know for a lot of our friends who are very, very strong champions of environment in general. That might be a difficult conversation to have, but I think it's something that I at least be interested in hearing your thoughts, both of you on.

Is that a conversation perhaps we do need to have or at least explore and certainly love to hear what you're doing in the Bay Area up there. Because I'm assuming you maybe at least thought about that a little bit and then we can talk about locally as well.

I'll start. So first of all, I think you're giving us a little too much credit for that study. So, you know, that was a fairly crude numbers that we used. We didn't include things like permitting costs or cost of land acquisition. You know, a lot of those are.

We didn't really look at groundwater rise and the impacts of groundwater rise. So that's why I said that number is probably wrong because it was sort of this crude estimate. And like you identified, the costs are most likely much higher than those that we included there.

But I think the point is of needing to figure out ways to expedite these projects to get them built. And in the ground is an important one.

In the Bay Area, we're very focused on our wetlands and our wetland restoration, but with the idea that they're going to be underwater if we don't start to help those wetlands accrete and elevate those and get more sediment to those wetlands soon.

So we've been doing some innovation in terms of our permitting to try to figure out ways to make those types of projects happen faster. They include things like something called the Bay Restoration Regulatory Integrated Team. I'm not sure if I got that totally right.

It's called the brit, but basically there are seven agencies, state and federal permitting agencies, that have a specific staff person that's paid for. And those folks work together to get those projects permitted. And the idea is they do that pre application process together. They're looking at the issues together.

So it's not a sequence of how those permits get issues. It's sort of all happening together. Some of the other ways we're looking at it are through things like just our systems as an agency. You know, permitting unfortunately isn't the most well resourced part of our state government.

And so our Executive Director a few years ago asked the Department of Finance to do a what's called a mission based review of our agency to try to figure out ways that we can be more efficient. So we now have a list of all sort of efficiency measures.

The Legislature just this past year allowed us to do something like buy a new database so that we can, like, find our permits and what's in them better. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that takes time. And we can do better if we just invest in the systems.

And so I think there's a lot of room to sort of work within our regulatory programs if we invest in them and figure out how to do things kind of smarter. And we're working on that.

Thank you. Anything you want to add to that conversation?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I'm going to be able to answer your question. I remember when Imperial beach was tackling this issue 10 years ago. I remember there was a group of conversations that the community was invited to.

We had some doctors from Scripps analyzing how low Imperial beach sat, how impactful flooding was going to be. And there was this conversation about building seawalls and infrastructure to protect coastline properties versus, I think, the phrase. Was it intelligent retreat or something? Planned retreat. Exactly. Yeah. And I'm not trying to, like, you know.

And so when I think about what we have and what we're ready to actually politically, economically, even spiritually invest in, I don't know, it feels to me like if this were life and death, that I would choose plan retreat. I don't know.

But it's also hard to tell people what they've invested their whole lives in, their families, their homes, their livelihoods, that this is a better option. But at the same time, I know that all these seawall building projects and infrastructure is going to take a heavy toll on us, but also a heavy toll on the environment.

And it speaks to, in some ways, like what our priorities are. You know, I became an environmentalist as a result of farming and surfing and hanging out with surfers and farmers. That's really what it was. And now here I am speaking on environmental issues, and it all happened without me even making a decision about it.

And when I think about our future and I think about what we actually invest in, when I look at what our country right now from a federal perspective is investing in, like the perceived threats of our closest neighbor and the billions and billions of dollars we're doing to police cities and neighborhoods and do it in the ugliest way possible, I don't know where our priorities are.

It's a sad thing. So I don't know how to answer your question, Assemblymember Alvarez, but I know that it tears at what our values are as a country.

That was, I think, a very appropriate answer. And Assemblymember Alvarez asked a very. I mean, you are such a diplomat. I am not that diplomatic because we both value the coast and we do it in different ways. And so I think we could be very direct.

There's this tension at the state level between streamlining and the environmental impacts of that that streamlining could cause and the cost to protect the environment. And I think Serge said it best.

But sometimes that comes at the cost of the environment itself because the timeline, and I think it's often a timeline problem, if you change your time horizon, you get to different outcomes.

And because we're thinking about the environment now, what's the impact of this project to the environment now versus the impact of this project to the environment now and in the future? So there's no way to. I don't know of a way.

And maybe we work on the way together, David, on a way to assess streamlining for projects that have long term environmental benefits. Right. And when we change the timeline, people can break out of their kind of narrow set positions and say, what are good? What's good for the environment in the long term?

