Water quality is at the center of the latest chapter in the debate over the Point Reyes National Seashore. After asking for a delay, the park service this week will present the California Coastal Commission with a sweeping draft water quality strategy to monitor and diminish the impacts of cattle grazing. Meanwhile, environmental activists who have been conducting private water quality testing at more than a dozen coastal sites are finalizing results that they say illustrate the urgent need to end ranching in the park.
“What we did is more or less the same as what the park is proposing to do,” said Bob Johnston, an Inverness resident who managed the testing project. “The data are very clear. All the data that’s ever been collected in the park shows clear violations.”
A patchwork of programs and practices exists to monitor beaches and creeks in the seashore for fecal indicator bacteria—often a signal that agricultural waste is contaminating the water. But the park stopped regularly monitoring water quality on the ocean side of Point Reyes in 2013, and activists say the lack of reliable year-round information for coastal drainages obscures the harm done by ranching.
Last year, the coastal commission made its approval of the park’s general management plan amendment contingent on a new water quality strategy. The park now plans to reinstate long-term testing as part of the new strategy, a draft of which was submitted to the commission last week. But activists, seizing on the park’s patchy monitoring, beat it to the punch.
The park pared down its monitoring over the last decade amid modest improvements to water quality. From 1998 to 2005, park officials recorded high bacteria levels at Kehoe Creek, Abbotts Lagoon and Drakes Estero, but during that time, ranchers also had to begin a set of management practices designed to reduce harmful runoff. Dairies at I and J Ranches added loafing barns, gutters, exclusion fencing and better manure management. Before 2007, only 6 percent of water samples collected in the park met standards for fecal indicator bacteria, but from 2007 to 2013, 38 percent of samples met objectives, according to a report prepared by park staff and included in the G.M.P.A.
In 2013, the park stopped monitoring the coastal sites, though it maintained Tomales Bay and Olema Creek sites as part of a regional water board program.
Activists were skeptical. “We all suspect it was because they weren’t getting the result they wanted,” Mr. Johnston said. “They spent a lot of money on best management practices without much improvement to water quality.”
The environmental activists pressing the park on water quality are helmed by the Western Watersheds Project and Resource Renewal Institute, two of the groups involved in a lawsuit over the G.M.P.A, and the Olema-based Turtle Island Restoration Network. In January 2021, Western Watersheds commissioned Doug Lovell, a Berkeley-based geo-environmental engineer, to conduct water quality testing at five locations in advance of the coastal commission’s review of the G.M.P.A. Mr. Lovell’s initial report found excessive fecal contamination, indicated by high levels of E. coli and Enterococci, at Kehoe Lagoon, Abbotts Lagoon and Schooner Creek, and determined that “reductions in the localized abundance of cattle waste will likely be necessary to adequately protect surface water quality.”
The park and county environmental health officials were quick to caution the public against drawing any general conclusions from a handful of samples taken on two rainy days. So the activists began plans to test a larger group of sites over a longer period. TIRN hired Mr. Lovell to test 14 sites between October 2021 and January 2022, and he said his results show high levels of E. Coli, Enterococci and fecal coliform bacteria at several sites. At the Kehoe drainage, levels of fecal indicator bacteria were more than 10 times higher than the allowable health limit. Mr. Lovell’s final report, which the group will send to the coastal commission and the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Board, is still in the works.
The park itself restarted its monitoring program last December, according to park superintendent Craig Kenkel. Last month, Mr. Kenkel implored the commission to extend his deadline for the strategy, arguing that pending litigation delayed the work. But after the commissioners declined to grant his request, the park submitted a comprehensive document describing its new strategy.
David Lewis, the director of the University of California’s Cooperative Extension for Marin, called it a “well-designed program,” and warned that while high levels of indicator bacteria “broadly tell you that you might have an issue,” they don’t always point to problems with agriculture. The bacteria aren’t all pathogenic, and can often be traced to septic systems or wildlife, he said.
“In watersheds without agriculture or a septic system, often environmental bacteria still exceed those thresholds,” Mr. Lewis said. “That’s why trend monitoring is so important. You can’t just go get one sample and know with certainty that there’s a problem or where the problem’s coming from.”
The park’s strategy includes six separate monitoring programs, only two of which are new. Aside from restarting the monthly coastal monitoring that ceased in 2013, the park will also begin short-term focused assessments at key locations where ranches drain to adjacent water bodies. This data, which park staff will collect in six-week consecutive bursts throughout the year, will be reported to the regional water quality board annually, helping to “isolate potential pollutant source areas,” the park said.
The remaining three programs are already in effect: dairies’ reporting of waste discharge to the regional water board during rains, the county’s recreational beach monitoring in the summer, and long-term monitoring at various sites in the Tomales Bay and Olema Creek watersheds.
By Wednesday, the coastal commission had already received dozens of letters asking it to reject the water quality plan and ultimately revoke its conditional approval of the park’s broader management plan. The commissioners will hear the matter on Thursday afternoon.