The National Park Service cemented a long-awaited decision for the Point Reyes National Seashore on Monday, approving the amended planning document that will dictate the management of ranchland in the seashore for decades to come.
The announcement dealt a blow to the environmental groups whose 2016 lawsuit originally spurred the park to revise its planning, and raised the possibility of more litigation. The amended general plan largely resembles the preferred alternative outlined in the 2019 environmental impact statement, despite thousands of public comments that mainly favored other alternatives.
Although it comes with some modifications, the plan still allows for 20-year ranch leases and diversified agriculture, and permits culling one of the park’s three tule elk herds. But the record of decision released on Tuesday sets new requirements for ranchers, limits diversification, makes some zoning changes, and raises the threshold at which the park would begin culling elk from the Drakes Beach herd, from 120 to 140 animals.
Seashore superintendent Craig Kenkel said in a statement that the plan “strikes the right balance of recognizing the importance of ranching while also modernizing management approaches to protect park resources and the environment.”
He added, “Input gained throughout this planning process was critical to shaping the National Park Service’s final plan.”
The environmental groups involved in the 2016 lawsuit were quick to condemn the plan and announced their plans for more litigation.
Laura Cunningham, the California director of the Western Watersheds Project, said the park’s final decision “doubles down on the Trump plan to increase livestock grazing and associated commercial agricultural production for the next 20 years, instead of focusing on protecting the wildlife and enhancing recreational tourism.”
“We’re definitely going to be looking at litigation with our three groups again,” she told the Light.
At least some ranchers are also unhappy about the new, unexpected requirements. Kevin Lunny, a third-generation rancher who leases G Ranch, said he hasn’t had the time to review the entire document, but was concerned by the modifications. The changes did not undergo an official public comment period, and Mr. Lunny said the ranching community had understood that the process was finished.
“This appears to be sort of a unilateral move that responds to the public comment of the anti-ranching community,” he said. “Screaming at the park service to make things different should have not produced any change.”
The process of amending the seashore’s management plan underwent numerous delays, and in July, a judge granted the park a 60-day extension on its deadline to file a record of decision. The move put off the original midsummer deadline and left room for a re-evaluation welcomed by the environmental groups involved in the 2016 lawsuit.
Yet aside from a few adjustments, the plan finalized on Monday adhered closely to the preferred alternative outlined two years ago in an environmental impact statement on the plan.
Park officials said the changes were a response to public comments and reviews by agencies like the California Coastal Commission. Now, if ranchers want to secure 20-year leases, they must satisfy a set of new mandates. Ranchers in areas where elk graze must modify their cattle feeding strategies to reduce potential conflicts. All ranchers in the planning area must maintain any stock ponds that serve as California red-legged frog habitat, maintain fencing along riparian buffer areas, and address maintenance concerns on historic ranch infrastructure.
The park will create schedules for ranchers to improve their procedures for manure management, water quality improvement and protection of riparian areas, and require that ranchers comply promptly in order to secure the longer leases. These guidelines existed in the park’s environmental impact statement, but now that they are prerequisites for longer leases, park officials said they will be accelerated.
The modified plan converts the D Ranch, now used for grazing by the Nunes family, to a scenic landscape area free from cattle, and downgrades the Martinelli Ranch north of Point Reyes Station into a seasonal grazing area. The park will adjust the limit of dairies in the planning area to five rather than six, reflecting the recent closure of the McClure dairy.
The plan also adds new restrictions for diversification: The park will require site-specific review processes if ranchers wish to add crop or chicken production, and it will limit ranches to a maximum of 50 sheep or 66 goats, with a corresponding reduction in cattle. The park will also require beef ranchers to phase out forage production.
Still, Ms. Cunningham said she was surprised by how little the plan had changed, and called the small changes nothing more than “tiny rays of hope.”
“I thought there would be a bit more bolstering of mitigation and resource protection,” she said. “It seems very little changed.”
The seashore’s unique and often contested patchwork of wilderness and ranchland is the result of its relatively short history as public land. In 1962, when the park was established by an act of Congress, nearly all the Point Reyes peninsula was privately owned. As the park purchased land from ranchers in the 1970s, it allowed most to continue operating on reservations of use and occupancy. Today, 24 families lease grazing land in the park’s planning area, which also includes ranchlands in the northern reaches of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
In 1978, the park reintroduced a herd of tule elk, which had been extirpated from the region in the 19th century. Within 20 years, the population was booming within its enclosure at Tomales Point, and the park created a tule elk management plan, recommending the release of more than two dozen into a wilderness area near the Limantour Estero. That population expanded and branched off into a third herd, which has bedeviled grazing operations at the C and D ranches near Drakes Beach. The culling described in the amended general management plan applies only to this herd; the park will continue to allow the Limantour herd to grow and spread, while attempting to discourage conflict between cattle and the roughly 50 elk from the herd that wander onto ranches.
