Please find the Friends of Rose Creek Draft Comments
to the Water Quality Improvement Plan (WQIP) for Mission Bay including the Rose Creek Watershed. Feel free to use any of the comments in your own letter.
To review the documents we are commenting on, click here. Please note this document is almost one thousand pages long. If you want to read it, focus on section 4 and it’s appendices. Section 4 starts on page 101 of the PDF document in the link.
To learn more about the Water Quality Improvement Plan and related projects, visit the Project Clean Water website. You will find Rose and Tecolote Creeks in the section entitled “Mission Bay / La Jolla Watersheds.”
The most important action you can take is to make all the suggestions you can. Don’t assume they have thought of everything. Even if you do not have time to read the draft WQIP documents, you can email your suggestions on any of the following topics:
For those planning on making comments, we have some general suggestions:
1) In general, we feel that strategies that address water quality, land protection, upland habitat, and wetlands restoration should always be the first strategy to be implemented. If done correctly, these strategies will be almost self-sustaining over a hundred years. Therefore, while these strategies may be more costly in the short term, their amortized costs will show a significant benefit to city expenditures. Furthermore, strategies that rely on wetlands and upland habitat restoration can often be funded by restoration grants from a number of sources, thereby reducing taxpayer burden.
2) Suggestions for how to and where to “daylight” creeks (click here for background information). Cudahy Creek is one suggestion – there may be others.
3) Encourage the City of San Diego to take the lead on the project to create a Rose Creek maintenance assessment district with funds garnered to be use for funding a ranger, habitat restoration, bike path maintenance, and trash cans/pickup.
4) The documents references “increased channel clearing” as a water quality solution. Please oppose this strategy as it means removing native and non-native vegetation that provides habitat for birds and other creatures. Instead, suggest that the City partner with non-profits, volunteer groups, write grants and whatever else you can think of to remove non-native plants and restore habitat.
6) Water quality improvement strategies should only be limited by your imagination. Anything that you can think of to suggest such as public outreach campaigns, signage, frequent trash pickups, etc. can be emailed as comments. No need to even read the documents. Do a Google search and find out what WQIP strategies other areas are implementing and use them as suggestions.
7) Provide suggestions on how to educate the public about pesticide, herbicide, and chemical fertilizer use.
8) If you are anyone you know has specific restoration projects they have been wanting to get done, send them in as potential projects. The important thing is to get them on the list. Put in as much detail as you have now. Don’t forget to include long term maintenance requirements.
9) Suggest that the City of San Diego and the co-permittees work with other jurisdictional agencies and/or non-governmental agencies in the watershed. Some examples include the US Marine Corps (Miramir), State of California (UCSD and CalTrans), County of San Diego, University of San Diego, etc. etc. List all the players in the area that you are concerned about and ask for an inter-agency water quality working team to be created. Add in any suggestions you may have as to how this may function.
10) Rose Creek, San Clemente Creek, and Tecolote Creek are “receiving waters” under the MS4 permit (the permit that allows the City to allow storm water to enter Mission Bay and the Pacific Ocean). If you haven’t read the MS4, it’s on-line for your reading pleasure.
14) Ask that the City of San Diego Storm Water and Transportation Department hire someone to engage with the community, attend meetings, as serve as a liaison between the public and the City.
15) One of the goals of the new MS4 permit is to give everyone a voice in the WQIP process. What strategies can you think of to make water quality outreach and communication between the City and the public more functional? Send them in.
18) If you have any creative thoughts on dealing with encampments in our canyons and along our creeks, please send them in as suggestions. The City has said they cannot deal with homeless encampments. Please comment on this. Past suggestions have included porta potties, trash bins, etc. People go to the bathroom along our creeks and that washes into our creeks, Mission Bay, and our ocean.
19) Come up with ideas for how to deal with dog poop and send them in. I don’t want to swim in dog poop, do you?
20) Please ask the City to come up with a process to tackled degraded water conditions. The plan is to identify one degraded area, re-mediate it based on your suggestions; then find the next degraded area until all our water is in good condition. Please offer suggestions on how the City might do this.
Write your comments and send them no later than 5:00 PM on Thursday, January 29 via email with “ATTN: Wayne Chiu / Mission Bay WQIP Comments” in the subject line.
If you have questions, please email us and we’ll do our best to respond in a timely fashion.
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