A contractor experienced in coastal wetlands enhancement recently made a pitch for the long-overdue restoration of the Buena Vista Lagoon on the border of Oceanside and Carlsbad. “After 20 years of studies and community meetings it’s time to act,” said Jon Ruth of Marathon Construction, a loca l company that has worked on three other saltwater lagoons in San Diego County. He spoke during a project update at a meeting of the Buena Vista Lagoon Joint Powers Committee. “It is a hidden national treasure that has been deteriorating over the decades,” Ruth said. “We are looking to inspire support and enthusiasm for restoring the lagoon.” Marathon Construction completed the San Elijo Lagoon restoration on the border of Encinitas and Solana Beach in 2022, and the San Dieguito Lagoon at Del Mar in 2024. The company also dredged the Batiquitos Lagoon at the border of Carlsbad and Encinitas in the winter of 2023 to maintain a restoration completed there in the mid-1990s. Each of those projects was similar to the work needed at Buena Vista and included the side benefit of using the sand taken from the lagoons to widen nearby eroded beaches. The proposed Buena Vista Lagoon project is likely to be larger than the others. It includes the removal of a weir, a low dam near the lagoon’s ocean outlet, that makes Buena Vista the county’s only freshwater lagoon. The weir prohibits the flow of saltwater into the lagoon and impedes the draining of sediment from the lagoon into the ocean. As a result, the more than 200-acre water body a few feet above sea level is slowly filling up with mud and cattails. The excavation needed for the restoration is expected to produce 1 million cubic yards of sediment, much of which will be clean enough to place on nearby beaches. That is more than twice the amount of beach sand yielded by the annual dredging of the Oceanside harbor channel. It’s impossible to return the lagoon to its more natural state of a century ago. However, restoring the ebb and flow of ocean tides will bring back native species of plants and animals that are rapidly disappearing with the continued development of California’s coast. It also will reduce mosquitoes and prevent the stagnation that sometimes kills off the non-native fish such as carp and bass in the lagoon. One of the biggest obstacles to the restoration was the question of whether or not to remove the weir. That hurdle was finally cleared in 2020 when the San Diego Association of Governments, the lead agency for the project’s environmental studies, approved a compromise between property owners and environmentalists that allowed the weir’s removal in return for changes such as altering the route of the lagoon’s main channel. Since then, SANDAG has been working toward a final design for the project and the necessary permits to make the project “shovel ready” for a construction contract, which would be awarded to the lowest qualified bidder. SANDAG reached the milestone of a 30% complete design last year and has begun working toward the goal of a 65% design, said Kim Smith, a regional planner for the agency, at the meeting. “We need an estimated $3 million to finalize that,” Smith said. The agency recently secured $1 million of that in the state budget, and is working to obtain the rest of the money to complete the design. The most recent estimate of costs to complete the lagoon project was $90 million to $100 million in 2022, she said. Construction costs in general have climbed rapidly since then. “That’s a lot of money,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of work on our hands.” Several North County residents at the meeting encouraged the joint powers committee, which is made up of the mayor, a city council member and a resident, one each from Oceanside and Carlsbad, to pursue the project aggressively. Carlsbad Mayor Keith Blackburn, who was first appointed to the committee 16 years ago, praised SANDAG for the work done so far. SANDAG took over as lead agency on the project in 2012 after it stalled under the leadership of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, which was unable to resolve the weir issue. “We have made leaps and bounds” since then, Blackburn said. A decade or so ago, the lagoon restoration, sometimes called an “enhancement,” was a possible candidate for environmental mitigation funding from the North Coast Corridor Program. The program is a coordinated effort by SANDAG, Caltrans and other agencies to improve freeway, railroad and other forms of transportation in the region. More than $90 million of the $120 million needed for the San Elijo restoration was obtained as environmental mitigation funding for the widening of Interstate 5. However, most of the regional program’s mitigation money has been spent now, and the Buena Vista project will need other sources. The committee, which meets every three months, agreed to discuss at its next meeting whether to make Carlsbad or Oceanside the lead agency in obtaining the permits needed from government agencies as the project proceeds. ...read more read less