Marin Voice: Huffman wrong to protect Point Reyes cattle ranchers

By Susan Ives September 10, 2018, Marin Independent Journal

Rare native Tule Elk and relicts of California’s once-vast coastal prairie can still be found at Point Reyes National Seashore.

They say politics makes strange bedfellows, and that’s apparently the case with Rep. Jared Huffman and Rep. Rob Bishop, the Utah congressman who, in a giveaway to Big Oil, cut a million protected acres from the Bears Ears National Monument. Bishop champions “unlocking” public lands so that drillers, miners and cattlemen can feast upon them, and wants to “return” federal lands to the states for development.

Giving away national lands has been part of the Republican platform since the mid-1980s. It’s surprising that Huffman, a three-term congressman representing one of the blue-est and greenest districts in the nation, has joined the chorus of the Republican Party’s staunchest conservatives.

Elected and re-elected twice on an environmental platform, Huffman has lately crawled under the covers with the self-proclaimed victims of big government — American ranchers — some of the most querulous of which live and work within Point Reyes National Seashore and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

The legislation that Congress adopted when it established the seashore in 1962, reads: Point Reyes National Seashore was purchased “In order to save and preserve, for purposes of public recreation, benefit, and inspiration, a portion of the diminishing seashore of the United States that remains undeveloped.”

The ranchers who sold their land to the National Park Service in the 1960s and 1970s, pocketed the equivalent of more than $300 million in today’s dollars. Nearly 50 years later, these ranchers and their herds still occupy 28,000 acres of the national seashore and nearby GGNRA.

Today they enjoy — at taxpayer expense — below-market rents; discounted grazing fees; government-maintained roads; USDA subsidies to dairy and beef operators; and fences that keep native elk off leased pastures. So-called “wildlife management” — keeping native tule elk behind an 8-foot fence and hazing and culling them off parkland leased for cattle — is provided free of charge by the National Park Service.

Ranchers in the national parks live at the most beautiful places, in one of the most expensive counties, in one of the highest-taxed states in the union.  They pay no property taxes. They profit from the public’s land as if it belonged to them, not us.

For decades, a beleaguered NPS has granted grazing permits to ranchers without much regard for environmental impacts. The public has limited access to one-third of parklands where up to 6,000 cows are kept. Cattle manure is routinely spread on parklands making the Tomales Bay watershed among the most polluted in all California. The recovery of 100 plant and animal species listed as rare, threatened or endangered is subordinated to cattle ranching.

In a letter to the NPS, the Seashore Ranchers Association called for 20-year grazing leases and expanding their operations to include additional livestock and row crops. In response, environmental groups sued the NPS for failing to update an obsolete, 1980 General Management Plan.

They reached a settlement committing the NPS to amend its management plan and — for the first time ever — provide an Environment Impact Statement on the impacts of ranching on the park. The agreement stipulates a transparent process and gives the public the right to comment on whether, and to what extent, ranching may continue in the park.

The planning process kicked off in 2017 as Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke took office and Rep. Bishop became chair of the House Natural Resources Committee. Park ranchers saw an opportunity to rewrite the seashore’s enabling legislation to give themselves permanence not just permits. They hired a lobbyist.

Huffman — with a safe seat and statewide ambitions — just introduced H.R. 6687 — co-sponsored by Rep. Bishop. It would make these dairies and ranches permanent without addressing environmental impacts,  and allows removing the tule elk. Huffman’s bill —on a fast track — derails the settlement and excludes the public from weighing in on whether, and to what extent, ranching belongs in these national parks.

Preserving Americans’ public lands — not privatizing them — is each generation’s responsibility to the next. Rep. Huffman has heard from the cattle interests.  He needs to hear from us. Tell him that the national seashore isn’t his to give away.