In 2012, at the direction of then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the park began work on what it called a ranch comprehensive management plan. But in 2016, the process was suspended when three environmental groups—the Resource Renewal Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Western Watersheds Project—sued the park, alleging it could not postpone updating its 1980 general management plan in favor of the ranch plan. The settlement reached in 2017 required the park to finalize an update to its general plan within four years.
By 2019, the park had drafted an environmental impact statement and outlined its preferred alternative: Alternative B. The management scheme created two new zones, the ranchland zone and the scenic landscape zone, replacing the special use zoning that has shaped planning since 1980. While Alternative B created a sub-zoning system to more strictly regulate use of pastoral lands to protect natural resources, it also allowed for much longer lease agreements. None of these elements was changed by Monday’s record of decision.
With Alternative B, the park set a threshold for the Drakes Beach herd of 120 adult elk, based on estimated forage consumption and forage availability on ranchlands. With cattle set to be removed from the D Ranch, the elk threshold has now increased to 140, which is more in line with the current population—the park counted 139 animals in the herd last year.
The park identified five other alternatives as part of its environmental impact statement. One alternative involved lethal removal of the entire Drakes Beach herd, while another entailed shutting down dairying operations. Alternative F, the one favored by many environmental activists, would have removed all ranching operations, torn down the elk fence, and created more visitor facilities like campgrounds. The park estimated the one-time cost of implementing the preferred alternative at about $4.9 million, while annual operating costs wouldn’t change dramatically. By comparison, the initial cost of Alternative F was calculated at nearly $15 million.
Resistance to the park’s preferred alternative has mounted since 2019. Public comments were dominated by opponents who sent in thousands of letters telling the park to prioritize natural resources over ranching.
Anger over the management of tule elk has driven much of the opposition. While the free-ranging herds have relatively stable populations, drought has been hard on the fenced herd, with more than 150 elk dying due to malnutrition from inadequate forage. This summer, the park supplied water to the herd, but activists contend the fence must be removed for the well-being of the animals.
The general management plan amendment does not address the fenced herd, but concerns over the fence have contributed to the pressure on the park. In June, a Harvard law clinic sued over the elk die-off to compel the park to update its elk management policy, which was written in 1998. A judge dismissed the law clinic’s request for an injunction in July, signaling support for the park’s elk management.
Elk are not the only contentious issue: Many public comments called for the total elimination of ranching from the park. The Resource Renewal Institute wrote two letters this month alerting park officials to alleged lease violations at the Home Ranch, where hikers found unauthorized bulldozing in a riparian area, and the E Ranch, where a wildlife photographer captured a dumpsite.
Chance Cutrano, the nonprofit’s director of programs, said the violations pointed to the ranching community’s failure as stewards of the land.
“Despite thousands of public comments in opposition, the final [plan] looks remarkably like the wish list ranchers submitted to the NPS before this performative planning process even began,” Mr. Cutrano said in a statement on Monday.
He added, “The National Park Service will have to explain this inadequate plan to a federal court judge.”
In fact, ranchers raised their own concerns with the amended plan as described in the environmental impact statement. The Point Reyes Seashore Ranchers Association sent a letter to the park in 2019 that argued the plan failed to address grazing conflicts with elk, neglected the positive potential of carbon sequestration practices and created prohibitive barriers to diversification.
Adding complexity to the debate is the fact that both the park and the ranchers occupy unceded Coast Miwok ancestral land. The park service said the amended management plan acknowledges the working agreement reached last month with the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, the only federally recognized tribe that represents Coast Miwok descendants. The agreement made it easier for the park to consult with the tribe on land management, wildlife management and historic preservation issues.
Tribal chairman Greg Sarris said in a statement that the tribe is “delighted” with the record of decision and will be involved in its implementation.
Another group representing Miwok descendants, the Coast Miwok Tribal Council of Marin, has no formal relationship with the park, but penned a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland this summer calling on her to reject the general management plan amendment. Like the environmental nonprofits, the tribal council is opposed to both culling and continued ranching.