Each year since 2006 when we started publishing our annual reports, I have sat down with my staff and selected projects to highlight in that year’s report. We then wrote short stories on our most newsworthy projects – the ones that best showcased the SMBRC’s activity that year.  However, as our program become more broad and diverse, we found it is increasingly difficult to choose just a few from our growing project line-up. You can call this the price we pay for success. So this year, instead of just giving a few snapshots, we decided to offer full descriptions of our major projects and activities, grouped into geographic or programmatic areas. With many photographs, this new layout captures the broad scope of our work. We also hope that this report will give our readers a better sense on some of the ongoing, multi-year projects that we have not presented in previous reports.   

Whether you leaf through or read every story in detail, you see that in 2010 SMBRC staff and stakeholders carried out our mission and achieved far-reaching goals, objectives, and milestones laid out in our Bay Restoration Plan. We continued to initiate, fund, and collaborate with our partners on a large array of water quality and habitat restoration projects - whether blocking trash from entering storm drains in Inglewood, planting native vegetation to restore degraded coastal bluffs on Palos Verdes Peninsula, or removing sea urchins from ravaged rocky reefs to bring back the kelp forests, these projects can be found throughout every region of the watershed.

We also expanded our efforts where the SMBRC’s unique structure makes us the ideal organization to provide services to our partners and the Santa Monica Bay community. These include facilitating planning and design processes, planning restoration, leveraging funding, monitoring and independent technical studies for filling data gaps, and providing forums to address issues and foster consensus on issues important to the Bay’s health. Our effort in these areas are exemplified by our involvement in the Ballona Wetlands Restoration planning process, which includes stakeholder participation facilitation, scientific monitoring, and watershed historical ecology studies, among other activities.

Last but not the least is our public outreach program that has not only brought the SMBRC into the media spotlight, but has motivated more people from various sectors of the Bay community to engage in Bay restoration activities at the grassroots level. Besides the highly-regarded Boater Education Program and the Public Involvement and Education (PIE) program, there are also increasingly popular events such as the Annual Coastal Cleanup,  publications such as the Urban Coast and the revised Boater’s Guide,  and extensive outreach associated with all other program areas, most notably marine life protection, wetland restoration, and seafood contamination.  

In reflecting back on 2010, we are especially pleased with the results we achieved despite the unprecedented financial hardship the organization endured in the previous year.  We are particularly grateful to the leadership of our local congressional representatives and federal EPA in increasing program support during this challenging time.  But above all and once again, we thank all our partners and stakeholders. It is their unwavering commitment and support that made all what we have accomplished possible. We certainly hope and are looking forward to seeing this bonding between the SMBRC and all our partners grow stronger and together we can do more and greater things in the coming years. 

Shelley Luce, Executive Director