Greenwood Beach Restoration Project

As of Spring 2025, this project is being led by the Town of Tiburon. Please contact the Town of Tiburon for further details/progress.

Greenwood and Brunini Beaches are the beach shoreline area along Blackies Pasture public park in Tiburon. The project site was historically a larger, wider barrier beach that sheltered a non-tidal salt marsh with shallow seasonal ponds. Today, the shoreline includes:

• Broad intertidal mudflats.
• A flood channel delta.
• A small salt marsh patch.
• Two small pocket beaches, both eroded and surrounded by old bay fill and shoreline armoring. Greenwood Beach in Particular is eroding asphalt and concrete into the bay.

Over the years, additional fill materials including asphalt, concrete rubble, and sand were placed to combat wave erosion of the park's shoreline. However, the shoreline has continued to erode, as waves scatter fill materials away from the shoreline and onto adjacent mudflats. Given this, the Greenwood Beach Restoration project is working to develop a more sustainable, nature-based "living shoreline" approach to managing the beach shoreline. The goal is to construct a pilot project that demonstrates the ability of natural bay beach systems to inhibit coastal erosion instead of rip-rap which provided no habitat values and limits public use of the shoreline.

Living shoreline techniques reinforce the shoreline and minimize coastal erosion, while restoring natural habitats for native plants and animals. Through strategic placement of native vegetation and natural materials such as sand, gravel, and cobble, bay beaches can protect shoreline systems and the tidal marshes behind them from further erosion.

Project Goals

1. Demonstrate bay beaches as a living shoreline design approach and a viable alternative to riprap and seawalls.
2. Provide habitat benefits through enhancements to the beach system and marsh area behind the beach.
3. Provide a publicly accessible design-with-nature model for similar locations around San Francisco Bay.

Funding

Earlier concept and preliminary designs were funded through a partnership between the Marin Community Foundation and the California State Coastal Conservancy.

CEQA for the project was finalized in September 2024. The recent design phase is funded by a $380,000 grant from the San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority to Marin County and will be completed in April 2025.

In Fall 2024, the Town of Tiburon was awarded a $1.4M grant from the State Coastal Conservancy to finalize the design and construct the project. It is now a Town of Tiburon project.

Zone

This project is not associated with a Flood Control Zone.

• Marin County Flood Control and Water Conservation District
• San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority
• Marin Community Foundation
• California State Coastal Conservancy
• Town of Tiburon