Elevate San Rafael to be Presented to City Council

The Resilient By Design Bay Area Challenge is a year-long, collaborative effort that aims to strengthen multiple Bay Area shoreline locations in resistance to sea level rise and severe flooding. Ten teams were selected to research and design solutions. In San Rafael, Bionic Team is working hard for waterfront resilience.

Bionic Team generated a wealth of information about the impacts of flooding and sea level rise on Central and East San Rafael’s valley. They developed a number of design ideas which can provide a basis for a future in-depth, community-based design process.

In support of Bionic Team, we at Resilient Shore have worked collaboratively with Shore Up Marin and the Canal Welcome Center. We helped to educate local community groups and organizations about flooding, sea level rise, and seismic risk. Community participants ware encouraged to share their needs and concerns with the team. We were fortunate to have support from local organizations:

San Rafael City Public Works, Fire and Community Development staff provided technical input
Marin County participated in sharing the Bay Wave vulnerability assessment
Studio for Urban Projects organized well-attended walking, bicycle and kayak tours of the San Rafael waterfront area
The San Rafael community joined us at a Flood Fair at Pickleweed Park as well as several meetings with local organizations and community groups

On Monday, August 20th, Bionic Team will present their final design “Elevate San Rafael” to the San Rafael City Council. This is the culmination of over a year of research, analysis and design by the multidisciplinary team.

You’re cordially invited to attend Bionic’s presentation at the City Council meeting. It will be an exciting opportunity to view the presentation and contribute to the conversation. We hope to see you there!

Participants in the Living with Water Bike the Canal Tour at Pickleweed Park May 12, 2018. This was one of the community activities associated with the Rebuild by Design “Elevate San Rafael” project.

Celebrating Our Shore

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Shore News. This monthly newsletter is dedicated to the understanding and enhancement of San Rafael’s bay shore. It provides a forum to bring timely issues, interesting stories, and relevant activities and events to our readers. Our focus is to learn from community groups, local interests and technical experts and share what we have learned. From this shared knowledge we are building a community coalition to work with the City and resource agencies to prepare a Shore Plan.

There are few people who recognize the extent and variety of our truly remarkable shore. Many of us go about our daily lives unaware of the amazing places along what is arguably the most diverse and accessible shore reach in the Bay Area. In spite of this, people are frequently on the shore, Gallinas Creek, and the San Rafael Canal estuaries engaged in many different activities.

We aim to expand community knowledge and appreciation of this remarkable resource by running stories about the different things people are doing on and around the shore. We will also share stories about local history and the cultural evidence it has left on the landscape. Illuminating threats to the shore including habitat, critical infrastructure, public services and vulnerable communities and identifying potential solutions is a major part of our beat.

Our success providing timely and interesting content is dependent on your continued interest and willingness to share your own shore and waterfront stories. We would like to invite you to share with us and our readers your experiences. We want to hear about your encounters with habitat conservation and restoration, public recreation and access, maritime enterprise, flood risk and vulnerable communities and businesses, emergency preparedness, fuel management, and invasive species. Please email us with your stories!

Resilient Shore is a team of biologists, engineers, flood risk managers, town and landscape scale planners and other experts. We are a community supported non-profit project. Help us make our shore better and more resilient by making tax deductible contributions to Resilient Shore through MarinLINK our fiscal sponsor. Let’s make our shore world class.

Together we can do this!

Jeff Rhoads
Executive Director
Resilient Shore

FEATURED SUPPORTER

For over 30 years, Huffman-Broadway Group, Inc. (HBG) has been providing environmental regulatory permitting and related services for projects that unavoidably impact natural resources protected by federal, state, and local environmental laws and regulations. These protected resources include wetlands, streams and adjacent riparian areas, other aquatic habitats, and listed special status species and their habitats.

HBG was founded in 1984 by Terry Huffman, PhD. While Dr. Huffman was the Chief Wetland Scientist for the US Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), he developed the Corps/US EPA wetlands definition and the technical criteria for the three-parameter methodology used to determine wetland boundaries. This methodology drives the wetland delineation and permitting processes of these agencies today.HBG has delineated project sites and provided comprehensive permitting services for projects as diverse as single family residential developments, drainage and levee maintenance, wetland and other aquatic resource and endangered species habitat establishment and restoration, solar farms, a high-speed rail route in southern California, and a 91,000-acre expansion of solar evaporation ponds on the Great Salt Lake. We tailor site-specific permitting strategies based on our technical know-how and regulatory expertise, experience conducting supporting biological and ecological studies, and long-term familiarity with regulatory agency policies and their authorization processes throughout the US. Many of our employees are former Corps, US EPA, NOAA Fisheries, and California Department of Fish and Wildlife environmental regulatory staff.

HBG is a certified Veteran Owned Small Business and a California Certified Small Business Enterprise.

ABOUT RESILIENT SHORE

We’re a non-profit project dedicated to working with local people and businesses, listening to their concerns, and together creating the best-of-all-worlds flood mitigation plan that benefits everybody.

UPCOMING EVENTS

San Rafael City Council Meeting
August 20, 7pm

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