Because this, this is not a today issue. Look outside, it's gorgeous. This is in one year, five years, 10 years when I'm long gone and my daughter is my age. That's what we're talking about. And so very, very well asked. I want to compliment you on asking it so delicately. BCDC does have different.

It's one of the things we've looked at in my team. They don't have the same constraints as the Coastal Commission in terms of building and they don't have the same mission or mandate because of all the historic fill reconstruction. They could never start the way we start right on the coast.

And so, you know, but I do think I want to pull off one thing you said was this simultaneously simultaneous permitting is what I think it was, that in terms of shortening the length of a project, I had to informally get something through and in this, in the San Diego area this last year.

And you could do it. I just told the agencies, I was like, do you want me to run a bill or do you just want to do this? Like you don't need me to run a bill to do what's logical and normal. Right. So they decided to not have me run a bill.

But getting state and federal and local agencies all to do simultaneously simultaneous permitting and one CEQA instead of 25 CEQAs, you know, depending on where your, what your jurisdictional overlap is, is really, really hard. And that's an area that I'm going to take away as Something maybe we could work on. Assemblymember Coloza.

Thank you, Chair. I appreciate the presentation from both of our speakers. So thank you for your time and connecting impacts to the community and what this really means for everyday people, especially everyday working class folks.

And also just some of the things that we don't think about when we're walking some of these beautiful sites that you took us a tour on, you know, we don't think about sea level rise when we're walking the pier in San Francisco or where they're, you know, playing tourists in other parts of the state to look at some of these sites.

And so, you know, I think for me, less so questions for me, but you know, just some additional comments about working through our Chair to really look at what are the other ways in which the state can be more responsive to the ongoing challenges and needs.

Because all of this incredible work and research is wonderful, but it's really not going to mean much if we're not able to respond to it with resources. And so I still go back to, you know, the resources, the funding aspect of it.

And really for me, like, what's helpful again is really understanding, you know, from even some of the projections that you put out there for Jessica, what are of that, what is that is federal dollars? What is that are state dollars? What are that local dollars?

Because it really helps us understand the role that we can play, especially some of the big things that the state has moved in this past year as it relates to cap and trade.

The Prop 4 dollars, you know, in this presentation and this hearing today helps for me put sea level rise at the top of my mind when I'm in these hearings and I think of, you know, what are the dollars that we need to allocate for specific projects. And so thank you for sharing some of those numbers.

But you have my commitment here today to work with Assemblymember Berner on this from, from our perspective. I am also on the Water Parks and Wildlife Committee as well as the state Public Works Board appointed by the Speaker. So look forward to working with you in this capacity.

And thank you so much to our Chair for your incredible work on this.

Thank you. And I have lots of questions. Maybe we'll follow up afterwards because we were supposed to end 12 and we're like 25 minutes behind. But I want to point out, you know, the name of the name of this Select Committee is Sea Level Rise in the California Economy.

And when you think about the economy and it's so easy to go back to numbers because economic impacts are more Easily quantifiable than human impacts or impacts to connections, communities or spiritual impacts. But I would say the impact to humans and communities and connection and spiritual impacts are arguably far more important than economic impacts.

So we use the economic impacts as a proxy for cost. But when we look at this, and this is why we asked you to be on this panel, was you look at it and you're weighing it against each other and this tension between and BCDC sees it, if you're in the coastal zone, you see it here.

This tension is really hard because the impact of sea level rise. And that's why I started the Select Committee, restarted the Select Committee in 2019. When I got into the Legislature was I believe back in 2019.

It's probably like triple this now, but we had approximate impact that like you did in a rough cursory thing, if you just look at infrastructure of $300 billion, our climate bond was 10 billion.

So I was working over the years on what ended up being our climate bond that passed by the voters and I was like, yeah, 10 billion, sure, we need it more money. 10 billion is cute because that's just the economic impact.

That's not the impact to that human aspect that the coast place and climate crisis will have on our communities. So I think it's important to look at the economic impact. That's the name somewhere. That's the name of the Select Committee. But I really appreciate you, Ramon, bringing that human impact and that spiritual impact.

Because the economic is just the proxy for the rest. Right. Like all of our infrastructure doesn't mean anything if we're not using it to connect with other people. Because then I'm not sure what life is for. Right. Anyways, that was my philosophical moment for the day.

I want to thank Mr. Chaires and Ms. Fain for your answers and for participating today. Like to call up the next panel. Yeah. Well, now I have our final panel mitigation efforts for. And so now we have some hope. Like this is what we're supposed to do. We first had it's a disaster.

