If we needed more evidence that the Tomales Point Area Plan is a sham, the seashore’s Sept. 7 virtual meeting certainly provided it.
A fundamental concept in wildlife management is carrying capacity, or how many animals a landscape can support. Seashore officials have been hedging on the issue of the park’s tule elk carrying capacity ever since creating the 1998 Tule Elk Management Plan, which failed to specify one at all.
Officials have also chosen not to manage the elk population. The usual approach is to cull the herd to keep it healthy, keeping the population at the right size for the carrying capacity of the land. The park chose instead—as policy—to rely on cyclical elk die-offs when carrying capacity is exceeded.
The rest of the tule elk herds in California are managed by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. In those tule elk reserves, culling occurs through hunting. It’s a win-win: hunters pursue their sport and pay for the privilege, providing revenue to the state.
But on Point Reyes, these best practices are not being considered. The proposed new plan, like the old plan, commits to neither a population target nor a way to manage that population. The planned reliance on die-offs will continue.
One of the more peculiar parts of the virtual meeting was listening to Dave Press, the park’s wildlife ecologist and acting natural resource program lead, discuss the concepts of carrying capacity and culling. It seems clear that culling elk to maintain the population within the carrying capacity of the landscape is the least cruel option for managing this re-introduced species.
The Tomales Point Area Plan includes an Alternative C that would leave the fence in place and introduce culling in accordance with a defined carrying capacity. That’s what the park should have done in the first place, and that’s what it should do now—better late than never.
But the seashore doesn’t want to implement this sensible plan. It wants to kick the can down the road and pretend it can solve the problem by simply taking down the fence, increasing the carrying capacity of the elk range by increasing its size.
Of course, the elk population will continue to grow if given more room, until the enlarged carrying capacity is itself exceeded. The park will eventually have to manage the herd, so culling an even greater number of animals is the inevitable outcome. The seashore is simply not large enough, nor does it have an adequate predator population, to support a free-ranging elk herd without ongoing management intervention.
At the meeting, a member of the public asked why the fence was put there in the first place. The obvious answer is to keep the elk in their preserve and out of the pastoral zone. Mr. Press did an impressive job of not answering the question, instead providing a history of the various planning projects associated with the seashore’s elk experiment.
No questions were accepted at the meeting about what will happen outside the planning area when the elk fence is taken down. The ranching families on the other side of the fence will be immediately and severely affected by the proposed action, yet the meeting explicitly excluded questions from these families about what will happen to them and the land they have stewarded for multiple generations.
Brannon Ketcham, a management assistant for the park, stated that the upcoming environmental assessment will analyze the effects of the proposed action outside of the planning area. Apparently they will discuss that crucial issue only among themselves.
Also remarkable is that the National Environmental Policy Act expert, in answering process questions, referred—twice—to the end of this process being a FONSI. That’s a finding of no significant impact, and it means the park can take action without further study. In theory, an environmental assessment takes place, and only then is the outcome evaluated. Only then can the “significance” of the “impact” be decided. Apparently the NEPA expert forgot to pretend there’s no pre-determined outcome here.
The meeting was a slap in the face to those who care deeply about these issues. But that’s a small part of why I call this purported planning process a sham.
The worst outrage is that this Tomales Point Area Plan creates an end-run around the lawsuit oncerning the general management plan amendment. Conveniently for the park, the active lawsuit means the ranchers are muzzled from telling their side of the story. The status of the elk fence is a major point of contention in that suit, which the park is still supposedly working in good faith to resolve. Yet they have split off the crucial issue of the elk fence and wrapped it in a planning process that allows them to give the plaintiffs what they want outside of the confines of the legal system. I hope the citizens of West Marin will use the comment period to object to this clear abuse of power.
Sarah Rolph is a writer based in Carlisle, Mass. who has followed events in the park for years.