What is the Peninsula Watershed?
The 23,000 acres of the Peninsula Watershed, located in central San Mateo County, are protected and managed by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission with the primary purpose of producing, collecting, and storing the highest-quality water for San Francisco residents and the SFPUC’s suburban water customers. In order to protect this precious water supply in an era of longer and more severe droughts, access to much of the area is restricted to a handful of popular trails, except under the auspices of a docent program. As a result, it has the highest concentration of rare, threatened, and endangered species — including the Mission blue butterfly, San Francisco garter snake, and California red-legged frog — in the nine-county Bay Area. The Watershed features diverse habitats ranging from pristine stands of old growth Douglas Fir to oak woodlands to serpentine grasslands.
What’s happening now?
The SFPUC proposes to improve and develop new recreational trails in the Peninsula Watershed lands. The Draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the proposed project has identified Alternative B as the “Environmentally Superior Alternative.” Alternative B maintains and improves the existing docent program for hikers, cyclists, and equestrians on Fifield-Cahill Ridge. It also proposes to allow unsupervised access to a new six-mile trail in a less environmentally sensitive area along the east side of Skyline Boulevard, extending south from Highway 92 to the Phleger Estate outside Woodside.
The Sierra Club’s Loma Prieta and SF Bay Chapters, along with Golden Gate Audubon, Sequoia Audubon, Santa Clara Valley Audubon, the Yerba Buena and Santa Clara Valley Chapters of the California Native Plant Society, and Green Foothills have all supported increased public access through an improved and expanded docent program on Fifield Cahill Ridge. We are pleased that the EIR has also determined that this is the Environmentally Superior Alternative.
What you can do:
Please write to the San Francisco Planning Department and PUC in support of Alternative B in the EIR for the Southern Skyline Boulevard Ridge Trail Extension Project. Written comments on the EIR will be accepted until 5:00 p.m. on August 10, 2020.
Email SFPUC Senior Planner Timothy Johnston at timothy.johnston@sfgov.org. Tell him you support Alternative B for the Southern Skyline Boulevard Ridge Trail Extension Project. If you prefer, write to Timothy Johnston at: San Francisco Planning Department, 1650 Mission Street, Suite 400, San Francisco, CA 94103.
The Draft EIR for the Southern Skyline Boulevard Ridge Trail Extension Project is available for public review here.
Editor’s note: To protect the health and safety of trail users and staff during the coronavirus pandemic, all hikes, bikes, and rides on the Fifield-Cahil Ridge Trail are cancelled until further notice. Check the SFPUC website for updates.
Language by Lennie Roberts and Arthur Feinstein.