Sebastopol to consider Laguna de Santa Rosa contract

The Sebastopol City Council will be asked Tuesday night to approve an $89,200 contract to help update and enhance management of more than 80 acres of city-owned property known collectively as the Laguna de Santa Rosa Wetlands Preserve.

The goal of the new management plan, first and foremost, is to ensure adequate protection of sensitive wildlife habitat and other environmental resources that are central to efforts to preserve and restore the expansive waterway.

But city officials also hope to identify opportunities to better link to one another the six properties that make up the preserve with the city’s urban core and with potential users. Officials hope to create a more cohesive identity, perhaps aided by uniform signs and more trails.

“There are some connectivity problems and challenges with these different properties and how they can be knit together and at least identified in some common way,” said city Planning Director Kenyon Webster.

Additional trail development would fit nicely with ongoing community discussion about increased walkability and connectivity between downtown, the new Barlow commercial center and the Laguna Preserve. A multiuse trail on the east side of the channel, opened two years ago by Sonoma County Regional Parks, is very popular.

Heavy usage of the county trail, Webster said, “is an example of the power of appropriate signs and improvements that tell people, ‘Yes, this is a park; you can use it, it’s here, and it’s something noteworthy.”

But the management plan, while providing opportunities to enhance the experience of visitors, also was necessary in order for the city to meet its obligation to conservation partners and oversight agencies after an episode early last year that raised the ire of the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District, the nonprofit Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation and the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, Kenyon said.

In that instance, volunteers conducting a city-authorized cleanup of an area near the Joe Rodota Trail cleared out non-native blackberry bushes, resulting in erosion and other problems for a nearby creek. That incident provoked demands for a city-funded management plan to prevent future such issues.

Mayor Robert Jacob said the goal was a balanced plan that would enhance public use of the area while managing wildlife habitat, even if that meant leaving portions off-limits to humans.

The Laguna, a 14-mile-long freshwater wetland complex that runs from the Russian River in Forestville to the community of Cotati, drains a 254-square-mile watershed covering much of central Sonoma County and provides habitat to a diverse array of bird, mammal and fish species.

It abuts Sebastopol on the city’s eastern edge, crossing Highway 12 at the gateway to town, spanned by a modest bridge.

Long-abused and altered by humans until awareness of its ecological value surfaced about three decades ago, it is now at the center of strategies aimed at restoring and conserving what remains.

The city developed a master plan in the early 1990s for that portion of the Laguna that is in Sebastopol’s sphere of influence, and created the preserve in 1998, though it has been added to since.

It includes land on the north end of Morris Street, around the Laguna Youth Park and the Sebastopol Community Center, part of a 13-acre parcel that was once the site of the city’s waste-treatment facility, off the west side of the Laguna channel. Another chunk of property to the south connects Morris Street with the Laguna’s west bank.

A large expanse to the east of the channel includes the 59-acre Meadowlark Field, once a waste-disposal site for an apple processing plant and now a 1.8-mile multiuse trail between Highway 12 and Occidental Road.

Also part of the preserve is an oft-overlooked patch of wetland under 10 acres in size south of Highway 12 near the Joe Rodota Trail along the old Southern Pacific Railroad now known as the Railroad Forest, and a one-time seasonal campground on the south side of the Highway 12 bridge that is now Tomodachi Park.

The management plan is to include a complete assessment of the restoration, conservation and maintenance needs, as well as regulatory and other restrictions, and generally establish policies, procedures and opportunities for improvement.

The city budgeted $90,000 for the job and has screened four applicants. City staff has recommended the contract go to Prunuske Chatham, a local firm.

Development of the plan is expected to take seven months.

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.