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URGENT CALL TO ACTION!

By Larry Jordan on April 18, 2022 in

Call to Action Bullet Points

CALL TO ACTION: Supporters and Friends, we need a few minutes of your time to help us convince the City of Redding not to designate as surplus and sell the Civic Auditorium and the Redding Rodeo Grounds and adjacent open space. Your participation is critical. Please read below and plan to speak or submit written comments at the upcoming Council hearing on April 19th at 6:00 to have your voice heard.

We need everyone to participate in order for this campaign to be successful!

Below is a link to a letter submitted to the City on behalf of Wintu Audubon, Sierra Club Shasta Group, and Shasta Environmental Alliance. The letter outlines numerous reasons why the City should not sell off the Rodeo grounds for development and, at the very least, must prepare an environmental analysis before deciding what to do with the property. The bullet points below summarize the key issues raised in the letter. Please use the bullets points as a guide to help you create and send a comment letter or comment in person at the upcoming hearing on April 19th at 6:00pm. In-person comments seem especially valuable, and can be read. We suggest you choose one or two bullets and focus your comments on those issues. In this way, comments will cover more topics. If you have any specific training, experience, or expertise in natural resources that could be impacted by the sale and development of this property, we especially need you to describe those potential impacts and state your qualifications. Please share this information with your clubs and friends.

Selling this land to a developer would be short-sighted and could lead to high-rise buildings, noise, and pollution in an area the City has designated for habitat restoration.
The City should slow down this process and carefully plan what kind and what density/intensity of uses should go on this site.
Designating this land as surplus and selling it to a developer may lead the City to approve a development that no one wants. Convention centers, hotels, sports arenas, and large entertainment venues would result in large crowds with a lot of traffic, noise, lights/glare, and pollution that would harm wildlife in the area and ruin recreational experiences on the river.
The Redding Rodeo Grounds are part of the river shoreline and provide wonderful public recreation opportunities. Redding residents and visitors enjoy the river corridor for scenic views, walking/hiking, bicycling, fishing, boating, bird-watching and other recreational uses. The presence of the River in the region is very important to this area’s quality of life and natural ecosystems, and to the region’s tourism economy. The rodeo grounds should be held by the City for public uses.
The City’s General Plan policies say to acquire land along the river for public uses, not to sell it off for commercial uses!
The Redding Rodeo Grounds and the Civic Auditorium are right next to extensive riparian habitat hosting a rich variety of wildlife. These include Turtle Bay Exploration Park open space area, the Turtle Bay Bird Sanctuary, and riparian resources extending from the Sundial Bridge upstream and beyond the Posse Grounds boat ramp. These natural resources should be protected.
A “no disturbance” buffer zone between the extensive riparian habitat and any new development is critical to protect these natural areas. Declaring the lands immediately adjacent to the natural areas as surplus, and selling them to others for development, will foreclose any such options for protection.
The City’s General Plan and Open Space Master Plan direct the City to preserve sites like this one by establishing public open space areas along the River to provide outdoor recreation and the potential to restore wildlife habitats, create effective storm water management, and preserve scenic views. Selling the property for development directly violates these policies.
The Sacramento River Trail is designated as a National Recreation Trail by the U.S. National Park Service. We should preserve it and the surrounding area to ensure that hikers have a natural experience. The grounds should be held by the City for public uses and to preserve recreational uses.
The Project Site’s location along the river also makes it likely that new development there could significantly impact buried cultural, tribal and /or archaeological resources.
The City must study the biological, cultural, and recreational values of the site and carefully plan what uses should be allowed there prior to deciding whether to sell it off for development.
Large crowds, heavy traffic, loud events, and related pollution will ruin our quality of life and natural ecosystems in the area.

City staff claim ”common sense” says there will be no impacts. More traffic, more people, more runoff, more noise will all likely result from selling the lands for more intensive development. How is it ”common sense” that there will be no impacts? Common sense would say impacts to wildlife will result.

