Staff at the California Coastal Commission wants Point Reyes National Seashore staff to do a better job of measuring water quality/NPS file
Editor's note: This recasts to clarify the ranching industry's role in the seashore's establishment.
While Point Reyes National Seashore staff has approved a plan to allow the ranching industry to remain in business at the seashore for two more decades, staff at the California Coastal Commission is concerned that the plan fails to adequately protect marine resources.
National Park Service staff in September issued their final environmental impact statement on how to manage the seashore's native Tule elk herds alongside cattle herds. While the plan called for maintaining the seashore's free-ranging Tule elk, it also allows for the killing of elk near livestock operations.
Ranching has existed on the coastal California peninsula for 150 years. The industry's role in the establishment of the seashore has been and remains controversial. While the seashore's administrative history notes ranchers' opposition to the seashore, the Park Service on the seashore's website explains that ranchers came around to supporting the seashore due to development pressures creeping into the area.
Marin County had embraced a favorable growth plan in the 1950s and 60s to benefit real estate developers and speculators, with assistance from the state department of transportation. With the influx of new residents, many of them affluent, property taxes for the county as a whole dramatically increased. At the same time, dairy operators nationally saw prices for the products drop considerably. Dairies regionally had been closing or consolidating for sometime, but the combination of economics, competition, labor costs, taxes, environmental regulation, and land values accelerated the pace. Point Reyes dairies feared the loss of the quality of life as much as declining profitability. If more dairies closed their doors, the fear rose that the supporting dairy industry infrastructure might collapse. Most important, the ranchers valued the pastoral landscape that their parents and grandparents had set roots in, often back to the nineteenth century.
In order to secure their place at Point Reyes, the dairy and cattle ranchers formed an uneasy alliance with the Sierra Club in hopes of preserving their ranches and west Marin open space. The National Park Service had actively sought to establish a literal beachhead on the California coast, and Point Reyes in particular, as early as 1936. Washington was approached to help solve the pressing needs of many local and national constituencies. The compromise hammered out by Congress and signed by President Kennedy in 1962 explicitly provided for the retention of the ranches in a designated pastoral zone, with ranchers signing 25-30 year reservations of use and occupancy leases, and special use permits for cattle grazing. Over the ensuing ten years, NPS acquired the 17 remaining operating ranches and the property of the abandoned ranches.
While then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar of the Obama administration in November 2012 refused to renew the lease of the Drakes Bay Oyster Co. so the estero could be managed as official wilderness, he also directed the Park Service to work on extending ranching leases “from 10 to 20 years to provide greater certainty and clarity for the ranches operating within the national park’s Pastoral Zone and to support the continued presence of sustainable ranching and dairy operations."
In February 2016, litigation was brought against the Park Service related to the ongoing ranch planning process and the use of lands in the planning area for ranching and dairying. The plaintiffs and the Park Service, together with the ranchers and the County of Marin, entered into settlement negotiations. The court approved a multi-party Settlement Agreement on July 14, 2017. Per the agreement, the Park Service agreed that in lieu of a Ranch Comprehensive Management Plan, it would prepare a General Management Plan Amendment and Environmental Impact Statement addressing the management of the lands currently leased for ranching in Point Reyes and the north district of Golden Gate.
That effort led to the FEIS released this past September.
Groups that oppose ranching at Point Reyes on the California coast claim the 24 cattle and dairy operations, comprising 28,000 of the park’s 71,000 acres, adversely affect the environment (water quality, methane emissions, erosion, fish habitat), the infrastructure (pavement degradation from milk trucks) and recreational opportunities at the seashore.
A report from the California Coastal Commission's staff voiced concern over a lack of clarity and reporting in the seashore's plan. The commission staff noted that away from the Tomales Bay area of the national seashore water quality data had not been collected since 2013.
"The data that are available indicate that water quality standards were not typically being met in creeks in (Point Reyes National Seashore) that drain into Drake’s Estero and the Pacific Ocean," the staff noted. "Importantly, NPS is proposing to implement the same suite of best management practices and water quality protection measures in (Point Reyes National Seashore) that were successful in addressing significant water quality problems in areas upstream of Tomales Bay."
"However, the GMPA does not describe where and on what timeline these measures will be implemented, or how their efficacy will be evaluated," the report stated.
The full commission is scheduled to meet January 14, and staff has recommended that it put conditions on the seashore's agricultural plan before the Park Service issues any leases. Specifically, the staff wants the Park Service to outline a strategy for monitoring water quality beyond the Tomales Bay watershed, "with a particular focus on areas that drain to Abbott’s Lagoon and Drake’s Estero and the creeks that drain to these features, but also including areas that drain directly to the Pacific Ocean."
