Environmental advocates have filed a lawsuit demanding that the National Park Service scrap its newly adopted plan to limit sightseeing flights over the Point Reyes National Seashore and replace it with stricter rules.
The suit alleges that the Bay Area Air Tour Management Plan, which takes effect next month, permits planes to fly too close to the ground and insufficiently adheres to federal laws intended to protect wildlife and park visitors from noise and other environmental impacts.
Officials from the park service and the Federal Aviation Administration jointly crafted the plan and approved it in January. It sets altitude limits and caps the number of annual sightseeing tours of the Point Reyes National Seashore, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Muir Woods National Monument and the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park at Fisherman’s Wharf.
The suit against the plan was filed by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, along with the Marin Audubon Society and the Watershed Alliance of Marin, groups that deem the plan inadequate. “These agencies did not just cut corners, they completely shirked their legal obligations to protect wildlife, natural soundscapes and the visitor experience from disruption caused by commercial tours,” said Paula Dinerstein, the lead counsel for PEER.
The park service declined to comment on the suit, citing its policy against discussing ongoing litigation.
In 2000, Congress approved the National Park Air Tours Management Act, which requires the park service and the F.A.A. to jointly develop plans to limit noise and other disturbances in the 24 national parks with more than 50 commercial sightseeing flights a year.
But two decades later, many parks still hadn’t submitted these plans. Some parks—including the Point Reyes National Seashore—have allowed tour companies to continue operating under interim agreements, without strict limits.
In 2020, PEER won a court order setting a Aug. 31, 2022, deadline for the federal agencies to come up with permanent plans. The long-term plan for the Bay Area parks now under legal challenge came in response to that order.
The Bay Area’s interim plan allowed about 5,000 flights a year and set no minimum altitudes or route guidelines. But the new plan requires planes to remain at least 2,000 feet above the Phillip Burton Wilderness, avoid some historic ranch areas and never dip below 1,500 feet. It would cap the number of flights at 2,500, with just 143 over Point Reyes.
The flight limit is based on the average number of tour flights over the past three years, essentially allowing tour companies to continue operating on their previous schedules.
“They’re just Xeroxing forward the status quo,” said Jeff Ruch, PEER’s Pacific director. “There was a theoretical change, but not a change in reality.”
The lawsuit asks the court to set a 50-flight limit across all four parks—just 2 percent of what the plan allows—while the agencies come up with a stricter plan. It does not seek to dictate precise long-term height or flight limits, Mr. Ruch said. “We’re not so much challenging the content of the plan, rather the process by which it was negotiated,” he said.
Federal officials formulated the plan without following the exhaustive reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which mandates a detailed look at the impacts of alternative plans and the environmental consequences of each, Mr. Ruch added.
“It’s like fifth-grade math where you have to show the work you did to get to your conclusion: the routes, the heights, everything,” he said. “The plan they have issued sort of sprung from black boxes, without any real breakdown of what they were doing and why.”
Mr. Ruch said officials solicited public comments on the plan but did not respond to concerns raised by several environmental groups and the director of the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, which lies offshore of the parks.
“From what we can tell, those comments didn’t figure into their decision-making,” Mr. Ruch said. “The public comments were kind of window dressing as opposed to an integral part of the process.”
In its comments on the draft plan, the Marin Audubon Society said the park hadn’t sufficiently considered the risks of overflights to threatened and endangered species. “Endangered, special-status, migratory and resident species that are in the path of existing and potential flight patterns should be identified and described in more detail,” the society’s filing said. “The plan should identify and discuss the different ecosystems, the avian and mammal species that depend on these habitats.”
Barbara Salzman, the society president, told the Light this week that Marin Audubon joined the lawsuit to ensure the plan takes into account a more detailed inventory of impacts.
“We want to have an adequate environmental review to have the best assurance that all the rich resources of our wildlife are protected,” she said. “The number of overflights allowed isn’t based on impacts to wildlife. All they did was take existing overflight numbers from previous years and average them out.”
The California Coastal Commission reached a different conclusion when it considered the plan last fall, finding that it adequately protected the habitat of seabirds and marine mammals while limiting disturbance to visitors.
Several tour companies operate in the parks covered by the plan, but only one, Mill Valley-based Seaplane Adventures, operates over Point Reyes. Its owner, Aaron Singer, raised objections when the plan was first announced. He said at the time that the rules would force his pilots to fly above optimal sightseeing altitudes and change altitude rapidly, putting his vintage aircraft in danger of stalling out. The 1,500-foot height restriction, he said, would push his planes into the edge of air traffic control airspace for San Francisco and Oakland International Airports.
Mr. Singer declined to comment in detail about the lawsuit. “I can tell you that being restricted to 50 flights per year would put Seaplane Adventures and other companies like ours out of business,” he said. “And I think they know that.”
PEER filed the suit on March 13 in the United States Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. The nonprofit, which represents federal whistleblowers, became involved in the flight management issue about six years ago, when the chief biologist at Glacier National Park in Montana raised concerns about airplane sightseeing tours there. PEER investigated the issue and discovered that the park had missed the deadline for coming up with a flight management plan. They filed suit, asking the D.C. court of appeals to enforce the deadline at Glacier and other parks across the country.
Glacier has since decided to phase out all sightseeing flights over the next seven years.