THE FEDERAL ROLE IN THE MANAGEMENT OF SAN FRANCISCO BAY 
Betsy Coombs 
Environmental Protection Agency Region 9 
I recently had the opportunity to brief the EPA's new 
Assistant Administrator for Water on San Francisco Bay. I 
showed him slides of the Bay, talked about declining fish 
populations, reviewed the history of fisheries decline, and 
talked about siltation and long-term degradation of the Bay. 
During a helicopter tour of the Bay, he turned and said, "The 
Bay looks so healthy!" 
His reaction is not uncommon. Many of us who grew up on the 
Bay are used to the idea that there are no booming fisheries on 
the Bay. At one point, San Francisco Bay was the most important 
fishery on the West Coast. 
Despite the lack of visible causes, there are very real 
problems contributing to the decline on the Bay, many of which 
have been touched on today. For the first time, there is the 
real possibility the EPA may receive management funds for what 
we in the region recognize is a resource of national signifi¬ 
cance, one that deserves our attention. The budget for such an 
undertaking may be $12 million, as some members of Congress have 
sought,...or it may be zero, or somewhere in between. We do not 
know if our equipment will be a handful of pencils or a Prime 
computer. 
We are at the mercy of The Office of Management and Budget 
and other people's priorities: the Congress, the State Water 
Resources Control Board, the Office of Management and Budget and 
the Reagan Administration. Within the next four to six months, 
our sense of what the San Francisco Bay Project might be could 
change by orders of magnitude and in more than one direction, 
and maybe more than once or twice. But one fact is clear: EPA 
Region 9 has a commitment to address the problems of San Fran¬ 
cisco Bay. 
With that introduction, I would like to talk about EPA's 
statutory role on the Bay, the Agency's relationship with other 
agencies, and the establishment of EPA's National Estuaries Pro¬ 
gram through the creation of the Office of Marine and Estuarine 
Protection. 
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