One of the Conservancy’s partners is the Santa Cruz County Resource Conservation District (RCD), which has been working with landowners, public agencies, and other organizations to restore fish habitat in coastal streams. “We sent out 26 stop-work orders December 18--to all the little guys,” said Karen Christensen, executive director of the RCD, which had contracted with small construction firms to remove impediments to fish passage and to restore eroded banks. Suddenly there was no money to pay contractors. “We have submitted $1.1 million in invoices [to the Conservancy] for work completed last fall, and have $950,000 more not yet submitted,” Christensen said.

The freeze stopped 41 of the RCD’s projects in a critical period. On some creeks, restoration work had exposed banks to the hazards of erosion and failure if revegetation was not completed before heavy rains hit.

Good relationships that had taken much effort to build were seriously damaged.

In Shasta and Scott Valleys in Siskiyou County, some landowners who had signed on to remove flashboard dams for the sake of coho salmon now stand to lose their irrigation water, said Karen Gaffney, executive officer of West Coast Watershed. The dams are gone, but the fish-friendlier irrigation systems were not yet in place when work was stopped. “Can you imagine the catastrophe,” Gaffney said, “not only for them personally, but for the long-term viability of the program, which is based on trust?”

On Clear Creek, southwest of Redding, the Western Shasta RCD was about to start replanting creek banks. “We have 3,500 tree cuttings in cold storage, 6,000 plants in our nursery, and 600 plants stored off site,” project manager Jack Bramhall reported shortly after the order came. “The cuttings will mold and become useless unless we get them in the ground soon.” The RCD could not afford to hire the people needed to do the job. Eventually, it gave the plants away.

In Los Angeles, Larry Smith of North East Trees wrote on a Stop Work Impact blog that soon materialized, “We have $3.5 million worth of projects affected. We employ up to 35 mostly full-time staff when our Youth Environmental Stewards program is fully operational.”

In San Mateo County, the Peninsula Open Space Trust, with almost $3 million from the Conservancy, had completed a three-mile segment of Coastal Trail on the bluffs south of Half Moon Bay. It was to have opened in July, after three bridges, on order from a contractor, were installed. The stop-work order not only postponed the trail opening indefinitely, it also blasted a hole in the budgets of contractors.

“The worst is the uncertainty,” said Judy Kelly, director of the San Francisco Estuary Project. To her, the “poster child” for the cascading effects of the freeze is the Invasive Spartina Project (ISP), because it illustrates how interrupting work on a long-range project can undermine many years of successful effort.