Additionally, staff wants the Park Service to provide an annual report to the commission's executive director that details "monitoring results and water quality analysis."
"With the incorporation of this condition, staff believes that appropriate measures would be in place to ensure that marine resources in the coastal zone would be protected, that biological productivity of coastal waters would be sustained, and adverse effects of water pollution would be minimized," said the report.
Seashore staff declined Monday to comment pending the Park Service's formal response to the Coastal Commission, which was being prepared.
While the commission staff had asked the Park Service to extend public review of the management plan through March 2021 due to the complexities of the document and keen public interest, the federal agency extended it only until January 20.
Comments
Two immediate thoughts comeexample of how the lie of ranchers being "instrumental to the creation of the seashore", as this author stated, is perpetuated. The opposite is true, the ranchers fought the seashore tooth and nail and it is all documented in the administrative history of the seashore.
Sadly, the park need only provide their standard line of "we will monitor the situation carefully to ensure practices are carried out as well as possible" in order to get past this criticism.
I was surprised to see the sentence, "Ranching families were instrumental in the establishment of the seashore in 1962, and Point Reyes' enabling legislation allowed for continuing ranching," and I was going to comment on it. I see Skyler has already.
The ranchers opposed the creation of the Seashore bitterly, and the option for continued ranching with buyouts and leasebacks was the only way they would support it, though even that was initially opposed. They now are happy, given the present economics of dairy ranching, because they have subsidized rent and don't pay property taxes. And the Park Service is giving them everything they asked for prior to the plan's development, allowing them to increase their activities in the Seashore. It's hardly a good use of public land.
Skyler Thomas mentioned Managing a Land in Motion: An Administrative History of Point Reyes National Seashore. It is a report written for the Park Service. Here are some excerpts. (You can download a copy at https://permanent.fdlp.gov/gpo83873/admin.pdf -- or order it online at Amazon for $15.99!)
The government could then lease the land in that zone back to the existing ranchers, so long as they continued the same type of industry and land use. This particular strategy immediately alienated ranchers and many other local residents. (p.76-77)
The board of supervisors made its stance official in September 1958, when it voted, four to one, to oppose any plan for a national seashore at Point Reyes. The Supervisors took the quick, unplanned vote after hearing from a delegation of Point Reyes ranchers. ... Soon after the supervisors' ad hoc vote, other private landholders and residents of West Marin County joined the ranchers in opposition to the NPS plans. (p.79-80)
In July 1959, ranchers, residential property owners, state, county, and federal officials came together at a meeting of the West Marin Property Owners Association. Most of the day's speakers voiced opposition to the park proposal, none more vociferously than rancher James Kehoe, who exclaimed: "Well, what the hell! We as a dairy group don't want to give this land away and we are opposing this bill in a big way. (p.82)
And an interesting addendum, given the present controversy at PRNS:
Legislators paid close attention to property owners' rights, but the ranches and dairies were not elements that the NPS, park supporters, or legislators sought to protect as part of the larger national seashore idea. The terms vernacular landscape or working landscape were not yet part of the NPS lexicon in the early 1960s.The focus on ranchlands as cultural landscapes worthy of attention and protection did not emerge until years later. NPS policies formally identifying cultural landscapes did not appear until 1988.During debates regarding the authorization of Point Reyes National Seashore, many members of Congress described the ranches either as obstacles to overcome in gaining congressional authorization, or opportunities for obtaining the most territory without incurring an insurmountable price tag. (p.89)
It should be noted that the document was written in 2007, well before the present ranching controversy erupted. A couple of years ago, Rep. Jared Huffman, the local congressman, introduced an amendment to legislation stating that preserving ranching was recognized as a purpose of the Seashore --more than 50 years after its creation.
A free copy of the administrative history can be found here:
https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/pore/admin.pdf
Also not to be overlooked is how the National Park Service describes the history on its website:
https://www.nps.gov/pore/learn/historyculture/stories_ranching.htm
So while there was opposition, there also was buy-in when the ranchers saw their way of life slipping away to real estate developers.
My issue is with the use of "instrumental" to describe the ranchers' contribution to the establishment of the Seashore. It gives an overly positive impression, given that they opposed the Seashore's creation until the last minute. "Eventually reluctantly supportive" seems to be more accurate.
I also wonder about the unbiased nature of the Park Service history on the Point Reyes website. It seems like it (consciously or not) gives support to the ranchers and their increasingly cozt realtinoship with the Park Service that developed over the years. In the Administrative History, written by an outsider, there is no evidence of any alliance, uneasy or not, between the Sierra Club and ranchers part of the campaign, prior to the establishment of the Seashore. The ranchers only supported the creation of the Seashore after the legislation was ready for a vote and not before.