Then we had let's remember humanity and now we have hope. That's what I'm looking to you both for. We have Philip Gibbons, who's the Program Manager for Energy and Sustainability with the Port of San Diego, and Jay Clemens, Director of Economic and Works Force Development with lTC. Thank you. I'll try to give you a two minute warning.

So occasionally look over this way. Assemblymember Coloza and Assemblymember Alvarez had to go. I want to thank them both for being here. And with that, you may begin. Mr. Gibbons, you may begin.

All right, thank you. Can you hear me okay? Yes, it sounds like it. Well, thank you, Chair. And to the other Members of the Committee, we can go to the next slide. Oh, I get to do that. Okay.

Just to orient you to the port, the land that we manage, what we call the tidelands areas, or thin strip of land around San Diego Bay and within the bay itself. The orange is the land area. The two shades of blue are the submerged lands. Together we call these the tidelands. These are state lands.

We manage 34 miles of the bay, over 14,000 acres. The port is a trustee of these lands. So again, these are state tideland areas. We manage them for the people of California. On behalf of you all. Our goals and mission is to promote maritime commerce, recreation, fisheries, environmental stewardship, public safety around San Diego Bay.

We do not collect any taxes. All the revenue that the port gets is from the businesses that exist at the port. We are an economic engine for the region. $13 billion and 71,000 jobs are supported by the port regionally in San Diego. County. We're also an environmental champion for the bay and it's tide lens.

We've been looking at climate change for quite some time. We look at this as a responsibility of the Port of San Diego to assess the risk that climate change may bring. So we focus on mitigation, which is reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We have a climate action plan.

We're committed to reducing our environmental impact, climate adaptation or preparing for the impacts of climate change. And then carbon sequestration, which is kind of a new area for us, is looking at the possibility of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through natural solutions and perhaps new technologies. So we're going to focus on the port's climate adaptation efforts.

Of course, today in sea level rise. And I don't want to shed any more doom and gloom, so sorry, and I won't. But I will point out that there are some areas of the bay that do flood today. So the top two pictures, there are areas that are flooded during king tide events.

Just the top left picture, I'll point that one out specifically, since we've been sort of talking about this. This is an area over in Shelter island that gets flooded during the highest high tides of the year. It's just a small little intersection there. There's not overtopping of the seawall that's nearby.

It's actually coming up through the storm drain system. So it's sort of back flooding. So we don't see it. You know, rushing over the bulkhead over there, it's coming up through the storm drain system. And so that's a risk that's not well mapped at all, really.

The bottom two pictures there were recorded in 2015, I believe, during one of the El Nino events that we had. The highest water level in San Diego Bay was recorded in November 2015 or so. And we had some damage. You can see the bottom picture there, where Imperial beach, the bikeway there was flooded.

And then a park on the bottom right there, Chula Vista park was damaged due to flooding as well. So it does occur today. If this is all that happened, okay, we could live with that. But the future does look bleak, as we've seen before. So you've already seen sort of these maps.

The Port of San Diego did assess its vulnerabilities to long term sea level rise in San Diego Bay. We did this pursuant to Assembly Bill 691. We finished our analysis, gave this report to the State Lands Commission. But I just wanted to show this is a 4.9 foot of sea level rise in San Diego Bay.

This is based on the old science, actually, when this may occur. So this may occur actually later than 2100, depending on our emissions scenario that Dr. Merrifield was showing. This is not what we want to happen around San Diego Bay. The orange outline there is the ports jurisdiction again.

And you could see those dark purples and light purples. This would be inundation or temporary flooding that might occur at the end of the century with this level of sea level rise. That would make operations at the port really, really bad. Right. We don't want to see this.

It'd be like 50% of the linear length of roads would be flooded. 50% of the building stock would have some form of impact. 70% of the acreage of our marine terminals could be impacted, of our parks could be impacted. Again, this is what we're trying to avoid.

We're trying to, hopefully, as we do projects at the port, we start to lift ourselves out of this flooding. So we like to say this is tomorrow's flood on today's landscape. And so our idea is to change the landscape. Bays and ports and harbors and working waterfronts are really unique places.

We're very constrained in our ability to move anywhere. I just wanted to point out that we do have a variety of shorelines around San Diego Bay. Armored shoreline. 70% of the bay is armored in some form or fashion.

But we do have some natural areas down in the south part of the bay and even in the north part of the bay as well as some beach areas. Just to visualize how we're looking at solutions for sea level rise, I wanted to put up this graphic. We do believe there's not a one size fits all.

So we talked about managed retreat. We can't really retreat from the water. We're a port. But there's things that we can do. There are policy instruments that we have to move slightly back from the bay design standards for elevation.

