SF State will close Estuary & Ocean Science Center in Tiburon
San Francisco State University is closing its Romberg Tiburon Campus due to lack of funding, throwing marine biology students and faculty at the Estuary & Ocean Science Center into confusion and despair.
In a Feb. 4 announcement, university President Lynn Mahoney said the school would immediately begin phasing out operations at the Paradise Drive center — San Francisco Bay’s only marine science lab — and moving students and faculty to the university’s main campus.
Despite “significant efforts,” Mahoney said in the statement, “the university has not been able to raise enough funds or support to sustain operations at the 52.7-acre Romberg Tiburon Campus in the face of high maintenance costs at the facility.”
Estuary & Ocean Science Center Interim Executive Director Katharyn Boyer said the announcement had caused confusion and distress among the center’s scientists, as it remains unclear whether the work of adjunct professors and researchers will be able to continue.
“People are despondent,” Boyer said. “What does it mean? People are advising graduate students, they’re working on research projects. They’ve got offices and labs. They employ research technicians. What’s going to happen? Nobody knows.”
Boyer made a last-ditch plea to any donor who could help save the struggling marine biology station, which is also home to the Smithsonian Estuary Research Center West and San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.
“My only hope is that someone comes out of the woodwork and says, ‘We would like to help you,’” she said.
Carmen Domingo, a biology professor and the dean of the College of Science and Engineering at San Francisco State, called the closure a “tragedy.”
“This is the only research center situated on the bay asking questions about the health of the bay,” she said. “I wonder, does the whole region understand the implications (of the closure)? This should be heartbreak for the whole region.”
The Estuary & Ocean Science Center, formerly known as the Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies, was established in 1978 and provides research facilities, laboratories and classrooms for San Francisco State scientists, students and research partners. Then-university President Paul Romberg led the May 1977 acquisition of the property from the federal government, which had been using it as a marine lab under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its predecessor agencies since the 1960s. It had been a Miwok village, cattle ranch, codfishery and cannery before its federal purchase to become a U.S. Navy coaling station, nautical training school and the Naval Net Depot, producing steel anti-submarine and anti-torpedo nets for the Pacific during World War II.
Center scientists and their graduate students publish regularly on topics such as the effects of climate change and ocean acidification on marine life, shoreline resiliency and marine mammal behavior in San Francisco Bay. The center also hosts visiting lecturers with talks open to the public and science education programs in local schools. The center’s Discovery Day open house last fall drew more than 500 visitors from around the Bay Area to explore marine science-based activities and exhibits.
San Francisco State is primarily responsible for funding the campus and receives only a small amount of money from the larger California State University system, administrators say. Most of the research on site is funded by grants. San Francisco State allocates money for instruction and facility maintenance.
But the center’s facilities, housed in old U.S. naval base warehouses, have been expensive to upgrade and maintain.
In early 2022, the university announced it could no longer support the facility. An advisory committee was formed to address the problem, and last year the committee submitted a plan to the California State University chancellor’s office outlining a path to self-sufficiency within five years. The hope was to renovate some of the derelict buildings on the site and rent them to scientific institutions to provide a maintenance income.
Boyer said she had already lined up $5.8 million in grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency to build an aquatic research training facility, along with grants from the California Coastal Conservancy.
She said she was awaiting approval of the plan when she instead received word that the university was pulling the plug and will now have to decline the money. Boyer said the center was still short $500,000-$600,000 and that she would need $1 million yearly to maintain the campus.
“We’ve been working so hard and we’ve come so close to covering our costs, and it’s not enough,” Boyer said. “It just makes me sick.”
University administrators say the closure is essential as San Francisco State’s finances have reached a crisis point. With a structural deficit of $13.9 million and anticipated state cuts to the California State University budget as well, the university needs to reduce its budget by $25 million, said Robert King, a spokesperson for the president’s office. The statewide system has seen declining enrollment and an 8% funding cut in California’s state budget, forcing the elimination of some courses and programs entirely at other campuses.
The statement from Mahoney said the closure will “allow (the university) to redirect critical funding into the main campus during a challenging period for the university, CSU and the state.”
Shuttering the doors will save the university about $800,000, Boyer said, but it may cost that much or more to relocate its facilities to the main campus.
“They have to cut dramatically. They are in an impossible position, I understand that,” she said. “But this is such a small cost savings compared with the problem. And they’re not considering at all the value of this place, what will be lost.”
The university said no layoffs are planned. The center is home to 17 tenured and adjunct faculty and 11 research assistants. About 40 graduate students use the center’s laboratories and facilities for field research.
