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Shoot and run

by Pam Sturner

From the early 1940s to 1994, Midpeninsula gun enthusiasts gathered at the Peninsula Sportsmen's Club in east Menlo Park to shoot trap and skeet, eat a simple lunch, and play a few rounds of checkers at the clubhouse.

Now, the remains of their 17-acre grounds -- which lie within the Hetch-Hetchy easement owned by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission -- will be hauled away by truck and train to waste disposal sites in remote parts of California, Utah, Nevada and Arizona.

The action marks the end of an eight-year odyssey that began with a ban on lead shot at bayside gun clubs, a response by the Regional Water Quality Board to findings that the pellets killed water birds. After many painstaking steps, the board's action has ended with a work plan to clean up the Menlo Park site -- an effort that will cost the PUC, and by extension taxpayers, $18 million.

Excavation at the former club, which lies along the bay just north of East Palo Alto, begins in earnest late this spring. By the end of the project, about 60,000 cubic yards of soil contaminated with lead shot and carcinogenic clay pigeon debris will be removed.

Although the PUC has insurance and strong legal grounds for placing responsibility squarely with the club owners, a series of bad breaks has left the agency on the hook for the entire bill.

Rona Sandler, a deputy city attorney for San Francisco, has revisited these facts many times while advising the PUC in the matter.

"Who would have thought then that we'd be spending millions in 2001 to clean up this site," said Sandler, noting the case began with a simple request from sportsmen to build duck blinds along the bay in 1939. "The attitude was, 'What could it hurt?' No one thought this would cause a problem."

Even today, the sportsmen's uses do not seem out of keeping with the location. Tucked away on a spot of land east of University Avenue leading to the Dumbarton Bridge, the former club seems miles from human habitation. The nearest neighborhood, an enclave of single-family homes in East Palo Alto, lies out of sight a quarter of a mile away.

The remains of the club blend with the industrial surroundings, which are framed by the bridge, the outsize pipes of Hetch-Hetchy, and transmission lines operated by PG&E.

The firing range overlooks a commercial salt pond, where a moonscape of crystalline deposits proves blinding on a sunny day. Once a dumpsite for construction debris, the grassy shore contains dark piles of clay pigeon debris and a tangle of nonnative plants. Fill added over the years caused seasonal "ponding" that has left the western end barren. Even the view east toward a natural slough takes in a collection of junk strewn underfoot -- plastic bottles, lengths of pipe, a construction sign from the Redwood City roads department.

As one of the largest cleanups in the Midpeninsula, the sportsmen's club seems like a natural rallying point for the area's many environmental groups. In fact, it has gone virtually unnoticed, taking a back seat to such issues as the Moffett Field cleanup and efforts to preserve the ecology of the creek watersheds.

Florence LaRiviere, a Palo Alto resident and founder of Citizens' Committee to Complete the Refuge -- a group dedicated to restoring wetlands in the South Bay -- visited the club while it was still in operation. She first heard of the site during an outreach meeting in May 2001, when the PUC briefed local groups on the project.

"It never occurred to me that (the club) was contaminating the salt pond," LaRiviere said.

While noting the type of contamination at the sportsmen's club is unusual, and therefore does not provide readily transferable lessons to other marshland cleanups, LaRiviere was intrigued by the PUC's plan.

"Pond cleanups are becoming of more and more interest in the South Bay," she said. "There's a lot of material that you might not think would be there."

The PUC's troubles began in mid-1994, when Henry Scoble, the club's operator, answered the water quality board's cleanup order in mid-1994 with a claim of bankruptcy.

Deferring the matter to the PUC, Scoble made a swift exit, concluding in a letter to the board: "It would be ludicrous for myself to undertake any further responsibility at this time."

At that point, the San Francisco city attorney launched an investigation but found no assets to recover from Scoble, his company, or the club's officers. Although it won a $20,000 judgment in back rent, which Scoble paid, the city was reluctant to pursue the club further, given that most of the members were retired.

"Taking these senior citizens' assets -- that didn't appeal to anyone here," Sandler said.

The PUC also hit a dead end when it tried to tap into various insurance policies covering the club's operation. Owing to changes made through court decisions in 1998 and 2000, it could not collect on the club's liability policy -- which the commission required as a condition of the lease -- unless the water quality board sued the PUC over the cleanup. The commission's own insurance proved no more useful: All of its policies excluded pollution as grounds for claims.