There are nature based solutions which we're going to talk about today, like living breakwaters or terraced wetlands and restoration. As a port, as a harbor, there absolutely will be need for armoring. However, we need bulkheads, we need revetment in places so that we don't have erosion along the shoreline.

So I really wanted to focus on our nature based solutions though. This is a really interesting work that we've been involved with for a number of years. The state is very focused on nature based solutions. It's been a long goal of the port to enhance the ecological value of our shoreline.

We've been thinking about this for quite some time at the port and over the past 10 years or so we've actually been able to deploy projects that I wanted to show to you. So the first is a project that's located over in Harbor Island. Harbor island.

This is the northern part of San Diego Bay, across from the airport. We went into partnership with a firm called Econcrete to place these bioenhancing tide pools into the revetment. So we took out the revetment, the rock that's along that shoreline, and put in these tide pool structures and Econcrete, the company that develops them. Two minutes.

Did you say no? Okay. I thought you signaled at me three minutes. Okay, I'll go quickly. Then. They adjust like the ph and the cement so that it can attract wildlife better. And they put this texture of a tide pool there and you could see the results on the left. That's when they went in to the shoreline.

And then over 40 months or so of implementation, you can see the diversity of life that's now living in that area. So you know, monitoring a showcase like 40 species of, or 60 species of, you know, critters that are living in this area. The biodiversity, the biomass of this is greater than the surrounding revetment that's there.

You can see both above water and below water. It's really fantastic what this project has been able to do. This is very small, however. This is like literally 150ft along a shoreline. We have 34 miles of shoreline. 70% of that's armored in some way. So it's a lot more work to be done to do something like this.

The other project I wanted to highlight is our living shoreline project down in the south part of San Diego Bay near the Chula Vista Wildlife Wetland Area Reserve down there. So we put in this living shoreline to see how it could attract native oysters to these clusters of these clusters that we built.

They were actually built with crushed oysters and that attracts the Olympian oyster to the surface. So we wanted to see if it would work to attract those oysters. It does. We also wanted to see if it would reduce the wave activity and erosion of the nearby shoreline that's still being studied right now.

Some of our researchers are saying maybe if we put them in a different construction kind of area, it might do a little bit better. So we're learning from this type of project. It is a pilot project. It did take multiple years to permit and only probably a few months to put in the ground.

And so we've heard today about streamlined permitting is important. So that's definitely a topic that we're concerned about as well. This is my last slide. So just in closing, I wanted to say that, you know, we're grateful to be in the State of California.

There's great scientific leadership here, great guidance for jurisdictions like ours to follow when we're looking at sea level rise. We're committed to partner with folks like Scripps to deploy new instrumentation in the bay to understand the wave dynamics and the physical processes that are occurring so that we can evaluate long term sea level rise.

We're also working with companies through our Blue Economy incubator to deploy new sensor technology. I always like to leave people with thinking about the importance of ports. You know, we're fortunate in California that we do have a network of ports and harbors and working waterfronts. They absolutely contribute to California being the fourth largest economy in the world.

But we can't really move back, right? So we're going to stay in place. We have to protect in place. We have to think of multiple solutions to help preserve these types of waterfronts. And lastly, you've heard this already today, but streamlined permitting is really important.

We can't think of these nature based solutions just as a protective device because they really are natural. Even if it's a hybrid solution that's man made nature, they're important for our long term success. So thank you.

I assume I might. Yes, great. Am I already on? No?

Yes.

Yes.

I'm on.

Thank you. Great. I'll give it a second here for the slides to load, and I know I am standing between you and lunch. I will try to keep this as upbeat as I can.

I really am going to focus on the solutions, the hopeful side of this discussion, I hope. Again, I'm the Director of Economic and Workforce Development at an organization called AltaSea at the Port of LA. So, love sitting here with our counterparts at San Diego. So, AltaSea is a blue economy—AltaSea is a blue economy hub.

I know how microphones work, that you have to be close. What I mean—what we mean—by the blue economy is essentially the corollary to the green economy for the ocean. So, we're talking about sustainable industries that leverage the ocean. Think decarbonizing maritime shipping, ocean farming, resilient infrastructure, marine carbon dioxide removal—I'll share a bit more about that—as well as ocean exploration, sensing, and monitoring.

So, when we say the blue economy, again, just kind of think green economy, but for the ocean. This is AltaSea's campus in the Port of Los Angeles. So, AltaSea is an independent entity. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

We lease this campus from the Port of Los Angeles, essentially zero cost, in a public private partnership, and then it is AltaSea's job to—we had to refurbish these 100-year-old warehouses. We've completed refurbishing three or four of them. We'll break ground on the fourth next year.

