After nine months of working with the Metropolitan Wastewater Department (MWWD) to halt and remedy its hasty razing of a Loma Portal canyon, nearby residents are seeing some progress on restoring foliage to the once-lush area.
The city has committed $9,000 to revegetation, which will include hydroseed, container plants and trees, according to Chris Toth, deputy director of wastewater collections.
Six residents, three wastewater officials and a representative from Councilman Kevin Faulconer’s office met on Aug. 16 to make good on the city’s promise to rejuvenate the small, urban canyon on Alcott Street.
Toth said an estimated $5,000 will be spent on hydroseeding the area with flowering, non-invasive plants, though the process would likely have to wait until the first good rain in November, nearly one year after wastewater crews razed the lower portion of the city-owned land to reach and repair a failing concrete sewer line that could date back as far as 1918.
The remaining $4,000 has been budgeted for larger, non-invasive container plants and trees. To maximize the homeowners’ autonomy in selecting and placing plants, Toth suggested that the city issue a purchase order at a nursery to be spent at the residents’ discretion.
Toth said the city will likely have approval for the purchase order following Labor Day, at which time residents will have a month or two to buy and plant their selections prior to the hydroseeding.
“We look at it not as the city’s canyon, but as the community’s,” said homeowner Amanda Sweeney, who was pleased with the solution.
Paul Reeb, Sweeney’s neighbor, agreed that the budget and implementation were more than satisfactory.
“I think you guys have really listened,” Reeb said of the wastewater department. “You take a lot of hits, but I really appreciate what you’ve done today.”
Toth acknowledged that such extensive collaboration with a community is relatively unprecedented for the wastewater department, though important for preserving good relations.
“We recognize in the process of doing our work that we’ve damaged a lot of the aesthetic beauty of this canyon area,” Toth said.
Last November, city crews reduced the bottom portion of the overgrown paper street – an undeveloped road – to dirt in order to reach and replace an underground pipe. More than a dozen small trees and a towering, four-story-tall eucalyptus were removed in the process. The city claimed that two sewage spills during the previous eight months constituted an emergency and necessitated the extreme measures.
Throughout December, outraged residents pressured the city to leave the remaining section of the canyon in tact and finish the rest of their work without the mass removal of vegetation.
Faulconer facilitated meetings in which the city and community agreed upon a pipe bursting technique for the final section of decrepit concrete. By May, 145 feet of pipe had been completely replaced or rehabilitated without cutting down any more trees.
Toth said the job was completed for $31,500. Initial estimates for trenching the same area totaled $51,500, but because the less invasive technique did not disturb the surface of the soil, the city saved on erosion control, revegetation work and tree removal in the final section.
Since the dispute between residents and the wastewater department began last year, the city has recognized the need for less invasive repairs in unofficial neighborhood canyons throughout the peninsula. A project to replace the remaining 1.6 miles of old pipe running through paper street canyons is currently in planning stages.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After nine months of working with the Metropolitan Wastewater Department (MWWD) to halt and remedy its hasty razing of a Loma Portal canyon, nearby residents are seeing some progress on restoring foliage to the once-lush area.The city has committed $9,000 to revegetation, which will include hydroseed, container plants and trees, according to Chris Toth, deputy […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"Loma Portal canyon to see restoration","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-297967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sdnews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297967\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}