As it goes for so many real estate developers here, President Donald Trump’s dreams of building in California could get derailed by regulations.
On Sunday, the president announced in a social media post that he would direct the Bureau of Prisons and the FBI to rebuild and reopen Alcatraz to “house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”
But if Trump is to get his prison, the bureau will have to first pass a number of environmental reviews, including the National Environmental Protection Act, and the California Environmental Quality Act, also known as CEQA.
CEQA requires developers to measure how a proposed project might hurt the environment — from wildlife to impacting water resources — and show how it will mitigate those impacts. Often, groups looking to block a project will sue under CEQA, claiming that an agency’s environmental report hasn’t met the mark.
There are a few major environmental hurdles any prison on Alcatraz would have to clear.
First, the birds.
Several species of waterfowl nest on Alcatraz throughout the year. These include the Western gull, cormorants, and the pigeon guillemot, which are legally protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Parts of the island are closed during seabird breeding season.
Contractors doing rehab work to the historic Alcatraz prison regularly have to pause construction or work around breeding season for these birds, historian John Martini said. Some parts of the island are closed much of the year to the public so the birds can roost. (Even the Escape from Alcatraz triathalon organizers are required to note in their permit that the swim won’t have a significant impact on birds.)
Alcatraz also has historic status. The island was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and was designated a National Historic Landmark — an even more elusive status — in 1986. The National Historic Preservation Act requires federal agencies to minimize harm to National Historic Landmarks when taking on projects that would impact them. Historic resources are also recognized as part of the environment under CEQA.
If the project does receive its environmental clearance, it might not be until Trump is out of office.
Consider how long other Alcatraz projects have taken.
The National Park Service started planning for a new ferry landing on Alcatraz for visitors in 2015. It took nearly two years for NPS to get environmental clearance — in part because the city of Sausalito appealed the project under CEQA, holding the appeal over NPS as leverage to ensure the agency designed it such that new ferries wouldn’t increase traffic around downtown Sausalito. It took another few years to get approvals from the city and Port of San Francisco. The project is finally set to be complete this winter — a decade later.
Even if the project were to pass environmental clearances, a new prison on Alcatraz would be extraordinarily difficult to build, Martini said.
“It’s a rock,” he said of the island. “There’s no soil out there. There’s no source of fresh water. When they built the prison back in the 1910s, they had to bring out everything — huge amounts of water for mixing concrete, let alone what was needed to support the people living on the island.”