San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Water quality dispute grips Point Reyes
Looking down at the coast from a hill above the historic L Ranch at Point Reyes National Seashore, rolling swells appear on the ocean surface like blue corduroy. The peninsula that stretches south toward the horizon is almost entirely taken up by ranchland and weathered buildings. Among them, coyotes stalk gophers on the dun hillsides, redtailed hawks perch on fence posts and a skunk waddles along the road’s asphalt margin.
Those beef and dairy ranches are the focus of a recent water quality report showing high levels of fecal bacteria downstream from the cattle, and their manure, in lagoons and beaches popular with park visitors. The report, which was commissioned by an environmental group and is disputed by the ranching
industry, is the latest flareup in a decades-long debate over the ranching that occupies more than one-third of the national seashore.
“Our concern big time is ocean health and water quality health,” said Scott Webb, advocacy and policy director at Turtle Island Restoration Network, a Marin nonprofit that commissioned the water quality report from an environmental engineer. The group doesn’t believe ranching belongs in a national park and would like to see the land restored. “This is public land. This should be for everyone to come explore,” Webb said.
The idyllic image of Point Reyes National Seashore depends on the eye of the beholder — be it bucolic green hills dotted with cows or pristine wilderness devoid of non-native species. But debates over water quality related to ranching have dogged the park for many years and raise concerns about safety for those among its 2.5 million annual visitors, especially young children, who venture into the water.
The California Coastal Commission required the park to create a new water quality strategy as a condition of approving its general management plan last year, which includes expanding water quality testing and reporting the results back each year. The park has not done such extensive water quality testing since 2013 and is due to begin this winter.
The San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board is reviewing Turtle Island’s findings now. It inspected the park’s five dairies this year for the first time since 2007 because of public interest in the issue and a previous water quality report from the same investigator that was sufficient to warrant inspections, said Xavier Fernandez, planning division manager at the water board.
“We’re taking the report very seriously, and we want to evaluate it,” he said.
The ranching industry finds fault in how the report was conducted and points to improvements ranchers have made over time since the federal government bought their land to create the park in 1962.
“We have been working with the regional water board for the last 50 years since the park’s purchase to improve water quality,” said Tim Kehoe, coowner of Kehoe Dairy, in an email. He said the family has spent millions on improvements since the early 2000s and plans to spend more when they get longer contracts; the ranches are currently on temporary two-year leases.
The ranches, some of which have been around since the 1800s, supply big names in the local food scene, including Straus Family Creamery. They are supported by many locals and lawmakers for the food they produce and for their historic and cultural value, said Anja Raudabaugh, chief executive officer of the Western United Dairies, which represents the five dairies in the park.
“We tend to look at the report with some skepticism because the Park Service (and) the water board out there have all indicated high levels of compliance for these dairies,” said Raudabaugh.
Raudabaugh also said the sites that were monitored were not the same as the ones that dairies are required to test annually for compliance reports.
“Those are some huge red flags for us when they’re asserting that there’s violations in water quality, when the actual regulatory bodies that are in charge of that have said no such thing,” said Raudabaugh.
David Lewis, director of the University of California Cooperative Extension offices in Marin County, which provides research on agricultural and environmental issues, said it’s not unusual for bacteria to show up in high numbers after winter storm flows.
Webb said the water monitoring followed protocols set out by regional water board, the California State Water Resources Control Board and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, including testing at 30or 42-day intervals over several months to average out the results. He also said that it focused on areas where there was the most human health risk, most of which have not been tested by the park for almost a decade.
The National Park Service would not comment on the Turtle Island report because of pending litigation. In January, three environmental groups sued over its management plan because it allows ranching to continue and for the Park Service to kill wild-roaming native tule elk that intrude on ranches.
The park currently hosts approximately 2,400 dairy cattle and 2,000 beef cattle, according to its leases. Dairy operations in the park tend to have the biggest impact on water quality because the animals and their manure are more concentrated, for example near milking barns. When it rains or when equipment is cleaned, fecal matter can be washed into streams that then feed into lagoons and beaches, or make it into groundwater. Manure ponds used to hold excess waste are supposed to withstand rain, but environmental groups are concerned they could overflow in storms.
This year, water quality came under increased scrutiny when hikers observed human sewage running from ranch septic systems into ponds that hold manure and fields, leading health inspectors to issue violations or warnings at several dairies. Those violations have since been resolved, according to Fernandez.
The water board separately
inspected the park’s dairies in February and found two needed to make substantial improvements to ensure they were preventing manure discharges into the environment, Fernandez said. Inspectors conducted follow-up inspections this month, the results of which aren’t yet available.
There are about 10 times as many cattle as elk in the park. However, Turtle Island’s report did not rule out wildlife as a source of the bacteria, which would require further testing, said Fernandez.
“It’s important to note that all warm-blooded animals have these pathogens in their fecal matter,” he said. “Elephant seals are out there. It can be tule elk. It could be deer. It could be the cows.”
Based on testing surface water between October 2021 and January 2022, the report showed fecal bacteria levels exceeding state standards for different types of recreation in 12 of 15 tested locations in Kehoe Beach and Lagoon, Abbotts Lagoon, Drakes Estero and Drakes Bay.
E. coli was up to 21 times the safe level for recreational use at Kehoe Lagoon. In Drakes Estero, where people canoe and paddleboard most of the year, enterococci, another fecal bacteria, was up to 18 times the safe standard, and at Drakes Bay, E. coli was up to 13 times the safe standard.
When there are high levels of E. coli or enterococci in water, the biggest concern is to young children without fully developed immune systems, said Jay Graham, associate professor of environmental health sciences at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, who was not involved in the report.
“The more (bacteria) that you have, the more likely that they’re going to actually experience diarrheal disease,” he said. That may sound like just a nuisance, he said, but “it can be really complicated in kids because of their smaller body size.”
The park posts a general water safety warning on its website. With Marin County Environmental Health Services and a local nonprofit group, it conducts water quality testing at Drakes Beach and Drakes Estero from April to October, when people are most likely to be near the water. The park posts warning signs at those sites if issues are found.
The beach testing is not the extensive kind done in the report and it’s also not during winter when most agricultural runoff happens, even though people kayak and pursue other activities in or on the water throughout the year, Webb said.
Under its new water quality strategy, the park has agreed to increase water monitoring and report its findings to the California Coastal Commission annually.
The park also plans to phase out dairy operations as ranchers retire, as fourth-generation farmer Bob McClure did last year. “If additional dairy operations close, no new dairy operations will be considered,” reads a record of decision on its general management plan.
Straus Family Creamery, which receives milk from two of the dairy farms in the park, declined to comment on the Turtle Island report because of the pending litigation.
After dairy farmers in the park implemented new management practices between 2000 and 2013, water quality improved significantly, according to a study co-written by Lewis. These included fencing the cattle out of riparian areas, moving animals between grazing areas, and taking manure from ponds and spreading it on
fields so it’s not as concentrated.
Lewis said there are many areas in the region with poor water quality at certain times of year that aren’t near agriculture, and the opposite is also true.
Fernandez said the water board’s plan is to do more monitoring in both agricultural and wild areas of the park to understand what bacteria is naturally occurring and what isn’t.
The board is “hoping we can build a collaborative monitoring network with Turtle Island, the Park Service — and we’ll see, maybe the ranchers, too,” he said. “Our hope would be to have all three of them.”