The Point Reyes National Seashore unveiled a new plan to improve and monitor water quality in the creeks, drainages and beaches downstream of its ranches and dairies. The California Coastal Commission had rejected a first draft of the plan last spring, giving the park until September to develop a more sophisticated version.
Coastal commissioners lambasted the park’s first effort, raising fundamental concerns about the impacts of agriculture in the seashore. But in a report issued last month, the commission’s staff recommended that commissioners approve the new plan at a hearing on Sept. 8. The document, subtitled “Version 2.0,” outlines a more exhaustive approach to monitoring water contaminants.
Commission staff described the plan as a “thorough effort” that is likely to satisfy the commission’s requirements, or at least to advance their “underlying intent” of improving water quality.
Though the seashore is run by a federal agency, its management decisions must be consistent with the California Coastal Act. The seashore’s leadership has been shepherding its general management plan amendment—which entails extending ranching leases and possibly culling tule elk—through coastal commission hearings for more than a year in its quest for a consistency determination.
The commission granted the park conditional approval of the management plan last year amid opposition by anti-ranching groups, giving superintendent Craig Kenkel one year to return with water quality and climate action plans to mitigate the impacts of continued cattle operations. Commissioners accepted the climate action plan this spring, but their sharp criticism of the water quality plan paralleled complaints lodged by anti-ranching activists.
This fall’s draft responds to most of the commission’s earlier concerns, staff wrote. It provides more details about “short-term assessment monitoring,” which is set to begin this winter and will take place during six-week sampling periods downstream of park ranches. Those tests will seek to isolate persistent sources of pollution that can be quickly remedied.
Along with testing for bacteria like E. coli and enterococci, the monitoring will also cover eutrophication, the overabundance of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. Monitors will visually check water bodies for excessive algae, an indicator of eutrophication, and measure dissolved oxygen. Harmful algal blooms caused by eutrophication deplete water bodies of their oxygen, suffocating aquatic life, and suggest contamination by manure or sewage.
The commission’s staff report identified just one important element they said was missing from the park’s plan: a commitment to updating the plan every year based on water quality data collected the previous year. But that absence could be easily remedied and “may simply have been an oversight,” the staff wrote.
If commissioners approve the plan next week, activists opposed to longer ranching leases are unlikely to be satisfied, and some pledged to continue pushing to permanently excise cows from the seashore.
“If it weren’t for this huge public outcry by hundreds of citizens, I don’t think the park service would be doing this,” said Laura Cunningham, the California director of the Western Watersheds Project and a plaintiff in a pending lawsuit against the park. “I still think we just need to get the cows out of the seashore.”
A major component of the park’s plan involves water quality stipulations on the two-year interim leases it will soon extend to ranchers. These terms could include a requirement to install fences around riparian areas and reduce livestock numbers and seasonal grazing, but their specifics are not yet publicly available. Once again, Ms. Cunningham argued, the park is putting off corrective action. The leases are set to be executed by Sept. 14, nearly a week after the coastal commission hearing.
“The park service is deferring the actual details of how they’re going to manage the ranches and dairies to stop the actual water pollution,” she said.
Water quality has increasingly become a focal point for battles over the management of the seashore, in no small part because the park did not regularly monitor drainages and streams on the Pacific Ocean side of the peninsula from 2013 until last winter. Activists concerned about runoff from cattle pastures have filled the vacuum, conducting a round of private tests last spring that showed high levels of fecal indicator bacteria near ranches after heavy rains.
The nonprofit Turtle Island Restoration Network commissioned a more extensive round of tests last winter. The results are still pending, though engineer Doug Lovell said they showed bacteria levels over 10 times higher than the permissible health limit at one site. Scott Webb, TIRN’s policy and advocacy director, told the Light the organization hopes to present the test results to the public before the coastal commission hearing next week.
The agenda for next week’s hearing notes an ongoing investigation by the commission’s enforcement division into potential Coastal Act violations in the seashore, but it didn’t offer specifics. Commission spokeswoman Noaki Schwartz said the agency is “actively looking at the various allegations” of violations, but told the Light: “We can’t discuss the details at this time.” The park service declined to comment.
After receiving complaints, county officials conducted a series of inspections of seashore ranches from February through August that led to the discovery of multiple septic issues. Four homes at B Ranch had no working septic tanks, while human wastewater was flowing into a manure pond at L Ranch. Repairs have since been made at both ranches, and the county is recommending additional minor repairs at several others.
This article was corrected on Sept. 1 to reflect that the National Park Service reinstituted regular water testing of ocean-facing sites on Point Reyes in December 2021, after ceasing testing in 2013.