Turtle Bay Provides Natural Wealth

By Dan Greaney on December 5, 2021 in BirdWords

It is the Thanksgiving season, and Redding has a special treat to appreciate. We have naturally what many cities spend a lot of money striving for: a place like Turtle Bay.

Sundial Bridge

On any temperate morning, and many others too, the Bird Sanctuary Loop is the hub for a stream of cyclists, dog-walkers, joggers, retired couples, friends, young families, and bird-watchers. Children gaze at green-headed mallards and study the giant webs of garden spiders. Parents guide their children to the trailside as bell-ringing cyclists approach. Walkers watch jacketed fishermen float below them, their boats drifting, their lines in the water. In fall, when the weather is right, the trails and visitors can be showered with golden leaves.

Mallard Pair

This welcoming and well-traveled route lies in the heart of Redding, nestled inside a bend in the river that creates the maze of bywaters and peninsulas that, together with the main river channel, comprise Turtle Bay. The green and brindled landscape nurtures a complex of aquatic insects and snails, and the fish, river otters, birds, and fisherfolk they support. The riparian woods house red-shouldered hawks, woodpeckers, and the numerous birds that nest in the cavities they excavate. Quiet inlets make restful wintering grounds for geese and hundreds of ducks including mallards, ring-necks, shovelers, and teal. Herons and egrets stalk the shallows, and kingfishers plunge into clear pools. Out in the river’s main current golden-eyes dive for bugs while grebes and red-coiffed mergansers chase fish. At Turtle Bay nature quietly offers a fundamental experience of life–its giving and its taking back, its patterning and variety, its beauty.

Barrow’s Goldeneye Pair

But the wealth of Turtle Bay is not just the bend in the river. The bay is part of a corridor. Just as the Bird Sanctuary Loop is part of the larger River Trail, the Bay and its wildlife are part of the flowing water and the riparian woods, upriver and down. Each fall thousands of yellow warblers follow the river, scouring the riverside trees for insects to fuel their long flights to wintering grounds in Central America. Tanagers flock through, the males’ flame-red heads eclipsing into their yellow-greens of winter, as they gorge on the ripened grapes espaliered on towering cottonwood trees–again, fueling long flights south. Swallows–the orange-rumped cliff swallows that build homes under the Sundial Bridge, the shining blue tree swallows and violet-greens that nest in old woodpecker holes, and the rough-winged swallows that make homes in weep-holes at the Bella Vista water intake, all capture insects on the wing, skimming the river surface or circling high in the sky, first here where they hatch and then all along the river as they migrate. Redding’s famous eagles have fledged twenty eaglets at Turtle Bay; they, too, travel the corridor, both seasonally and a few years ago to try nesting downstream at Riverview Golf Course, where they fledged young but lost three nests before returning to their more reliable home at the Bay.

Redding Eagles

So far the Sacramento River corridor remains largely free of commercial development, allowing clean bywaters and riverine woods to grow the bugs that feed the fish and birds and other riparian life. Upriver from Turtle Bay the woods still flourish up to the dams, perhaps most broken at Redding’s Rodeo grounds, where the thin riverside forest has received a strip of welcome
replanting. Downstream, aside from the development along Park Marina Blvd, the riverbanks are substantially verdant.

Redding Rodeo Grounds

Now the city is considering selling land at Turtle Bay for commercial development. As this is written, the City Council is pursuing the land sale, while unofficially assuring that the Bird Sanctuary itself will be retained and spared the pavement, at least for now. Unfortunately, the biology of the Bay stands to lose regardless, because its life runs up and down the river.

City Council has seemed genuinely interested in getting public input: should the sights and sounds of riverside plants and wildlife be retained with permanent, broad setbacks for riparian woodlands? Should development be kept to areas that are already paved, perhaps diverted to Park Marina? Will a dressed-up Convention Center and more restaurants draw the revenue of visitors from the Bay Area and farther off? Ultimately, will selling riverine public lands for development improve the quality of life for citizens now and in the future? Your City Council wants to know what you value. You can reach them through cityofredding.org .

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