State regulators are threatening to rescind their approval of the National Park Service’s controversial land management plan in the Point Reyes National Seashore.
Members of the California Coastal Commission are considering the reversal after the park service asked to delay reports it promised to give the commission next month on how it plans to address water pollution and climate impacts caused by cattle ranching.
The reports were one of the conditions that led the commission to narrowly endorse the park’s plan in a 5-4 vote in April 2021.
Park Superintendent Craig Kenkel said a federal lawsuit filed in January challenging the ranching plan has required the park to delay issuing extended leases to ranchers by at least one year.
“Moreover, the NPS is not in a position to answer questions from the Commission on matters that are now the subject of federal court litigation,” Kenkel wrote to the commission in a March 4 letter.
At a meeting last week, several coastal commissioners expressed frustration at the request, especially given that the promise of the reports secured the commission’s endorsement.
Commissioner Caryl Hart said the “idea of an unlimited period of delay, to me, is just not acceptable.”
“It seems like it should have been crystal clear to the National Park Service that something of such high visibility and importance to the commission needs a report,” Hart said at the commission’s meeting on March 11.
Commissioner Sara Aminzadeh, a Kentfield resident who is running for state Assembly, said the commission risks its integrity and credibility with the public if it does not enforce its own requirements.
“On this matter, I think we need to draw a hard line because otherwise, we’ll just continue to see delays,” Aminzadeh said.
The commission directed its staff to request the park service provide an update at its April meeting as originally planned. From there, the commission could decide to schedule a meeting when it could consider rescinding its approval of the plan.
“The National Park Service has to be responsible for what they haven’t done,” Commissioner Roberto Uranga said. “They had a year and that’s inexcusable.”
This week, park spokesperson Melanie Gunn said the park service is “working with the California Coastal Commission staff on requests for the April hearing.” She declined to comment further because of the ongoing litigation.
The park’s management plan, adopted in September, allows the park to extend leases from five-year terms to 20 years. About 28,000 acres of dairy and beef cattle ranching exist within the 86,000 acres of land in the seashore and the neighboring Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Ranchers and the park service say the longer leases will provide greater financial security and allow ranchers to make investments to reduce water quality issues.
To address conflicts between ranches and one of the park’s free-roaming tule elk herds, the plan allows park staff to shoot some tule elk in the Drakes Beach herd to keep its population at 140. The latest population county this winter shows the herd has 151 elk. Kenkel wrote in his letter that the park does not intend to shoot any elk “at this time.”
Additionally, Kenkel stated the park service entered into an agreement with the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria last year to coordinate how elk will be managed in the park.
In his letter to the commission, Kenkel said several changes were made to the plan from its original 2019 version which “will increase the certainty of water quality protections and reduce environmental impacts from dairy operations and forage production.”
Some of these changes will require ranchers to make upgrades to their facilities as part of their lease agreements that will work to reduce water quality impacts.
The park service also originally proposed allowing ranchers to diversify their operations, including allowing them to trade in cattle for other types of livestock without having to undergo a lengthy environmental review and allowing them to plant row crops.
The revised plan will limit ranches to a maximum of 50 sheep or 66 goats. Commercial chickens and row crops would no longer be allowed, meaning about 9,000 chickens will be removed. The plan also accounts for 700 dairy cows being removed following the closure of the McClure Dairy in mid-2021, Kenkel wrote.
The park also plans to expand water quality sampling at coastal areas of the park that had not been sampled since 2013. Water quality samples collected at some of these waterways in January 2021 by a ranch plan opponent, the Western Watersheds Project, found unsafe levels of fecal bacteria, including up to 40 times the state health standards for E. coli at one site.
The Western Watersheds Project is one of the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit against the park service plan.
Kenkel said the park has launched coastal water quality stations this winter as part of a pilot program to begin rebuilding its monitoring capacity.
Several opponents of the park’s ranching and elk plan urged the commission to reject the requested delay.
Neal Desai of the National Parks Conservation Association — a nonprofit partner for the parks system — said Kenkel’s letter is an “example of a pattern that we and others warned the commission about when we said there would be attempts to backslide and delay and dilute these protective measures.”
Desai said the federal lawsuit has not blocked the seashore from implementing its management plan.
“The park service provides excuses for the delay but they’re misguided,” Desai told the commission.
Source: www.mercurynews.com