A large portion of Long Beach’s Los Cerritos Wetlands is finally on its way to restoration, with officials gathering on Thursday, May 8, to celebrate the start of the long-awaited project.

The 154-acre portion of the Los Cerritos Wetlands, a privately owned oil field for the last six decades, is near the city’s border with Orange County and is bounded by Studebaker Road, Pacific Coast Highway, Second Street and Loynes Drive.

The effort to restore the Long Beach wetlands has been ongoing for years — and has faced numerous challenges along the way.

“Everyone agrees on the goal: This should be restored wetlands that should be open to the public,” Community Development Department Director Christopher Koontz said Thursday. “But then figuring out how to get there has been really hard.”

That’s because restoration work costs millions of dollars, Koontz said, which neither the state nor city has the money for.

“Oil companies are not a charity, so you have to figure out a way to make it work for them financially,” Koontz said, “(and) how the city and the state can be involved, and how to bring along the public and environmentalists. We made it work — but it was a lot of work.”

The concept for the project when the city initially began work on it in 2015 was worlds different from what it eventually turned out to be, Koontz said.

Back in 2001, Southern California Edison donated a parcel of land at Second Street and Studebaker Road to the state to settle an environmental lawsuit — which played a key role in making the original version of the project work for all the parties involved.

Under the auspices of the original pitch, Koontz said in a Thursday interview, Synergy Oil &Gas would donate the 154-acre portion of land housing its oil field and, in exchange, would get the state-owned parcel of land.

Synergy would also have to agree to relocate its oil operations to the Pumpkin Patch, a 7-acre area bordering Pacific Coast Highway and the San Gabriel River.

“And in the original version of the project, there was going to be a pipeline running through the city’s parcel, which didn’t end up coming to be,” Kootnz said, “but that was how we first got the project together.”

It took years to get that version of the project approved by all the necessary regulators, including the California Coastal Commission. The city finally got the OK in 2018.

But then, in 2022, the state approved Senate Bill 1137, which banned all new oil drilling within a 2,300-foot distance from schools, business, housing and other highly frequented areas.

The law’s implementation, though, was put on hold shortly after after its opponents gathered more than 600,000 signatures asking the Secretary of State’s office to allow voters to either approve or deny the new regulations.

“SB 1137 conceivably put this whole project out of the running,” Koontz said. “So we had to scramble about, (and figure out) what that actually mean(t) — because this was an approved project prior to that becoming law.”

From there, the city essentially had to start from scratch and rework the project to align with the new legislation, which went into effect in 2024 — after its opponents withdrew a measure on the November ballot.

“The project team kind of reworked the project. They got rid of the pipeline, they got rid of any drilling at Second (Street) and Studebaker (Road),” Koontz said. “And now, instead of up to 100 wells, there’s going to be 20 to 30 underground wells over at the pumpkin patch.”

Last year, the project finally came to fruition after the California Coastal Conservancy approved a deal in which Synergy Oil would hand over the 154 acres of wetlands to the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority in exchange for the 5-acre portion of land at Second Street and Studebaker Road.

That approval paved the way to restore the historic tidal connection to a greater portion of the wetlands — and reinvigorate the once-thriving ecosystem there.

Third District Councilmember Kristina Duggan, who is the LCWA chair and began work on the project shortly after her election to office two years ago, said getting to this point was a challenge.

“There was not a cohesive group. People were not talking. My job was to sit people down at the table and figure out what the problems were and how we could move it forward,” Duggan said in a Thursday interview. “I didn’t see this as moving forward two years ago, and here we are. It is unbelievable.”

The land swap deal, Duggan said, was the key to getting the project going.

“The land swap was really the crux of it, and I think we were able to figure out what each party involved needed to move it forward,” Duggan said. “To convert 154 acres of privately held coastal land into publicly accessible open space is something that’s rare and remarkable.”

