Numerous streams used to flow right through downtown Stockton. If these had been stewarded properly, Stockton would have a unique Delta-city character.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Sigh.
One stream does remain. Mormon Slough, dry and desolate for decades, is now the focus of a plan to restore it to a flowing urban waterway and green space with native plants, trails, parklets, restored wetlands, fish, homes, and businesses new and old.
“We’re champing at the bit to do this,” said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director of Restore the Delta. “It’s going to be fun.”
Restoring the slough — which runs 9 miles from the Bellota Weir east of town, skirts downtown’s southern edge, and ends where it reaches the Delta near the Port of Stockton — is being undertaken by the Mormon Slough Restoration Association, a group of local agencies and tribal governments, and managed by Artie Valencia, RTD’s flood and restoration manager.
Valencia was raised in south Stockton. “There is no real place for people here to recreate safely on the water,” she said. “To me it is about giving back to the community, something they can go to to find relief on hot summer days, a place for people to recreate, walk, and connect back to their waterways.”
That last part is important. Great cities exploit their geographic assets. Stockton’s waterways are a godsend — but city planning, or lack of it, bad ideas and bad luck, have estranged Stocktonians from the water.
“Because we haven’t had access to the water — we have kind of a negative relationship with it now — it feeds into the negative narrative,” Valencia said. “As if we’re not worthy of good spaces. So it’s also about reshaping the narrative.”
Mormon Slough helped drain the basin east of Stockton into the Delta. It was given a slightly different name by Stockton’s founder, Capt. Charles M. Weber.
“Weber named Mormon Channel because a party of Mormons en route from San Francisco to the Stanislaus River transported their goods up that channel in 1848,” says the 1964 biography “Capt. Charles M. Weber” by George T. Hammond and Dale L. Morgan.
Short-sighted pioneer Stocktonians filled in the other streams for flood control. With Mormon Slough they took a different approach, persuading Congress to fund federal construction of the Stockton Diverting Canal.
Completed in 1910, the Diverting Canal does just what it says it does, diverts water headed towards downtown Stockton around the city’s east side and dumps it into the Calaveras River, which back then ran north of town.
The Bellota Weir, BTW, is the low dam, floodgate, and fish ladder at the fork of Mormon Slough and the Old Calaveras River. There’s currently a plan to modify it to ease the way for salmon. The weir can be opened to allow water to flow into the slough. The city did that after 1910, using the slough for sewage.
For much of the 20th Century, though, the slough remained an urban afterthought, a dry ditch, a trash dump, a site for homeless camps, the riverbed prone to grass fires, blighted and ugly as sin.
Rise Stockton Coalition said of this period, “Mormon Slough for decades has been utilized as a publicly subsidized pollution pond for Stockton industries, rather than as the public trust resource that it is under California’s public trust doctrine.”
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers repeatedly disdained to upgrade it, citing a cost-benefit formula that favored richer areas. Now, plan advocates say, the Corps adds equity to its equation.
The plan is to piece together “mini-projects” along the slough, soliciting community input and petitioning government and private donors for grants. To bolster the levees for flood control, taking pressure off the Calaveras River by diverting water as climate change brings potentially catastrophic rains. To remove homeless people and find them housing. To build trails and small parks, reintroduce steelhead fish, and allow local tribes to reintroduce native plants of cultural significance.
Planners believe introducing a new flow of fresh water to the Channel head will reduce toxic algae blooms in the Channel, create opportunities for entrepreneurs for shops and cafes, a place for kayaking, picnicking, even a tourist attraction.
It would, in short, restore the allure and beauty water brings to a city.
“It really has to be done with community input, thoughtfully, with integrity and really perfect planning,” Barrigan-Parrilla said.
Restore the Delta plans as-yet unscheduled community meetings in 2025. The last one, held in Stribley Center in December, was standing room only. Community members were jazzed.
As well they should be. It’s a terrific project. The only drawback is (brace yourself) the whole shebang may take 25 years.
“Because each location varies in the type of restoration activity that needs to take place, mini-projects with different permits,” Valencia said. “With that come hundreds of grant applications. So it’s just a process.”
In the near term, locals will see small restoration sites along the slough, native planting efforts, riverbed cleanups.
“Look, you know how slowly government moves,” Barrigan-Parrilla said. “We are not delusional. (But) You can start working on it and you can come up with something in the end. Ninety percent of what gets done in this world is because people stick with it.”
Fitzgerald’s column runs on Wednesdays. On Twitter and Instagram as Stocktonopolis. Email: mfitzgeraldstockton@gmail.com