Update: Coastal Wetlands Preserve

Marina Center will restore the Balloon Track, an environmentally degraded parcel of land, to productive use. In the process, it will enhance Eureka’s environment in several important ways.

In fact, Marina Center’s development will meet or surpass all local, state and federal environmental standards. It represents a vast improvement over the Balloon Track's presently degraded condition.

Marina Center also provides for a rare opportunity to restore and preserve a significant portion of one of the historic tributaries to Humboldt Bay and Pacific Coast wetlands habitat. It will also restore more than 10 acres – nearly one third of the total development area – into a coastal wetlands preserve. The initiative will add to Eureka’s public access open space and will restore the area to a natural condition it has not known for 100 years or more.

Funded entirely by Marina Center, the restoration project will remove exotic, non-native vegetation (and a significant amount of trash and debris) currently dominating the wetlands and adjacent Clark Slough channel and replace it with a diverse habitat of coastal marsh vegetation.

Restoring the area to historic topographic elevations and replacing non-native vegetation, mostly Phragmites australis, or “common reed,” with native marsh vegetation will promote the return of a wide range of water birds to the site.

Marina Center's Coastal Wetlands Preserve