November 6, 2001

Lake Merced agreement a fantastic first step

An editorial

October 25 saw the announcement of a truly historic agreement on the city's beleaguered Lake Merced, an announcement that at times it seemed would never come.  And consensus came only after a long period of hard work too liberally mixed with finger-pointing, delays, and lawsuits over the fate of the tarnished jewel of the city's southwest corner.

But in the end several branches of San Francisco city government, the neighboring San Mateo County town of Daly City, local golf-course owners, fishing groups, neighborhood activists, and others all had a hand in what is an enormously encouraging first step toward putting Lake Merced back on the road to recovery.  It's a fairly simple arrangement, but the potential benefit to the lake is considerable and the import of reaching an agreement among such differing parties at all is enormous.

The agreement, in a nutshell, provides that San Francisco will sell Hetch Hetchy water to Daly City at a low price and Daly City will stop pumping so much drinking water from the underground aquifer that feeds the lake.  The two cities will work together to build a plant to treat water for use by the golf courses, cemeteries and other users that now get landscape irrigation water from the aquifer.  And instead of sending all its stormwater runoff to sewage-treatment plants, San Francisco will clean up some of the water and send it to the lake to make up for the effect of development on the lake's natural watershed.

Among all the well-deserved congratulations, however, it's important to remember that this is just the first step, and even if the agreement works out as planned there will still be a lot of work to do.  Decades of decline cannot be undone in a day or even in a single rainy season.  So let's toast the agreement and admire the successes of the day -- then let's put away the glasses, roll up our sleeves, and get back to work.