The Los Cerritos Wetlands were once a vast marsh covering about 2,400 acres in what is now Seal Beach and Long Beach.

But now, the wetlands have been reduced to around 776 acres after years of development, oil drilling, agriculture and draining, among other things, disturbed the landscape and cut off the wetland’s traditional tidal connections.

The same is true for the vast majority of California’s historic wetlands, with 90% having disappeared, according to the state’s Water Quality Monitoring Council. And 75% to 85% of Southern California’s historic wetlands have been lost.

In 2006, the LCWA formed as a joint-powers authority — with representatives from Long Beach and Seal Beach, the state Coastal Commission, and the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers and Mountains Conservancy — with a mission to protect and restore the Los Cerritos Wetlands.

The LCWA’s focus is a 500-acre conservation area that spans both sides of the San Gabriel River, in Long Beach and Orange County.

The LCWA owns about 170 acres of the Southern wetlands. And in 2023, it received a $31.8 million grant from the California Coastal Conservancy to restore 103 acres of wetlands in Seal Beach.

And soon enough, as part of the land exchange deal, the LCWA will come to own the 154 acres of the Los Cerritos Wetlands.

Though the groundbreaking ceremony for the start of restoration on the wetlands was held Thursday, restoration work has already been ongoing for about a year, according to Synergy Oil CEO John McKeown, who is leading the effort.

There are three main phases to the restoration, McKeown said, the first two of which include decommissioning and abandoning the active oil wells on the property and removing the tanks, power lines, roads and other equipment.

During the final phase, Synergy will break the berms that have been preventing the ocean from re-entering the wetlands — restoring the historic tidal connection that once was — and restoring native habitat and public access to the property.

“I would say that this 156 acres is probably the most important,” McKeown said in a Thursday interview, “because over here is where the actual ocean, the water flooding of the entire 700 acres (of wetlands), comes in.”

The project will also include the construction of walking trails and a nature center focused on environmental education for visitors. The nature center, Koontz said, will have a focus on Native American history on the land.

“The abandonment of the oil field, that’s been going on for over a year — we’re about halfway done,” McKeown said. “We’re on target to be done (with the entire project) completely by the middle of 2027.”

McKeown said that about 75 acres of land, which doesn’t currently house any oil operations, has already been transferred to the LCWA.

Once the project is completely finished, the LCWA will receive full control of the land, and responsibility for its ongoing maintenance and stewardship.

The oil company  will also set up an endowment to help the LCWA maintain and manage the property once the authority takes it over.

Synergy, meanwhile, will develop new oil wells at the pumpkin patch. And, Koontz said, the company will likely turn the Second Street and Studebaker Road parcel into an industrial warehouse or similar use.

The company currently has permits for 17 new oil wells there, McKeown said, though it has room for 30 at the location and officials are working with the state for permission to drill the additional wells.

“All the equipment is at ground level or underground. It’ll just look like like a commercial office building over there, but it will actually be oil drilling,” Kootz said, “and it’ll be the cleanest oil well in the United States, because it’s the most regulated oil well in the United States, because of it being built here in California and in a sensitive location.”

Synergy, McKeown added, will also lose about $7 to $10 million yearly revenue from the shut down of the oil field on the wetlands — and about 30 jobs will be impacted.

“My objective was to try to accomplish restoration, but also keeping jobs for all the people that work at (Synergy) was important to me,” he said. “So we did that; we went out and bought all our own equipment, (and) we’re turning our company into an abandonment company.”

All Synergy employees, he added, will also soon benefit from a profit-sharing program.

And by mid-2027, the Southern California community will have access to the newly restored 154 acres of Los Cerritos Wetlands — the largest expansion of open green space in Long Beach since the construction of El Dorado Park in the 1960s, according to Mayor Rex Richardson.

“It’s not every day that we begin to embark on more than 150 acres of open space available to our community without leveraging public dollars,” Richardson said Thursday. “That is incredible.”