More than $100 million in Proposition 4 funding — a $10 billion climate bond passed by voters last year — will go to California’s coastal resilience efforts, state Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, announced at a press conference Sept. 15.
During the press conference, hosted at East Palo Alto’s Cooley Landing, speakers highlighted San Mateo County’s unique vulnerability to sea-level rise and the dire importance of funding resiliency efforts.
“My city sits on a federally designated flood zone,” East Palo Alto Councilmember Webster Lincoln said. “The county of San Mateo sea-level rise vulnerability assessment predicts that 45% of the population and 61% of the total land area in East Palo Alto will be at risk for flooding in the next decade, if no solutions are implemented.”
Becker successfully advocated for a doubling of Proposition 4 funding in the 2025-26 state budget, he said. Now, $62 million is designated for coastal resilience funding and $40 million is designated to the Coastal Conservancy’s San Francisco Bay Area Conservancy program.
“This is the ultimate case where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he said. “The sooner we build shoreline restoration projects, the better off the future residents of this area will be.”
In the Bay Area, where $10 billion of coastal property is at risk of sea-level rise by 2050, investment in both traditional and natural shoreline protections is more important than ever, Save the Bay Policy Director Josh Quigley said.
For vulnerable communities without local funding to protect themselves, statewide investment will be key to mitigating risk, he said.
“The shoreline is our first line of defense against sea-level rise,” Quigley said. “Communities around the Bay are already experiencing more frequent flooding from intense storms, as sea-level rise will bring more Bay waters into our neighborhoods, many of our disadvantaged communities are at the greatest risk.”
Assemblymember Diane Papan, D-San Mateo, was a strong advocate of Proposition 4’s passage. She emphasized during the press conference that immediate investment efforts would be key to fighting back against increasingly dramatic climate events.
“We’ve seen what happens when we delay,” she said. “Just a few years ago, after a punishing three-year drought, we had a winter of atmospheric winters that brought catastrophic flooding. And that climate whiplash? That’s our new normal, so it demands immediate action.”
Though the funding hasn’t yet been meted out to specific initiatives and projects, Pacifica Mayor Sue Beckmeyer said investments of this nature were integral to the challenges her uniquely at-risk coastal community is facing.
“Pacifica has been experiencing these impacts for decades with the loss of homes, with the loss of apartment buildings, and we are experiencing increasing impacts from weather events, flooding and coastal erosion, which threatens our infrastructure, homes and businesses,” she said. “With funding like this, we are able to work on the planning we’ve been doing for decades.”