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PERMIT NO. 6-94 (Issued on July 24, 1996, As Amended Through March 4, 2010) AMENDMENT NO. SIX (Exclusive of Amendment No. Four) City of Redwood City and Keech Properties, LLC Page 19 While supporting evidence is sparse and somewhat speculative, there is evidence to support USFWS's concerns. On some levee trails us'ed for recreation in the South Bay, the ability to manage predators has proven to be extremely difficult because of the hazards of placing traps in areas frequented by people and their pets, vandalism to tarpaulins, and the negative perception of predator management by some people. To conduct predator management in these areas, additional measures have been taken to reduce contact between the public and the trapping program, such as setting traps after dark, checking traps before sunrise, and careful placement of traps to avoid heavily traveled paths. The USFWS states that these extra measures have greatly reduced effective trapping time and area, and required more personnel to maintain trapping efforts. The Commission staff, the Commission's Design Review Board, and others pointed out that both the Clapper Rail and the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse have persisted at the site despite over 20 years of public use of the levees. While development of the tip of the Redwood Shores peninsula can reasonably be expected to increase public use of the levee, increase the presence of predators, and increase the conflicts between predator control efforts and public use, the Commission believes that some combination of the public access design and management alternatives described above could lessen the severity of those impacts sufficiently that even with increased public use, impacts on the rail and the harvest mouse would be less than currently , exists. The Commission staff also pointed out that the fences, gates, and mitigation channel designed to exclude predators and the public will not be completely effective, a point that the USFWS acknowledges. However, the USFWS believes that these exclusion measures will be effective in keeping many potential predators from rail and harvest mouse habitat. In addition, by closing 2.2 miles of public access on the perimeter levee, as well as by , mandating large open space buffer areas between urban development and endangered species habitat, the USFWS believes that the activities of predator control will be shielded from public view, increasing their effectiveness and minimizing the controversy that predator control programs often engender. However, the public use of the levee has not appeared to significantly alter the habitat's viability for the Clapper Rail or Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse. In addition, the installation of the moat and fences will not effectively exclude the red fox and other feral predators from the levee, which is a reason given to fence the area from human use. Thus, a major reason for closing access on the levee is so the public will not be able to observe or interfere with predator control activities. Therefore, because the Commission is not thoroughly convinced that relocating the public access is justifiable-absent the ability of the USFWS to block the overall project, because rights to the levee were expressly obtained by the State of California to provide public access, and because no alternative inland public access could match the experience afforded by access on the perimeter levees, the Commission finds that eventually access should be returned to the perimeter levee as soon as the apparent conflict between public access on the perimeter levee and sensitive wildlife species is eliminated or reduced to an acceptable level. Therefore, this authorization