Caleb Zimmerschied Valadez is a freelance writer. He can be reached at calzimval@gmail.com.

Cutting across bureaucratic channels is never easy, but it’s become OneShoreline’s specialty. As one of the first agencies of its kind, OneShoreline has demonstrated a knack for getting public and private partners in San Mateo County to respond collaboratively to the water-related impacts of climate change.

When OneShoreline opened its doors in January 2020, all 20 cities in San Mateo County committed funding to a three-year startup period that was matched by the county government. Their goal is to make San Mateo County, by most metrics the state’s most vulnerable county to rising sea levels, one of the most resilient.

The collective approach has been an advantage in the age of budget austerity. “Each city does not have enough staff to do everything they want or need to do … that’s part of the budget crisis,” said Eunejune Kim, the public works director and city engineer of South San Francisco. “So having an agency that can coordinate and oversee some kind of rational implementation of good policy to account for future conditions is very necessary.”

Where rubber meets the road

OneShoreline focuses on getting planning and public works teams at cities and the county to look at private development and public infrastructure with future conditions in mind, instead of historic conditions. This helps agencies understand what policy choices are available to ensure that projects reduce risks today and far into the future. Multiple cities in San Mateo County have already adopted zoning ordinances with more stringent climate resiliency requirements thanks to OneShoreline.

“That’s where the rubber meets the road,” said Len Materman, CEO of OneShoreline. “If it’s in a local general plan and a local zoning ordinance, it enables city staff to say to a developer, ‘Look, you need to think about what this place is going to look like in the future, so that your project protects your investment and ties into regional efforts that protect your community.’”

OneShoreline takes an aggressive approach to prevent structures from being built in harm’s way, which helps avoid costly relocation or mitigation projects. According to Materman, this is critical, as many projects are still approved based on historical norms with little to no consideration for how global warming is deviating from those norms. In fact, many of the state’s environmental laws are from the early 1970s, when the climate was much less extreme.

“State laws and guidance for environmental regulatory agencies also don’t account for our changing climate, which is a problem for developers, the environment, and local governments,” Materman said.

According to Nikita Sinha, a program manager with the Institute for Local Government (ILG), local agencies often run into budget and capacity issues when trying to plan for climate resiliency. Sometimes, it could just be one person taking on these projects.

Sinha added that the siloed nature of local government agencies is also a major challenge. “It’s not just a silo between neighboring cities,” she said. “It’s also silos within cities.”

ILG provides education and grant support for California agencies, along with statewide recognition through the Beacon Program. OneShoreline received a Beacon Award in 2023 for demonstrating how to build climate resilience by providing multijurisdictional support for other local agencies.

“Not only was OneShoreline the first to be doing what they’re doing, but they made it a goal to be able to share those lessons learned,” said Sinha.

One of the first challenges OneShoreline tackled was a construction project 11 years in the making. It was a relatively small project, but it cut across two different cities, as well as unincorporated county land that flooded at least every other year. After repeated delays, stakeholders handed it over to OneShoreline in early 2020 to get the project funded, permitted, and into construction. Two years later, construction was completed, just in time to reduce flooding during that winter’s series of atmospheric rivers.

“Figuring out how to create alignment between elected officials and staff in multiple jurisdictions at the same time for a common purpose, that’s how we do it,” Materman said.

Collaborative climate action in the age of budget austerity

OneShoreline’s efforts mean that cities don’t have to start from scratch each time, making projects more cost-effective and prevents duplicating planning efforts. The city of South San Francisco has incorporated OneShoreline’s recommendations for sea level rise and climate resiliency into key planning documents, such as its 2040 General Plan and Lindenville Specific Plan. City staff are also working to update the South San Francisco Municipal Code to align with best practices recommended by OneShoreline.

City staff work closely with OneShoreline staff on ongoing initiatives and have created a strong partnership to address these issues. 

Working together also increases the likelihood that an individual project will succeed — a must for a city like South San Francisco that is backfilling a $12 million budget deficit. “The simple fact is that costs are escalating more rapidly than our revenue sources are increasing,” Sharon Ranals, city manager for South San Francisco, said. “Every single department would like to hire more staff, and every single department deserves more staff. … But the direction we got this year was no new staff.”

South San Francisco’s Kim noted that while collaboration between cities in San Mateo has always been good, OneShoreline helps by emphasizing greater consistency in design and improvement standards. “These standards give us a rational way of coordinating, because water would just go around one wall to another if everyone had different standards at each city limit,” she said.

Summer Bundy, the director of project management at OneShoreline, points to a project at San Bruno Creek as an example of why regional collaboration is necessary. “We all recognize that water has no bounds. Our job is to figure out how to piece together an adaptation plan that brings a regional approach to addressing flooding and sea level rise, instead of on a per-project basis.”

OneShoreline is facilitating discussions between the city of San Bruno, the San Francisco Airport, South San Francisco, and private landowners who all own portions of the area around the creek. The San Bruno Creek Watershed is already heavily modified with water pumps, tide gates, and man-made channels, some of which are owned by different agencies or private individuals and must be accounted for in the planning.

Materman said that these projects shouldn’t be seen as traditional public works projects. He argued that cities need to get more creative in how the private sector is involved in addressing climate change — and not just on capital projects. For example, while insurance has historically been a private sector issue that local governments avoid, increased risk from flooding and wildfire has led to rising insurance costs, increasing borrowing and capital costs, which then impact family budgets and, increasingly, local government budgets.

He also pointed out that many city leaders were trained in a time before climate change and resiliency were a focus, which is understandably reflected in their project priorities.

Ranals agrees. “Twenty-five years ago, it seemed like a future problem, but here we are now, and it’s just getting worse, and the public can see that,” she said, noting that the city council used to focus more on general quality of life issues. “More council people are super engaged and interested in climate resiliency because there is more awareness and more political will.”

“Local climate action in California can really be demonstrative and set a tone for the rest of the state,” said Sinha. “California is a climate leader in the country, so what’s happening on a local level here has so many ripples and such a profound effect.”