The PUC briefly considered taking the insurers to court but abandoned the idea, as the prospects seemed risky at best. "The insurance companies never roll over. It's not a slam-dunk going after them," Sandler said. "I think we've done everything we could." Pat Martel, general manager of the PUC, said funding for the cleanup will come from the agency's annual capital project fund, which amounts to about $20 million a year. She stressed it will have no impact on either water rates or the capital improvements planned for the Hetch-Hetchy water system, for which the utility is proposing a $4.6 billion bond measure for November.

Although the commission has yet to decide how it will apportion payments during the two-year cleanup, Martel said smaller projects will be delayed as funding becomes squeezed.

"The important thing is that we are under a mandate to restore this site to an environmentally sound state. We don't have a choice; this is a regulatory issue we're responding to," Martel said.

Although the PUC is now ready to start work, progress was slow as the project encountered difficulties almost as soon as the utility took it over.

According to Sandler, the commission only started in 2000 to realize how expensive the cleanup might be. Costs went up dramatically once contamination was found in the salt pond, which lay within range of the falling shot and will require sophisticated dredging techniques to clear. Disposal posed another problem, since lead and the carcinogens in the clay pigeon fragments require different treatment.

In 1999, the PUC also came under political fire for moving too slowly on the matter. Noting that five years had lapsed without significant action, some critics pointed to the sportsmen's club as proof that the PUC needed to broaden its governance to include representatives from outside San Francisco.

The problem struck a personal chord for San Mateo County Supervisor Rose Jacobs Gibson, a former mayor of East Palo Alto. Having seen many polluters abandon toxic messes within her city's borders, she spurred the PUC to accelerate its efforts, believing the project languished in part because of its location.

"Everyone was just sitting on it," Gibson said. "The water quality board didn't follow up, and the PUC hadn't done anything. There were always reasons they couldn't do things. It was totally unacceptable."

The PUC spent most of 1999-2001 working through the technical problems and looking for the cheapest solutions. In an effort to recoup costs, it even explored a proposal -- which was ultimately rejected -- to sell lead recovered from the site.

A few pieces of welcome news nonetheless emerged from these exploratory studies. Testing confirmed that neither the lead nor the clay pigeon fragments, which contain carcinogens chemically similar to asphalt, were decomposing. The stability of the contaminants meant the site posed no threat to human health. The same characteristics suggested that the risk to wildlife was limited as well -- primarily to water birds that might pick up lead shot while feeding.

In Sandler's eyes, the consequences arising from the shooting club's tenancy are the unsurprising fallout of a longstanding tension between the PUC's mandate as a public utility and the political pressure it encounters -- which is often intense -- to open its extensive land holdings to recreational use.

"I don't know how this could have been avoided," she said, noting that no one in 1939 would have questioned the wisdom of leasing to a gun club.

She added that in recent years, the PUC's real-estate group has subjected its tenants to more stringent financial scrutiny. It now imposes bonding requirements, updates its leases more frequently, and investigates potential tenants' finances to make sure they can pay for any significant problems that arise.

"The world's a lot different now," Sandler said. "Hopefully in 2050 we won't be facing something similar (to the club cleanup) based on land decisions today."

The PUC is already facing questions about the fate of the parcel after the cleanup, which will end with the restoration of native plants in the upland sections. The city of East Palo Alto has approached the PUC about putting a transit hub on the easement to serve a proposed cross-bay commuter rail. One East Palo Alto resident would like to build a driving range for local youth. The restored marshland could also serve as mitigation for a development project elsewhere on the bay.

Martel is wary of entertaining any new projects, at least for now.

"My concern is the location of a major pipeline there. Anytime you introduce the public to a major facility, you have to be more concerned about security," Martel said. "At this point, our number-one responsibility is to deliver water. We have to be sure all our facilities are safe and we can continue to do that."

Whatever the final disposition of the land, Gibson is getting what she hoped for: a cleanup to the highest environmental standards for her constituents in East Palo Alto. With the PUC poised for action, she is pleased her efforts helped get the cleanup going. "There is a responsibility for agencies to be accountable," she said. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission will make public presentations about the Peninsula Sportsmen's Club cleanup Feb. 19 at the East Palo Alto City Hall, 2415 University Ave., from 5 to 7 p.m. and March 2 at the Onetta Harris Community Center, 100 Terminal Ave., in Menlo Park from 10 a.m. to noon.

E-mail Pam Sturner at psturner@paweekly.com