But the idea is that we can then turn around and rent out the space on this campus to researchers, educators, businesses who are advancing the blue economy.

And then on top of managing the campus, we lay our programming to support research, so the science to support businesses, to support education of in the regional community and beyond, to sustainably, equitably grow the blue economy. That is our overarching mission. It's a large one.

A lot of my work also includes some public advocacy and supporting policies that will advance the blue economy. We're very disappointed to see the outcome with AB 399. I know, I know. Got to keep at it.

And I will say quickly before everyone glazes over because again, I know I'm the last speaker today, we talked a little bit how there's not enough public funding. This came up a lot, right? Money, money, money. We need more money to solve these solutions. And it's certainly true.

The state government alone can't fund all of the work that it's going to take to beat climate change, to make our coastal areas resilient. But what the state can do is really strategically deploy that public funding to organizations that can then draw in more private capital, right, to solve these solutions. There is plenty of money out there.

It's a question of values, as was mentioned earlier, and doing the hard work staying to beating climate change even in the face of headwinds, and knowing that absolutely, we can't rely on our state to do it all.

We have to figure out how to all come together, use public funding most strategically, and then draw in more private support. So, that's my quick spiel on that point.

And now, I want to turn to highlighting some of the partners that AltaSea works with and some of the solutions that they have come up with and that we're helping to help to amplify, again, to make our coasts more resilient and also, quite simply, to reduce emissions, one of the most important ways we can combat sea level rise.

So, first, I want to start with an organization called Kelp Ark. They actually spun out of the University of Southern California. They are a nonprofit that is actually creating a seed bank for native Pacific seaweed species that are, quite frankly, under attack with ocean acidification and ocean warming.

It has put a lot of stress on many native seaweed species, and this is a huge loss because these plants essentially act as forests for all sorts of marine life to live in and thrive in.

And so, when we lose our kelp forests, it's quite devastating to marine habitats and then also can impact the severity of storm surges, et cetera, if we don't have these thriving marine ecosystems just off our coast. So, this group is working, again, to create a nonprofit seed bank.

The idea of doing this work as a nonprofit is, of course, to make sure that the seeds are accessible. They do not want to further inhibit coastal restoration. They want to support it. They want to grow.

They've also done very strategic breeding to find strains of seaweed naturally that are more resilient to ocean acidification and ocean warming, and again, track those seeds, make them available to the public.

They've also, in the face of all the LA wildfires earlier this year, the fires, for better or worse, were followed by storms, and that created significant runoff of quite a bit of toxic material into our LA coastal area, and that impacted seaweed that was growing there.

So, they acted very quickly, in partnership with a number of local organizations to go and collect as many specimens as possible to preserve them for restoration projects when we're ready to do that. Next, I want to talk—I guess concrete is the theme of the day in ports here.

So, one of our, really our star partners, is a startup called Sperra, using technology, again, that actually came out of University of Southern California to do 3D concrete printing of some of the coastal infrastructure that Phil already highlighted that can be useful in creating more resilient coastlines.

The innovation, of course, of their work is using 3D concrete printing. It's quite cool. They have an R&D space at our campus. We get to see the robotic arm in action from time to time.

They are, again, thinking not just about what the physical needs are for coastal resilience, but also the labor, the workforce, the supply chain. 3D printing, some of this technology actually, can keep jobs local rather than having to outsource the creation of certain concrete pieces of infrastructure, and can also be really agile, right?

With a robot, you can just reprogram it to print a different shape rather than having to create new molds and new casting.

And so, there's sustainability element, not just in less resources being used, but also being able to better leverage local labor and local supplies for the creation of that concrete infrastructure, which again, can range from anchors and moors, particularly as offshore wind, floating offshore wind, is coming to California.

I have to believe that it's coming despite actions at the federal level and then all the way over to the kind of the other side of the spectrum, the kind of the coastal wildlife restoration that these concrete infrastructures can support as well. All right, so now I want to jump into the topic of marine carbon dioxide removal.

So, of course, there are plants living in the ocean, right? They need carbon dioxide to thrive. The oceans have always absorbed CO2. The problem is the amount of CO2 that is now currently absorbed is causing ocean acidification. It's destroying wildlife that lives in the ocean and the warming of the atmosphere as well is also causing ocean warming.

At the same time. It's a pretty catastrophic scenario for much of marine life. And of course, our lives depend on marine life in many ways, so this impacts life on land as well. There are a number of groups that are finding technical solutions to reduce the level of carbon in the ocean.

