By Andrew Christie, Chapter Director
In the end, Oso Flaco was a bridge too far.
After decades of trying to help the California Department of Parks and Recreation find a way to make off-highway vehicle recreation and the preservation of environmentally sensitive habitat somehow fit together in the Oceano Dunes ecosystem, Coastal Commission staff have come to an unavoidable conclusion: It’s just never gonna happen. (Send your comments to OceanoDunesReview@coastal.ca.gov, preferably by July 5th.)
As Dan Carl, the Coastal Commission’s Central Coast District Director, told The Tribune, “It’s not been an ‘aha!’ moment – it’s been a steady progression of these issues kind of ratcheting up.”
But then he turned to the latest proposal from State Parks: A campground and junior ATV track at Oso Flaco Lake, flattening an environmentally sensitive habitat area.
“That also was a big turning point for us, seeing what they were proposing was really a step in the wrong direction,” he said.
The list of State Parks’ violations of its Coastal Development Permit and SLO County’s Local Coastal Plan at Oceano Dunes is more than 30 years long. Why, exactly, was this a turning point? Let’s turn to the March 14 issue of New Times and a pair of quotes from the Senior Environmental Scientist for the ODSVRA, discussing the rationale for a proposed campground, flat track, and kiddie riding area at Oso Flaco Lake:
"We know more than we did back in 1982 when a lot of these decisions were made and memorialized. If we were to design this park then, knowing what we do now, would we have designed it differently? Let's look at the park with the lens of today's regulatory environment and try and design something that works.... That's why we are looking at this project in Oso Flaco."
But:
"There are incremental losses to that land that's available for recreation and so they're looking at ways: How can we replace what was lost?... And this has a lot of support from the users community."
Of these two statements, the first one can be easily measured against the response of Coastal Commission staff to determine whether it is Orwellian doublespeak and vapor:
“[T]he proposed Oso Flaco Lake project does not appear approvable, nor does it appear that the PWP effort is moving in the right direction at this time. On the contrary, it appears to be a fairly clear indication that the PWP is heading in a direction that is not in keeping with the vision of developing a contemporary plan that addresses the many difficult and serious issues and constraints presented by OHV riding in the dunes.”
In other words, it is the opposite of “look[ing] at the park with the lens of today's regulatory environment.” It is the opposite of designing the park differently than was done in 1982, “knowing what we do now.” That’s why it “does not appear approvable.”
That leaves the Senior Scientist’s second statement as the real McCoy, an authentic representation of State Parks’ bedrock management philosophy: Come hell or high water, there must be new space created for the dune buggies to cavort when any land is “lost” to conservation and environmental restoration, because that space must be replaced with a new sacrifice zone.
We may assume that it was the expression of that immovable bedrock philosophy via State Parks’ plans for Oso Flaco that pushed matters to a tipping point and a counter proposal for a plan that includes a path to a future in which off-road activity ceases at the dunes.
That’s my guess. But potential turning points have been thick on the ground at Oceano Dunes. Another recent one the Coastal Commission could have picked up on, as the Sierra Club has pointed out, was the fact that State Park’s Draft Environmental Impact Report for the Oceano Dunes SVRA Dust Control Program “impermissibly shifts and narrows its focus, primarily identifying the project’s impacts on OHV recreational opportunities rather than potential impacts on the environment…and attempts to create a new category of ‘significant conflict’ because the project does not ‘perpetuate and enhance recreational use of OHVs in the SVRA.’”
Then there was the 2017 meeting of the Coastal Commission, where Commissioners quashed the attempt by State Parks to impose pre-determined limits on the annual amount of hazardous dust mitigation, restricting the type, amount, and location of dust control measures. The Commission forced Parks instead to make that determination on the basis of ongoing air quality modeling – i.e. reality.
State Parks has told the public that its Public Works Plan will be “a long-range land use management plan for compliance with the California Coastal Act.” The Coastal Commission is now telling State Parks that that’s exactly what it must be.
The July 11 meeting of the California Coastal Commission in SLO will be State Parks’ first opportunity to start living up to those words. And it will be the crucial moment when residents of the Central Coast must show up and tell Coastal Commissioners to make sure that they do -- not at yet another undefined date somewhere in the future, as has been the custom, but right now.