California wine country traffic jam fuels fight over endangered mice, marsh birds

During his eight years on the Santa Rosa City Council, Chris Rogers spent hour after tedious hour in local transportation meetings discussing a proposal to reduce congestion on one of the main traffic arteries into the Napa-Sonoma Valley corridor.

That’s why Rogers, now a rookie Democratic assemblymember, said he had to chuckle when environmental groups complained that a bill making its way through the Legislature was somehow “fast-tracking” the long-stalled Highway 37 widening project in the North Bay.

“When you’re talking about a project that was started or at least conceived before you were born … and somebody’s calling it ‘fast tracking,’ it just doesn’t track,” Rogers said at a committee hearing last week. “The project should have been done already.” 

Assembly Bill 697 by Lori Wilson, a Democrat from the Fairfield area, would allow state highway officials to potentially harm three protected bird species and endangered mice as workers add new lanes to a stretch of Highway 37 to wine country. 

It’s another example of California Democrats trying to speed up major construction projects such as housing and public infrastructure that can sometimes stall for decades due to the state’s stringent environmental regulations.

Read More: ‘Too damn hard to build’: A key California Democrat’s push for speedier construction

Last week, the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee voted to advance the measure. The 13 members of the committee, including Rogers, weren’t persuaded by the objections from a Native American tribe, environmentalists and transportation advocacy groups that oppose widening highways. They argue that research shows that adding lanes doesn’t reduce congestion.

Only one committee member, Gregg Hart, a Democrat from Santa Barbara, declined to vote, which counts the same as voting “no.” 

The 21-mile highway connects Interstate 80 in Vallejo in Solano County to Highway 101 in Novato in Marin County along the north San Pablo Bay. It cuts though some of the state’s last remaining salt marshes, which are threatened by sea level rise. Highway 37, which has a history of flooding, also is one of the most congested highways in Northern California, leading to long backups for commuters during weekdays and for wine country visitors on weekends. 

The source of the 10-mile bottleneck is where four lanes shrink to one lane in each direction. An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 motorists find themselves inching along the highway each day, typically adding an hour and a half to round-trip commutes.

Commuters suffer in traffic

Officials have for decades discussed what to do about road safety concerns and congestion as tourism to wine country has expanded and as the surrounding communities have grown due to comparatively cheaper housing. Meanwhile, rising seas threaten to swamp the highway entirely in the coming decades.

Highway officials eventually plan to raise the highway via an elevated causeway that could include passenger rail connecting to the Capitol Corridor train line running between Sacramento and the Bay Area. But the full project, estimated to cost more than $10 billion, isn’t funded. It could also take decades to build.

Instead, they’ve settled on a short-term, $500 million plan to add a carpool lane and a toll lane to the existing highway between Mare Island and Sears Point. The project includes measures intended to protect the highway from flooding, plus an additional 1,200 acres of “near-term habitat restoration” in the area. Construction is slated to begin in 2027. 

Wilson’s measure would, during construction, waive certain protections under the California Endangered Species Act for the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse, as well as for three protected birds: the California clapper rail, the California black rail and the white-tailed kite. 

If the Legislature doesn’t authorize the Department of Fish and Wildlife to issue an “incidental take” permit, it would cause major, costly construction delays, Wilson’s office said. Without the permit, the proposed construction window would shrink to just 10 to 12 weeks a year, instead of the current six- to seven-month construction season.

Wilson told the committee she was motivated to stand up for commuters in her district, many of whom make the $16.50-an-hour minimum wage to work in the service industry on the opposite side of Highway 37.

“When you factor in the commute, they’re automatically down to $13.89,” she said. “And that is real. That is real.”

She noted that the congestion is so bad that public bus lines won’t run along Highway 37 because they’re unable to set consistent schedules. 

Democrat is done waiting

Local transportation officials, construction companies and labor unions whose members would work on the project support the measure. In total, those groups have given nearly $17 million to lawmakers since 2015, according to the Digital Democracy database.

Opposing the bill are environmental groups that have spent significantly less on state politics. They include the California League Of Conservation Voters, which has donated $213,650 to legislators since 2015, according to Digital Democracy. The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, a local tribe, is also opposed. The tribe, which owns a casino in Rohnert Park in Sonoma County, has donated $265,200 since 2015.

In an opposition letter to the committee, the tribe argued the measure would “greenlight the take of cultural species for a temporary, near-term project that has so far lacked meaningful tribal consultation and fails to address climate change impacts.”

At last week’s hearing, Transform, a group that advocates against building new highways or adding more lanes to existing ones, also testified in opposition. 

Lobbyist Jeanie Ward-Waller said the highway is projected to be underwater due to sea level rise as soon as 2040, so it doesn’t make financial sense to add new lanes that would be used for only 10 years. She said the project ought to be shelved so officials can focus on the long-term causeway proposal which would achieve “greater ecological benefits.”

But Rogers said that isn’t practical since there’s no funding for the permanent project.

“And the longer that we continue to delay, the more it impacts people’s lives, the more that it impacts the environment. And we’ve reached a fever point where we need to do something,” Rogers said.