We talked about some of the nature-based solutions which are also just important, just as important. I think we're really at a space where we need to be exploring all possible solutions to get the level of CO2 in the ocean back to a healthy level.

So, Captura is one of these groups that, more or less, simply uses electricity to remove streams of CO2 from seawater and then just returns that more alkaline seawater back to the ocean where it can then draw down more carbon from the atmosphere and to support the ocean, hopefully, again, being able to restore those healthy levels of CO2.

Equatic is a similar group. They have a few extra steps though in their process. A really fascinating space. I don't know if anyone's done a deep dive on marine carbon dioxide removal. There are a number of different technologies being explored in the space. This is really just one, the use of electrolysis to remove CO2 from the ocean.

Equatic, their process actually also produces green hydrogen as a byproduct when they're using clean energy to run their systems, and of course, again, in this landscape, developing in the ocean is expensive, right? It's hard, it's capital intensive.

So, this group has innovated to try to find multiple revenue streams to support their work and is having kind of dual impacts of reducing emissions through the use of green hydrogen and, you know, in fuel cells, as well as, again, removing CO2 from the ocean at the same time.

All right, I believe this is the last project I'm going to highlight. This group is called Eco Wave Power. We're really thrilled to be home to their first U.S. demonstration, which also happens to be the first U.S. demonstration of an onshore wave energy device.

More or less, this technology just includes bobs that move up and down with wave movements, can be attached to existing infrastructure, and that wave movement then can compress air or create hydraulic pressure that can then be released to spin a turbine when the energy is needed. So, both a combination of non-battery energy storage, as well as clean energy production.

We think wave energy has extraordinary potential. We're waiting, actually, on a report from the California Energy Commission—hopefully later this year—to include policy recommendations to advance this technology within the state. And I will leave it there. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Very well done, and we're still like 30 minutes over, but that's fine. I think it was fascinating and you gave us hope. So, I want to ask three questions. I'm going to ask it all at once and you can answer each answer, whatever parts are relevant to you.

What areas of research—so, the most potential—for assisting in mitigating the impacts of climate change and sea level rise? Two, how are you addressing equity in all of your work? And how can the state ensure that we're aggressively and proactively mitigating and creating a more resilient coastline?

Would you like to start?

Sure, I can kind of start there. On the mitigation side, you know, I think, you know, we're doing our best, at least at the port, to reduce emissions. That's like Mark showed earlier, more emissions, more sea level rise into the future. We want to keep that as low as possible.

But sea level rise will continue, of course, so we're focused at the Port to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, lower that long term warming. Equity is a very important part of the port, both on pollution levels, as well as when we think about sea level rise.

So, our main plan right now, at least for reducing pollution at the Port, is our maritime clean air strategy and has a vision of health equity for all, recognizing that the people that live next to the port in Barrio Logan and Sherman Heights, et cetera, do suffer a lot of pollution.

And so, we recognize that and we're focused a lot of funding, 227 million so far over the last four or five years, to dedicate to electrification that could reduce emissions and hopefully help them. Now, interestingly too, those communities are adjacent to our working waterfront.

So, when we think about protecting the working waterfront with structural solutions, that will also help to help the community behind them too, when it comes to flooding that could occur in the future. As far as aggressive tactics, again, I'll go back to streamline permitting.

I think we need to find a way that we can get these projects into the ground a lot faster because we all want them, right? I mean this is the thing that we want to do at the state—nature-based solutions. We shouldn't have to take so long to do them. That's my answer.

Great. So, one, yeah, I think it just has to, once again, be getting emissions down is probably the most promising area in this space.

And we're seeing the Port of LA just continue to keep its commitments to clean air, reducing both pollution and carbon emissions from, from maritime activities, which, you know, have historically deeply harmed the communities around, particularly around the Port of Los Angeles. I won't speak for the Port of San Diego.

And so, equity is deeply embedded in AltaSea's work, knowing this history of how the communities around the Port of LA have been impacted.

So, there are a few different ways that our work centers that. We have partnered with local community colleges to create workforce development programs that basically will create tailored curriculums that can be completed just within two years at a community college to prepare someone for a decent paying blue economy job at the end of it.

And Altasea's role has been helping to bring industry to the table to speak with faculty to again make sure these curriculums are purpose-designed and lead to real jobs at the end. That's about a two-year-old program. There's already a certificate program created for aquaculture. They're in the process of creating one for hydrogen safety.

Hydrogen being, again, a really promising alternative, zero emissions fuel for hard to abate industries. And on top of that, then AltaSea provides internships to students, many that participate in these workforce development programs.