Due to low enrollment, the center’s interdisciplinary master’s program in estuary science offered at the center was discontinued in the 2023-2024 school year, according to the university.
There are no classes or lectures at the site this spring due to cost-cutting measures, Boyer said.
Staff and faculty were told Feb. 1 that Mahoney had recommended closing the center but held out a slim hope as the chancellor’s office had not weighed in. The statement from the president’s office that a decision had been made caused shock and confusion, Boyer said.
While the president’s statement said “very few” students and faculty will be directly impacted by the closure, professors at the center disagreed.
Geography and environment professor Ellen Hines, who recently retired after 14 years teaching at the center, said the impact of losing field-based study at the site was immeasurable.
“They are trying to make it about the numbers,” Hines said. “This field-based experience has affected countless students and inspired many scientists over the years. Our science and our students have incredible reputations throughout the Bay Area.
She vowed: “We will continue to fight to retain our site and our community.”
While tenured faculty, staff and students will be relocated to the university’s main campus in San Francisco, not all the scientists at the site may find a place there.
One research associate said principal investigators working at the center and their research assistants had been told there will be no space for them to continue their research on the main campus.
These university scientists, many of them adjunct professors, use the center’s laboratory space to conduct research that is funded mainly by state grants. A portion of their grant money goes to the university to pay for laboratory upkeep, said Toni Ignoffo, a senior research associate working with retired adjunct professor Wim Kimmerer.
Ignoffo, who has studied and worked at the center for 20 years, said her current project is studying the feeding habits of the endangered longfin smelt. She said she and Kimmerer must now look elsewhere for laboratory space to continue their research.
“We cannot do that work on (the) main campus, they don’t even have a seawater system,” she said. “There’s no place for us there.”
However, King, the spokesperson for the president’s office, denied that research would be disrupted.
“The plan is to move all (principal investigators) back to the main campus,” he said. “Space is not an issue.”
There are also questions as to how to house the many marine animals in tanks. Administrators said the animals could be moved to the recently completed science building on the main campus. The facility has a small seawater room, but Boyer questioned whether there would be space enough to accommodate the graduate students and their experiments.
Boyer, a biology professor who specializes in eelgrass propagation, will be unable to keep the bayside eelgrass tanks. Administrators conceded the main campus does not have the facilities to house them.
Boyer has been awarded federal grant funding to study eelgrass propagation in Richardson Bay, part of the Richardson Bay Regional Agency’s program to restore eelgrass beds damaged by anchored-out boats in the bay.
Questions also remain about what will happen to the laboratories and conference spaces at the site. The derelict buildings from the old naval base will need to be secured and tanks and equipment near the water’s edge removed, Domingo said.
“I think what we don’t have clear is the cost of closing the campus,” said Domingo. “We haven’t had time to have a conversation about what it’s going to cost to remodel labs on the main campus.”
Administrators said it is unclear if the bayfront site can be sold. The university purchased the site from the federal government for just $1 with the stipulation that it be used only for educational purposes. It might be possible to sell all or a part of the property to developers, Boyer said, if the terms of the property transfer can be renegotiated.
Boyer said the closure brings an end to the dreams of scientists and administrators who hoped to make the center a hub for scientific thought on climate-change adaptation and marine science.
“We built this to grow the leadership of the (center), to grow the regional capacity for doing this,” Boyer said. “We had a place where people wanted to come and have these conversations and push the science forward.”
Andrew Chang, an adjunct professor of biology at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center West on the Paradise Drive campus, said the Smithsonian center would need to relocate its research on the effects of invasive species in San Francisco Bay to another facility.
“I am confident that we will continue with our work,” he said. “But it will be very, very difficult to match the opportunities and benefits provided by the central location and colleagues at the (Estuary & Ocean Science Center).”
Domingo said despite some small fundraisers, one of which took place at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Belvedere last year, she was frustrated by the community’s lack of support for the facility. A recent grant application to the Marin Community Foundation was rejected, she said.
“A lot of this work was around Marin County,” she said. “Marin benefits from having (the center) it its backyard, but I don’t think they got the required support from Marin. Now you might just see a big ugly fence around this place.”
Domingo and Boyer both said they still hoped a large institution, perhaps another university or private donor, might come forward, but chances seemed slim.
“If anything is going to happen, it needs to happen now,” Domingo said. “I always hold out for miracles.”
Contributing writer Gretchen Lang of Belvedere covers the environment.
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