Conservancy Wins $441,000 Grant, Seeks More : Private Group to Restore, Maintain Wetlands

Degraded coastal wetlands in Huntington Beach now will be restored and maintained by a local environmental group, thanks to a $441,000 grant awarded recently by the state Coastal Conservancy.

The Huntington Beach Wetlands Conservancy, a nonprofit land trust formed two years ago by local residents, is also hoping for even more grant money for its goal of upgrading a total of 150 acres of coastal wetlands between Beach Boulevard and the mouth of the Santa Ana River on the inland side of Pacific Coast Highway.

“We’re going to try to get it to look as close as possible to how it looked at the turn of the century, when the Pacific Coast Highway was built and the Santa Ana River was diked,” said Gordon Smith, a member of the Wetlands Conservancy board of directors.

The $441,000 grant is a beginning, Smith said. It will help pay for excavation, filling and “contour” work on 27 acres of land, Smith said, and about $110,000 of the money will be used to buy a 17-acre parcel of land from the state Department of Transportation. The state agency bought the land decades ago with plans to build a freeway there, but it was never built.

Dredging is scheduled to begin this fall on wetlands between Brookhurst Street and the Santa Ana River. But Smith said Wetlands Conservancy members and other volunteers will begin other projects in the next month.

Two or three weeks from now, Smith said, cord grass, a rare and yet “key” species in coastal wetlands, will be transplanted from the Upper Newport Bay to the Huntington Beach site.

“Cord grass is very hard to come by, and that will be just one of the things we will be doing,” Smith added.

(The 150 acres to be restored are up the coast from the Bolsa Chica wetlands, which are in the area of Golden West Street and Warner Avenue.)

The restoration project is expected to take three years to complete, and it will be done in conjunction with other agencies that own land within this wetlands system, Smith said.

“The county will upgrade its flood control protection for the area, Caltrans will improve the Pacific Coast Highway, and the sanitation district will improve the appearance of its facility immediately to the north with additional landscaping,” Smith said.

A new bridge over the Santa Ana River will be built, along with a new channel to the ocean, “which will serve to drain the Talbert channel and allow flushing for the wetlands,” Smith said.

The Huntington Beach Wetlands Conservancy, according to Smith, is the first private organization in California to undertake ownership, restoration and management of a coastal wetlands area.

The grant money, Smith said, comes from the sales of government bonds that were authorized by voters for conservation programs.

Ironically, the local conservancy is being given bond revenue from the state to buy land from a state agency, Caltrans, which owns the most acreage. Another landowner in the area is Southern California Edison, which has property next to its power plant near Newland Street, Smith said.

“The idea is, we will take ownership (parcel by parcel) and then manage the wetlands in perpetuity,” Smith said.

The conservancy last year was awarded a $40,000 grant from the state Coastal Conservancy for development of a restoration plan, which is the basis for the new grant.