But others, we've partnered with Cal State Dominguez Hills, Long Beach Community College, to place their fellows, the state program, Corps to Career, which I guess is under California Volunteers, recently funded. We host a number of fellows from that program.

So, we've specifically designed our internship program to be accessible to the communities in our area, again, who need these opportunities most. And yeah, I guess we can't say enough about streamlining the permitting process.

But I would also say, again, you know, for California to continue its commitments to regulate, again, the industries that are most polluting, I'm thinking cap and trade, low carbon fuel standard, et cetera, continuing to stay the course on that regulation is key as well, as I would say again, kind of strategically deploying public funding where it can be most well leveraged to draw in more private capital

So, I'm thinking innovation funds, right, for the technologies and the projects that are coming online to, again, reduce carbon emissions, create more sustainable coastal infrastructure.

It can take, you know, a relatively small amount of public money to de-risk those technologies and draw in, you know, exponentially more private capital. So, I'll stop there.

Well, thank you, both of you, Mr. Gibbons and Ms. Clemons, for your answers and participation today. I want to move to public comment. So, you're done. Thank you. Move to public comment. Please approach the mic with your name, affiliation, and comment. You'll be limited to two minutes and you're between us and lunch. But we have a microphone.

I think it's on. We have the micro—I don't know when it appeared, it suddenly appeared. Wasn't there for surge.

Hi, I'm Jim Pugh from the San Diego Bird Alliance and one of the things that wasn't mentioned in impacts of sea level rise, is when you go to a wetland, you can see there's a band of vegetation you can see during low tide, and you can't see during high tide.

That band of vegetation is incredibly important for wildlife, for water quality improvement, and for carbon sequestration. As you can see in 25 years, those are usually in really shallow plains. Most of those will be gone in Southern California in 25 years. And so, a significant value of our wetlands will be lost.

We'll have a lot more open water. But we don't have this habitat that enhances the value of the open water.

And this fish and wildlife service did a study in Seal Beach where they assessed one approach, that of spraying muddy water on a wetland over a very, very long period of time and seeing if they could lift it up. It was called thin film augmentation. That study was done, the final report, no one in Southern California has taken any action on it.

When you Google, there has been some studies and research on the East Coast, but I found nothing else on the West Coast. This is a really serious problem.

There needs to be at least a Southern California wide and maybe it's universal enough for the whole coast to look at possible approaches, look at which ones would work, which ones would have unintended consequences, do long term studies on them, and then assemble coherent plans that people can take to each wetland and see which element of those plans would actually work for that wetland.

And otherwise, we're going to lose this incredible value in 25 years and we're doing absolutely nothing about it. So, I do wish that this were a massive state program. The regional board seems to understand a lot of this. They might be a good place to start, but we have so many universities that might work too.

So, I just hope somebody will take action on this. Thank you.

Hi, Assemblymember. Thank you so much for hosting this really timely and important conversation today. My name is Lesley Handa. I'm also with the San Diego Bird Alliance and Society for Conservation GIS, San Diego Chapter.

Quick note, I'm a geographer in my day job, to improve the decision-making process at the statewide level, in terms of prioritization of which utilities should be tackled first, I strongly encourage local municipalities to invest in maintaining in their GIS data at the Public Works Department. GIS data stands for Geographic Information Systems.

It's a digital representation of the real world, and if you use this to track utility information, you can just pull all that information together and kind of prioritize, you know, the age of a lot of our infrastructure.

And moving on to the conservation side, as more than 30% of our bird population have declined since the 1970s in the United States, California is a biodiversity hotspot, and locally to San Diego and Los Angeles counties, we have more bird species documented in these counties compared to the rest of the United States.

We have a lot of work to do in terms of planning for climate change because wildlife and habitats will be affected.

Nature-based solutions to address climate change mitigation will have long term benefits, especially with blue carbon habitats, such as wetlands, as these areas provide fish nurseries, help filter pollution from runoff to clean our water, and help mitigate for sea level rise in our communities.

So, as we depend on natural habitats for our survival, along with wildlife, I hope that planning will prioritize conserving these habitats. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair, and I just appreciate you guys bringing this to San Diego and the rest of the Committee for joining us here in Coronado. I just wanted to touch on a little bit of what—oh, excuse me. I'm the Director—my name is Waylon Matson.

I'm the Director of Four Walls International, a local environmental nonprofit here in the region. I just wanted to touch on some of the interconnectedness between climate adaptation and what—and the mitigation efforts that we struggle with here, especially around stormwater.

