As Executive Project Manager of the South Bay Salt Ponds Restoration Project, Dave Halsing brings more than 11 years of experience in environmental consulting to the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. At firms including Environmental Science Associates, AECOM, and URS, he has worked on or managed environmental and infrastructure management, restoration, and enhancement projects in and around San Francisco Bay. In seven of those years, he worked on various aspects of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, including its Phase 2 alternatives development, design, environmental analysis documents, and permitting. In the last two years, he worked as a deputy to his predecessor, John Bourgeois, helping to keep all the Project’s pieces in motion while collaborating with the Project Management Team and project partners. Other project work relevant to the Restoration Project involved San Francisco Bay habitat restoration or enhancement, public infrastructure, regulatory processes, alternatives development, and stakeholder or public engagement.
Prior to his consulting career, Dave was a research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park. His work focused on integrating economics, spatial data, and decision sciences into the natural and physical sciences that were the USGS’ primary focus. Dave has a Bachelor’s Degree in Biology from Stanford University and a Master of Science in Natural Resource Policy from the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment. He brings a strong project management background and a multidisciplinary approach to this challenging, multi-objective, multi-stakeholder project.
Hi and welcome back!
One goal of this blog was listing the Top Ten Questions I get about this Restoration Project. You can check out previous entries on that list here. Here’s a question from the rest of the Top 10.
Are salt ponds good or bad?
Where can I bring my dog? My drone? My bike? My…self?
These are common – and important – questions. The explanations and reasoning behind the answers are at least as important as the answers themselves. I’m trying to tighten up these entries, so let’s dive right in…
In our last entry here at Salty Dave’s Wetland Weblog (still hoping for some better name suggestions…), I wrote about sea level rise and related aspects of coastal flood management and adaptation.
After covering a few other topics in my blog entries, I thought this would be a good time to revisit another in the list of common questions I get from students, media, and other interested people. This one is such a meaty topic that there’s enough content for two blog entries on it…LUCKY YOU!
Here’s the first one; we’ll run Part 2 in a few weeks.
I’m a native of San Francisco, and I lived in various spots on the Peninsula until I was almost 40 years old. Over most of that time, the Bay was just a thing I had to drive across on a bridge or cross under in a BART train to get where I was going.
In my job as Executive Project Manager of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, I do a lot of media interviews, public appearances, presentations to elected officials, and site tours with groups of students and other interested groups. I also meet a lot of people socially. In those settings, the “what do you do?” question comes up a lot.
Hello – and welcome back to Salty Dave’s Wetland Weblog, where we ironically embrace a lot of alliterative archaisms!
I am psyched to have gotten our first Reader Suggestion for a blog entry topic: Brian Coyne asked about what we are planning to do at the Eden
We’re trying out something new here at the Project’s website: a blog! I know: blogs are very 2002…but, uh…having had yet another birthday, I realized that I’m getting old enough that 2002 doesn’t seem that long ago to me. I still have a sweatshirt from 1996 that I wear pretty often, so I’m not discarding a good piece of casualwear OR a fun way to reach the stakeholders and various audiences for the Restoration Project just because either one dates back to the Clinton administration.¹