Bay Area entrepreneur envisions new purposes for land, ways to save planet

James Levine is a civil engineer. He’s also an entrepreneur, environmental consultant, a developer and someone who figures out how to solve multiple problems simultaneously in a way that he hopes benefits all.

One day while he was looking out at the bay from his Emeryville office, Levine was struck by the steep unnatural riprap shoreline surrounding most of the bay that discourage wildlife from gathering there. He also thought about the many tons of sediment that needed to be dredged from the bay so that big ships could pass — and what he could do with that fill to encourage wildlife habitat elsewhere.

“I realized that because wildlife really want more shallow, variegated areas, and that if I could safely use dredged sediment to create those, I could provide an economic solution for the ports, which are losing billions of dollars of possible revenue because they couldn’t get the big ships in, and make extraordinary habitat at the same time,” he said.

Thus was born the Montezuma Wetlands Project in Solano County, a private initiative begun in the early 2000s that addresses two problems: the historic loss of wetlands and how one can responsibly dispose of millions of cubic yards of sediments dredged annually from San Francisco Bay Area ports, harbors and channels.

Formerly one of the most valuable habitats in the San Francisco Bay region, the Montezuma Wetlands, next to Suisun Marsh near Collinsville, were diked for agricultural use in the late 1800s. It was not until late 2020 that the levees were breached as part of Levine’s 15-year project to return the area to its original wetlands, using dredged fill from the bay to restore habitat.

“Sometimes problems are so difficult that they’re often only solved if you can combine two or three problems together, and find an integrated solution,” Levine, CEO of Montezuma Water LLC, said.

Levine’s company pioneered the use of dredged sediment to restore wetlands, now an increasingly common method. And the brackish water habitat at the newly formed Montezuma Wetlands will support a number of species, including smelt and small salmon, while the adjacent restored marsh will be attractive to the salt marsh harvest mouse, Ridgeway’s rail and California black rail, which are listed as endangered, threatened or near-threatened.

Levine recently talked about some of his many projects and what one needs to succeed in a responsible way in today’s business world.

How did you get your start?

For three years, I worked for the State Water Quality Control Board, the Regional Water Quality Control Board in Oakland, and for two and a half years, I was an incident commander for environmental emergencies. I handled a lot of things. Then I worked on some of the first Superfund sites in the region. I was a guy they sent down, and so I did a lot of engineering and figuring out how to solve problems.

Why the focus on creating wetlands?

I thought why can’t I take that fill from projects and fill up some of these areas and make them much more valuable ecologically? So I started on a quest to do that. And the way that I did it was I signed an engineering geologist to find me the best site in the Bay Area. I always like to team people up with different backgrounds. … They came back three weeks later and there was one site that was an order of magnitude better than every other site of the entire Bay Area.  And that that was the 4,000 acres of land that Santa Fe Southern Pacific Land Company owned in Solano County. … We thought if we could restore this by putting the dredged sediment here and placing it in a pattern where it would leave a landform, when you’re done it would look like a tidal wetland.

In 2020, we turned our first 550 acres plus another 100 acres of buffer to the tides. And the success of the restoration is unprecedented and how fast it was. We thought it would take four years for vegetation to come back, and it took nine months.

You also plan to use some dredging fill for your proposed Jersey Island project in East Contra Costa County, too. How would you do that?

In Contra Costa, there’s really not a great place to go to the beach and your kids could be unsupervised for safety reasons. … With a county with temperatures that are 100, 105 degrees, how valuable would it be to the community to have a place like that where you can go to, like a big beach? And, as a business, we’re really experienced at moving large quantities of material like sand and fill and all that. Decker Island is right next door; we’d probably pump it (the sand) over.

What are some of the other proposals for the six-acre island currently owned by Ironhouse Sanitary District? We thought it could be a really good green energy (wind and solar) generation location, which is one of Contra Costa County’s goals, to generate local green energy.

Then we saw some habitat restoration potential, particularly for the giant garter snake. That’s an endangered species that you run into it when you’re doing levee projects, which are necessary projects if you want to save these islands … and so to have mitigation already available, it would just be a huge benefit.

We were just struggling to figure out, though, how to replace the cattle grazing, which the (Ironhouse Sanitary) district was losing money on, running their grazing operation. … It keeps the weeds down, so there is a benefit to grazing. But cattle grazing, I don’t know. So that’s when we thought what about if we grazed wild animals and gave the people around here like the most interesting thing to look at that you know, they ever look at on a weekly basis? I mean, I would come out here once a week to see it, to look over a huge 500-acre area and see herds of exotic animals.

How are your Jersey Island proposals seen by environmentalists? Nothing would thrill us more than to partner with the Sierra Club and Greenbelt Alliance and other groups. That would help us make it better … and I think kind of marry community values and environmental values. It doesn’t have to always be one or the other. And so, I think there’s ways of doing it, but it does require people to come out of their corners and people get out of their boxes and be willing to consider things that maybe they hadn’t thought they would before.

What upcoming business projects do you have that will help the environment?  We’ve launched two new enterprises over the last year, one with a goal to sequester several million tons of carbon dioxide every year. And the second is to try to advance the construction of a desalination plant for the Bay Area as an additional form of water security.

What’s different about how you approach problems these days? It’s a different world now. You know, the old solutions are just not working. We have to think a little bit differently. And I think, based on things I’ve done, that if you did that, you know, maybe you could do some really amazing things. __________________________________________________________________________JIM LEVINE

Position: CEO Montezuma Water; civil and environmental engineer

Education: UC Berkeley master’s degree in engineering

Age: 67

Residence: Berkeley

FIVE THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT JIM LEVINE

He plays guitar in a rock band called CRISIS.
He used to eat ice cream every night. Now, he’s replaced it with small doses of dark chocolate.
He still runs hills in Berkeley reminiscent of his high school track practice days.
He competed in martial arts for 25 years.
His first work experience was with a small landscaping business, which helped put him through college.