The California Coastal Commission has approved a National Park Service proposal to dismantle the fence confining tule elk at Tomales Point, signaling a likely victory for environmentalists while casting uncertainty over the future of the 21 historic dairies and ranches that have defined the Point Reyes National Seashore.
During the closing minutes of a daylong meeting on Sept. 12, the commission endorsed a park service finding that removing the fence would not adversely affect coastal zone resources.
In his assessment of the plan, coastal commission manager Joseph Street wrote that the “removal of the enclosure fence would allow tule elk to access additional habitat and, over time, naturally intermingle with free-ranging herds elsewhere in Point Reyes National Seashore, promoting natural population cycles, improving genetic diversity, and increasing population resilience during drought.”
Mr. Street said the impact on ranching operations would likely be minimal, mirroring the effects seen with existing free-ranging herds.
But ranchers and dairymen, many of whom operate third- and fourth-generation family farms that predate the park’s establishment, argue that removing the fence could devastate their livelihoods.
Longtime rancher Kevin Lunny contends that without the enclosure, roaming elk will damage property, compete for limited forage and drain water reserves critical for cattle. “Opening up that fence will make it nearly impossible for the ranches to survive,” he said.
There’s no timeline for the fence removal, but seashore spokeswoman Melanie Gunn said a decision is expected this fall.
The coastal commission is a 12-member body established by a ballot initiative in the 1970s and enshrined by subsequent legislation under the California Coastal Act. It is responsible for regulating land use within the coastal zone, an area that typically extends about 1,000 yards inland from the shoreline. The Coastal Actidentifies agriculture as one of several priority land uses and includes specific measures to safeguard and support it within the coastal zone.
The commission’s endorsement comes amid ongoing legal battles over the seashore’s elk management and its broader land-use policies. In 2021, two environmental activists and the Animal Legal Defense Fund filed a lawsuit challenging the park service’s failure to update its management policies for Tomales Point.
The suit, which was brought by Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Clinic, accused the park of negligence in handling the elk. The herd’s population fell from 445 to 293 between 2019 and 2021 due to drought-related starvation and thirst.
According to the park’s most recent tallies, from March, there are now at least 315 elk on Tomales Point, a 20 percent increase from 2022.
Park officials announced the Tomales Point Area Plan shortly after the Harvard lawsuit was filed, pointing to the herd’s die-offs and the need to reassess elk management in the context of climate change. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit last year, but the plaintiffs appealed the ruling.
The lead plaintiff, Jack Gescheidt, hailed the coastal commission’s vote as an important step forward. “This is one more bureaucratic hurdle that we activists anticipated,” he said. “But we’re thrilled to be on the same side for a change as the coastal commission and the park service in agreeing that wild elk should roam free.”
The Tomales Point plan would mark the first update to the park’s elk management policies since 1998, when concerns arose that the confined herd—reintroduced to the seashore in 1978 after the species nearly died off across the state—might exceed the carrying capacity of the reserve. At the time, the park relocated 28 elk to the wilderness near Limantour Estero. Those animals have since grown into two free-ranging herds.
A herd near Drakes Beach has at least 188 elk this year, a 11 percent increase from 2022. The Limantour herd has 199 elk, an 18 percent increase from the previous count.
According to the park, if the fence is removed, the seashore’s combined free-ranging elk population could swell to about 2,800 animals within 20 years. With no natural predators and the need to contain the elk within park boundaries, population management would eventually become necessary—likely beyond the 20-year mark, the park’s preferred plan says.
The proposal for Tomales Point calls for removing the 2.2-mile-long fence that keeps the elk penned into the 2,900-acre reserve on the northern tip of the peninsula. Under the plan, the park would install a lower fence to keep cattle off Tomales Point, while removing the water tanks, pipes and troughs that it placed in 2021 as support for the elk during drought years.
(Mr. Gescheidt has urged the park to retain the water infrastructure, warning that elk may not instinctively migrate to new areas in search of water during future droughts.)
With the elk fence removed, the herd would be free to roam throughout the seashore, gaining access to additional forage and natural water sources.
The litigation over the fence is closely tied to another unresolved lawsuit that seeks to end agricultural operations within the park. Filed by the Resource Renewal Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project, that suit has delayed the park service’s implementation of an amendment to its general management plan, which would allow the extension of agricultural leases for an additional 20 years and the culling of free-ranging elk.
Because of the litigation, the park service has issued only two-year lease renewals, leaving ranchers in a state of uncertainty. These leases were set to expire on Sept. 14 but were extended until Oct. 18, coinciding with the expiration of a stay on the lawsuit that was granted to allow for mediation.
For Mr. Gescheidt, the commission’s vote leaves an elephant in the room: “It’s ironic that in this concurrence there is no mention of the leading cause of land degradation, waterway contamination and atmospheric pollution: the cattle industry,” he said.
Albert Straus, who buys milk from the Nunes and Mendoza dairies, two of the four dairy operations remaining in the park, sees the endorsement of the fence removal as part of the broader push to eliminate agriculture in the seashore.
“The removal of the elk fence will most definitely have serious socioeconomic impacts on existing dairy and beef ranching businesses operating in the ranchland zone,” Mr. Straus wrote in comments submitted to the park service. “By releasing the Tomales Point elk herd into the ranchland zone, it will further exacerbate tenuous farming conditions and make it a fait accompli that the ranches will eventually be forced out of business due to poor farm economics caused from forage competition between cattle and elk.”
Mr. Lunny echoed those concerns.
“The claim that removing the elk fence is unrelated to the future of the ranches and the settlement discussions is absurd,” he told the Light. “Removing the elk fence is just one step toward removing the ranchers.”
As ranchers await a final decision on the elk fence, they are also bracing for a ruling on the future of grazing on the peninsula.
“If the park service announces the end of ranching first, then they won’t get any pushback when they say they’re going to remove the fence,” Mr. Lunny said. “If the ranchers are gone, who’s going to complain?”