If we are to look at history - lets go back to the beginning and not forget the Coast Miwok people who inhabited this land prior to ranchers for generations. Visitors will not learn of that history as they walk in the park, how they lived in harmony with land, fished in the bay or how they persisted the challenges of their time. Then lets go further back to how the coast and marine resources were created. Please lets not short change the historical nature of Point Reyes by starting from ranching.
"Ranching has existed on the coastal California peninsula for 150 years. Most important, the ranchers valued the pastoral landscape that their parents and grandparents had set roots in, often back to the nineteenth century".
Forgive my being blunt, but the gentle tone of this article about the National Park Service's (NPS) "Ag Plan" downplays or ignores upsetting offenses occurring already at the seashore:
1) When approved, which is extremely likely, the Park Service will, in 2021, be authorized to do something unusual in a national park: shoot and kill some of its wildlife. Why? To please PRIVATELY-owned, for-profit ranch and dairy operations inside this PUBLIC national park unit. Got that? Presumably men with guns will be escorted by park rangers into Point Reyes National Seashore to shoot some of the wild Tule elk, to "cull" elk, to "manage" them, as the park service and politicians call it, to minimize public outrage. I watched, in person, Congressman Jared Huffman advocate for "managing" the Tule elk at a recent Town Hall Meeting in San Rafael, CA.
Does anyone need to read additional environmental offenses in the next paragraph to be outraged at the (Ag) money and politics driving this new Ag Plan? Why is there even an "Ag Plan" inside a public national park unit which is supposed to offer maximum protection for wildlife, and not cows?
2) For essential perspective: there are about 700 elk at Point Reyes, and 5,600 dairy and beef for-profit cows. About 8 private cows for every 1 wild elk. Worse: the thousands of cows are the Seashore's #1 polluter: its greatest source of water pollution, from 10,000,000 gallons/year of cow feces and urine dumped onto the land which runns off into Point Reyes' lagoon, estero, bay and the Pacific Ocean.
Past water contamination testing at Point Reyes showing too much E. coli? No problem! Just stop testing! That is, until environmental groups sue, get testing results, and reveal that Point Reyes contains some of the highest amounts of E. coli (from cow feces) in all America. READ:
https://therevelator.org/wasted-water-crappiest-places
Wild animal slaughter AND domesticated animal pollution at Point Reyes National Seashore... all to prop up privately-owned, for-profit businesses inside a protected national park unit that is legislatively supposed to afford the highest level of protection for its animals, flora, soil, water and marine habitat, NOT private livestock.
3) This is cynical, but based on what the CCC has done in the past, it will defy and deny all evidence and rubber stamp the NPS' egregious and ongoing environmental offenses at Point Reyes. How else could dairies and ranches polluting Point Reyes be functioning inside the park for decades? For 2021, they will promise to clean them up and monitor the water, really they will, trust them, but please approve this bill, and we'll clean up the mess in the future that we haven't cleaned up in the past (years).
Don't you wish your polluting business got this kind of federal subsidization, and royal regulatory (non) treatment?
There is a simple solution to this madness: Don't approve the new "Gag Plan" and instead of shooting elk, move the filthy thousands of cows out of our protected national seashore. This must be done even if the Park Service wasn't hell-bent on doing the bidding of the cattle industry by shooting the majestic wild animals at Point Reyes. Killing wild tule elk is just the bloody, visible tip of a filthy, polluting, iceberg of environmental offenses.
Jack Gescheidt, Founder
The TreeSpirit Project
Kurt, with no disrespect intended, it continues to astound me how media treat this issue as controversial and aim for "balance." The proposed plan is unethical, very likely illegal, short-sighted, and wildly unpopular with the owners of the land (the public). What we have here is a few bought politicians (Huffman, Feinstein, et al) representing an influential special interest, as they continue to degrade and impair the environment, at tax-payer expense, for their own profit. The EIS is loud and clear: 24,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases, streams full of e coli, invasive plants, erosion, on and on. Shooting native elk is just adding injury to injury. If we had a responsible government that represented the people, this would be laughable. Instead, everyone is saying, oh gosh, maybe we could have just a little less pollution and a tiny bit more public access. Please can we have maybe 130 free roaming elk and not start shooting them dead at #121. WHY? It's a National Park, and these people SOLD THEIR LAND. It's way past time for them to pull up stakes and get out. The current proposed plan and all this tiptoeing around is an abject betrayal of the public trust and yet another failing of this generation to care for future generations. Shame on anyone behind it and anyone portraying it as in any way controversial.