Park Service scraps GGNRA dogs plan
The National Park Service pulled the plug Thursday on a 14-year-long process for restricting dog access in the 80,000-acre Golden Gate National Recreation Area, 10 months after revelations emerged that agency officials had improperly corresponded about the process from their personal email accounts.
The Park Service abandoned its effort to draw up new rules for where dogs can be walked off-leash and said it would stick with regulations that have been in effect since 1979.
“We can do better and in the interest of upholding the highest standard of transparency and trust with our Bay Area neighbors,” acting Park Service Director Michael Reynolds said in a statement. “We have determined that it is no longer appropriate to continue with the current dog management rulemaking process.”
Golden Gate National Recreation Area officials first proposed the new rules because of fears that dogs were harming endangered wildlife, such as the western snowy plover, and native plant species. The changes were supposed to have been finalized earlier this year.
However, the National Park Service put the process on hold in January after a public information request from a dog
owners advocacy group unearthed emails showing that Park Service employees — including two former GGNRA superintendents — corresponded with groups opposed to more liberal dog-access rules from 2011 to 2016.
The emails showed that some of the Park Service employees had suggested ways those opposed to expanded dog access could lobby officials.
Reynolds’ announcement said a federal Interior Department investigation concluded that the email correspondence had not tainted the rule-making process. But Park Service and Interior Department officials decided to ditch the rules anyway.
“We are very excited about the news,” said Martha Walters, an environmental scientist in San Rafael who founded the Crissy Field Dog Group, a nonprofit that advocates for dog owners. “We think it’s fantastic. It’s just a huge relief.”
The emails had prompted Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough, to initiate an effort to kill funding for Park Service efforts to “finalize, implement, administer or enforce” the dog management plan. She called the process “fraught with corruption and opaque decision making.”
On Thursday, Speier called the Park Service’s decision “outstanding news . ... The new policy being presented did not take into account that GGNRA was not Yosemite. It was an urban park.”
Dog enthusiasts had argued that the GGNRA had no evidence that the new rules would make a difference in habitat and wildlife preservation.
San Francisco Supervisor Katy Tang, whose district includes popular dog-walking spot Ocean Beach, also spoke out against the policy, saying the agency was using “a bludgeon to solve for a problem that required a more surgical approach.”
“I’m sure that residents will be thrilled to hear that their right to access public open space with their dogs will no longer be jeopardized by the GGNRA,” Tang said Thursday. “Parks and open spaces are for the public to use, enjoy, learn about, and respect — they are not meant to just be stared at from afar.”
A spokeswoman for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area declined to comment, saying the matter was being handled by the Park Service’s national office in Washington, D.C. Representatives of environmental groups that had pushed for the new access rules could not immediately be reached.
The Park Service’s new rules would have limited spaces open to dogs, both on- and off-leash, to six areas within the GGNRA. Dogs would have been banned on 90 miles of trails, up from the current 63 miles. Beach access would have been restricted to 2.8 miles of the national recreation area’s 8.8 miles, compared with the current 7.2 miles.
The current rules allow dog owners to let their pets run off-leash in specific areas of the national recreation area: Muir Beach, Rodeo Beach, Crissy Field, Ocean Beach, Fort Funston and the Marin Headlands.
The GGNRA started the rule-making process after a federal lawsuit filed in 2002 resulted in citations being dismissed against three dog owners. The ruling stated that the National Park Service had failed to enforce the on-leash law for 20 years, creating a de facto policy that required public input to change.