That San Francisco State University is facing budget cuts comes as no surprise.

Sadly, it’s the sign of the times.

Just north of us, Sonoma State University is eliminating a number of academic departments it has offered and its athletic teams are being dropped to close its budget gap.

San Francisco State is facing a similar dilemma — a “financial emergency” — caused by a reduction in state funding for the university system and a downturn in enrollment. Its leadership has decided to close the Estuary and Ocean Science Center at the Romberg Campus in Tiburon. The bayfront marine lab is the only one of its kind on San Francisco Bay.

The center, which is a scientific hub, teaching space and conference center, has been on the budgetary chopping block for several years. In 2023-24, low enrollment led the university to eliminate the master’s degree offered in estuary science, instead adding it to the college’s biology graduate program.

This time the ax is falling.

It is a sad loss, not only for the college and students pursuing studies in marine science, but also for the Bay Area. The college is moving its lab and work to its city campus, but that can’t replace the hands-on research that the center has provided since San Francisco State in 1978 acquired the 57-acre site that had been surplused by the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The center has played an important role in not only learning more about the bay’s ecology, but also in enhancing its environmental health.

In recent years, the center has been at the forefront of study and repair of the bay’s field of eelgrass, the underwater pasture that plays an important role in the bay’s habitat and health. The center has been at the forefront of efforts to grow eelgrass and replant acres that have been lost of pollution and damage.

Its deep-water location has made it a perfect spot to study ecosystem challenges such as ocean acidification and sea level rise, particularly nature-based strategies.

Those environmental challenges aren’t going away, but our local research into tracking and addressing them is losing a valuable research asset with the center’s closure.

The college has not said what it plans to do with the property, itself part of the history of Tiburon.

The center’s closure also doesn’t address the cost of needed repairs, many resulting from postponed maintenance.

Other colleges have managed to retain their marine laboratories, among them San Jose State’s Moss Landing lab and the University of California at Davis has a busy oceanfront classroom and research lab in Bodega Bay.

College of Marin will soon reopen its long-shuttered Bolinas lab.

But the Tiburon center is the only one situated and focused on the bay.

It is both unique and important. Its students, benefiting from the research they’ve been able to participate in at the center, have been able to find work with state and federal regulatory and resource agencies.

Tiburon Mayor Holli Thier is hoping that funding can be found to keep the center open.

“We need to do everything we can to preserve the only marine science lab on San Francisco Bay and the critical research performed there,” she said.

With the state and federal government in budget-cutting mode, the immediate outlook is bleak.

The unique educational and research benefits offered at the center and its scientific role in restoring the bay’s environmental health seem to outweigh the estimated $1 million the university hopes to save by closing its doors.