And I appreciate all the words around streamlining permitting, but also the operations and maintenance and the actual costs in the deferred maintenance, especially in light of these intensified storm events. And just, you know, we—Prop 4 is a great step in this direction.

But one thing that I think from our speaker, Ms. Fain, in the Bay Area's example, is how we could recreate something like the San Francisco Restoration Authority here, where we actually have local managing power and resources to then deploy. And another, I think, big step forward is how we're looking at innovating around insurance.

And there's a great example in the Bay through the UC Davis example, around how we can create parametric insurance options for some of these coastal and surrounding areas. So, thank you very much again.

Assemblymember, thank you very much for putting this excellent panel together. Wilt Sang. I'm speaking as an individual, as a constituent of Assembly District 77. You know, again, I learned a lot today from all the panel members and it shocked me a little bit.

I mean, knowing that the inflection point between sea level rise is going to potentiate pretty soon, either 25 years or in a certain temperature. What I did want to bring up, because I heard a lot of economic issues regarding climate change, but really, from my point as a physician, is really the human toll.

When the sea level rises and the sewers back up, we see the after effects of kids with GI issues and even climate issues.

So, I want to make sure that that's placed in mind because I think the economic damage is not just going to be quarter of a billion, it's going to be much more and it's going to be paid in human lives. So, thank you for bringing this up.

Thank you. That was a good point. Any further public comment? One more? Yeah, no, please do. My first sea level rise hearing, I only allowed 15 minutes and gave everybody 30 seconds and I was told never to do that again. So, I will not limit public comment.

Mary Barabia. I'm a resident of Coronado, but specifically, four miles south of the Coronado Cays on State Route 75.

So, we have had many sea level rise reports coming from all the different parts that impact our neighborhood down there and that, you know, we have the Port of San Diego, we have the City of Coronado's, we have, let's see, the navies for their coastal campuses.

We have Caltrans, which said that Caltrans has one of the most, that that road, SR 75, is one of the most highly impacted transportation systems in all of California.

I'm waiting to see if you could, maybe you could find out, if the state parks have finished theirs and that is the last section of Silver Strand on both sides of State Route 75. And most of my frustration is that we have reports and we don't have anybody addressing the actual practical things that come from these reports.

We have storm drains, we have culverts. You know, there's a lot of things that will impact transportation between Imperial Beach and the City of Coronado. And the other off ramp for that is the bridge. So, getting a little tired, you know. Okay, thank you.

Okay. Any more public comment? One more? You're welcome to line up so I can assess how much public comment we have.

Thank you. My name is Tom Jeter. I'm a simple Coronado resident, having been born here in 1935. I must have a scientific background and appreciate the first panelists and all their scientific arguments and projections. However, my concern is that hardcore Republicans will simply reject those scientific arguments out of hand.

I would like to be proven wrong on this concern. Will anybody here tell me I'm wrong on this?

Thank you. Any other public comment? Okay. I want to thank you to Assemblymember Alvarez and Assemblymember Caloza who participated in the hearing today and the members of public who tuned in and attended the hearing. I want to thank you to all of our panelists and their witnesses for sharing your knowledge with us, with our Committee.

In addition, I would like to thank Assembly Members—the Assembly sergeants—Assembly Television, our Legislative Data Center AB team, and the staff here at the Coronado Public Library for helping this hearing run very smoothly. I found this conversation very illuminating. I have many pages of notes, some as a Legislator, one as a mom.

And you know, it's important to remember that California does take early action. We are leading the country and the world. The work we're doing with Scripps on Bluff Claps is the leading in the entire world on this. Our port—love all our ports in California.

Our port is leading on reducing emissions and coming up with nature-based solutions. California leads in the blue carbon space. Dave, your—I took notes—I'm going to have to follow up on you because I understood half of it, but I'll understand it by January. I want to thank everybody for taking us on this journey.

It's actually a hard Committee to run because you start out and you always see those projections, and I'll tell you, in six years of chairing this Committee, those projections haven't gotten any better. The impacts are getting worse. And we talk about the impacts, as I said earlier, about economic impacts. There are health impacts, as Dr. Sang said.

There's human impacts, as Ramon shared with us. There are impacts to equity, to housing, to our daily lives. So, it's a hard Committee to do because you start out and you're like, it's doom and gloom every time we do this Committee.

The first panel is always like, we have to start out with the science and the projections aren't pretty and the impacts are large and they're costly to human life, human connection, and our economy.

And then you come out—and I want to thank our last panelists—with hope because California is also a leader in the world on innovation and if anybody can solve this, it will be us. So, thank you again for joining us for the Select Committee on Sea Level Rise in the California Economy. And with that, this meeting is adjourned.