In summary
A new conservancy will oversee work to improve vegetation, water quality and natural habitat in the Salton Sea. Will nearly half a billion dollars in projects be enough?
Haze hung over the Salton Sea on a recent winter day, while black-necked stilts and kildeer waded in the shallows, pecking at crustaceans.
Something else emerged a few steps closer to the lakeshore: a briny, rotten egg stench wafting from the water.
The Salton Sea is nearly twice as salty as the ocean, laden with agricultural runoff and susceptible to algal blooms that spew hydrogen sulfide, a noxious gas. It’s also a haven to more than 400 bird species and a key stop on the Pacific Flyway, one of North America’s main bird migration routes.
State officials have wrestled with the sea’s deteriorating condition as its water becomes fouler and its footprint shrinks, exposing toxic dust that wafts through the region.
This year, the state took a step toward a solution, creating a new Salton Sea Conservancy and earmarking nearly half a billion dollars to revive the deteriorating water body. While the funds will help restore native vegetation and improve water quality, some community organizers think it will ultimately take tens of billions of dollars to save the sea. And the conservancy alone can’t address the impact its pollution has on human health, including the elevated asthma rates among nearby residents.
“The Salton Sea is one of the most pressing environmental health crises in the state of California,” said state Sen. Steve Padilla, the Chula Vista Democrat who authored the bill to create the conservancy last year. “It’s a public health and ecological disaster … The Salton Sea Conservancy will provide permanency in our investments for cleanup and restoration.”
The California climate bond that voters passed in November dedicates $170 million toward Salton Sea restoration, including $10 million to establish the conservancy. The state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund also dedicates $60 million and the federal Bureau of Reclamation is contributing another $250 million, Padilla said.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Legislature, local water districts, tribal governments and nonprofits are expected to appoint 15 members to the conservancy by Jan. 1.
The new conservancy will manage land and water rights and oversee restoration work spelled out in the 2018 Salton Sea Management Program, a 10-year blueprint for building 30,000 acres of wildlife habitat and dust suppression projects.
“The conservancy is needed to make sure that it is completed, but also to permanently maintain and manage that restoration,” Padilla said. “This is not the kind of thing where you check a box, one and done.”
At 35 miles long and 15 miles wide, the Salton Sea is California’s largest lake. Its most recent incarnation formed in 1905, when the Colorado River breached an irrigation canal and millions of gallons of freshwater flooded the basin, creating an inland lake that spans Coachella and Imperial valleys.
But that wasn’t really its beginning. Although the Salton Sea holds a reputation as an agricultural accident, it has filled and drained naturally over the past few millennia.
Ancient versions of what was called Lake Cahuilla have appeared every few hundred years since prehistoric times. In its older, larger configurations, Native Americans set fish traps along the shoreline. It filled as recently as 1731, a hydrology study by San Diego State University found. That natural history demonstrates its value to the region, proponents say.
“We need to treat the Salton Sea as an important ecosystem for our environment that we live in,” said Luis Olmedo, executive director of Comite Civico del Valle, a Brawley-based community organization.
During its heyday in the 1960s, the salty lake was an aquatic playground for Rat Pack celebrities, including Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. By the end of the last century its salinity increased and water quality plunged, leading to mass die-offs of fish and birds, including endangered brown pelicans.
Area residents suffer from breathing problems, as dust from the exposed lakebed swirls through neighboring communities. Last year a study by the University of Southern California found nearly a quarter of children living near the Salton Sea experience asthma, about three to five times the national average.
A thriving hotspot for birds
Despite its contamination, the sea still provides key wildlife habitat. An Audubon bird count in August 2023 yielded a record 250,000 shorebirds sighted in one day, said Camila Bautista, Salton Sea and desert program manager with Audubon California. Even as the sea’s polluted water and dying fishery make it less hospitable to fish-eating birds such as pelicans, ground-nesting birds such as snowy plovers proliferate on the expanding shoreline.
“The Salton Sea is still a thriving hotspot for birds, and these restoration projects are important to make sure that’s still the case,” Bautista said.
The California Salton Sea Management Program lists 18 restoration projects, including some key efforts already underway. Those include massive aquatic restoration projects as well as revegetation efforts, said Natural Resources Agency Deputy Secretary Samantha Arthur, who oversees the management program.
At the south end of the sea, the state’s species conservation habitat project has added nearly 5,000 acres of ponds, basins and other water features, according to the management program’s project tracker. Images of the site look like a sci-fi waterworld, where earth-moving equipment reshapes the shoreline into a network of 10-foot-deep pools.
Workers will mix highly saline water from the sea with freshwater from its main tributary, the New River, to reach a target salinity of 20 to 40 parts per thousand, Arthur said. At that level the water can support native desert pupfish, along with tilapia, an imported fish that’s adapted to brackish water and once thrived throughout the sea.
“We’re designing a target salinity to sustain the fish and then to attract the birds,” she said.
Covering exposed soil with water should also improve air quality by suppressing dust, Arthur said. That project started in 2020 and is slated for completion this year.
An expansion to the species conservation habitat would add another 14,900 acres of aquatic habitat for fish-eating birds, with “nesting and loafing islands” and ponds of varied depths. It’s expected to be finished in 2027.
The management plan also includes planting native vegetation around the shoreline or encouraging plants that are already there.
“We see 8,000 acres of wetlands that have naturally sprung up along the edge of the sea,” Arthur said. “The thing that’s great about that is it provides ongoing habitat for bird species.”
The state is helping that along by planting native vegetation on the west side of the sea, to create habitat and cut dust.
Creating nature-based solutions
Bombay Beach is an artisan hamlet on the east side of the Salton Sea, dotted with rusted trailers, abandoned cars and pop-up art installments.
It’s also the site of a restoration project spearheaded by Audubon California, which will add 564 acres of wetland by 2028. It will create shoreline berms to enable water to pool naturally, forming shallow ponds that draw waterfowl and shorebirds, Bautista said.
“The message of this project is to make this as self-sustaining as we can, and to work with nature-based solutions to make it not super engineered,” Bautista said.
Those projects form the first phases of a bigger restoration effort, Arthur said.
As state officials and nonprofit partners are shoring up wetlands and planting vegetation, the Army Corps of Engineers is studying long-term solutions for the Salton Sea.
Olmedo thinks the half billion dollars allocated now is just a small part of what’s ultimately needed to save the sea.
“Everything is costing more and it’s not unreasonable to think that we have a $60 billion liability,” he said. “I want to see billions of dollars invested in infrastructure.”
Silvia Paz, executive director of the Coachella-based community group Alianza Coachella Valley, pointed out that the conservancy is primarily focused on restoring habitat, but human health risks from its pollution still needs attention. She wants to see more public health studies and services as part of long-term plans for the Salton Sea.
“That’s a big win that we have the conservancy established,” she said. “In terms of addressing the overall health, environmental and economic impacts, the conservancy was not designed for that, and we still have a way to go to figure out how to address that.”
