Cargill drops fight to build 12,000 homes on Redwood City salt ponds

In what environmental groups are hailing as a “complete victory,” Cargill Salt announced this week it will not appeal a decision by a federal judge that protects Redwood City’s salt ponds from development, effectively halting its decades-long effort to build thousands of new homes there. The move comes after a U.S. District Court judge ruled in October that the federal Environmental Protection Agency ignored its own regulations when it decided in 2019 that about 1,400 acres of San Francisco Bay salt ponds adjacent to the city’s port aren’t protected by the Clean Water Act. As salt ponds, the land isn’t worth much financially — but if the ponds had been excluded from the act, it would have allowed Cargill to make lucrative land and development deals potentially worth billions of dollars.