Richardson Bay agency accepts $5 million in grants for debris, eelgrass work

Nearly $5 million in grant money is bound for Richardson Bay to pull decades of sunken debris off the bay floor and replant the eelgrass beds that anchors tore up.

The Richardson Bay Regional Agency board accepted the two awards Sept. 10 at Tiburon Town Hall. It adopted both on its consent calendar in a 3-0 vote with Marin County Supervisor Stephanie Moulton-Peters absent. Neither drew discussion or public comment, and the meeting ran 13 minutes.

The larger award, $3,051,000, comes from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s San Francisco Bay Water Quality Improvement Fund and was signed Aug. 13. The agency had asked for $3.95 million.

Under the award, crews are to remove at least 700 tons of marine debris — anchors, chain, sunken boats, batteries and plastics left by decades of anchoring. They are also to restore six acres of eelgrass, survey the bay floor and publish maps of what is down there. The EPA reimburses the agency as it spends, through May 31, 2029. A $200,000 share goes to Sausalito, which dropped out of the agency in May 2017, to measure results and handle outreach.

The second award, $1.9 million from the San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority, pays for a further six acres inside the bay’s eelgrass protection zone, about two years of monitoring and one or two paid internships for Marin students. The agency asked $3.65 million over three years and scaled the work down on the authority’s guidance.

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