Mendocino County”s proposed new marine protected areas should cause fish populations to flourish, a newly released environmental impact report (EIR) states. The EIR admits the new offshore parks present enforcement challenges and creates the problem of fishermen moving off newly-closed areas to others, but says those negatives will be overridden by the good marine protected areas (MPAs) will do.
A public hearing for the EIR, which evaluates the impact of MPAs from Point Arena to the Oregon border, will be held Tuesday, March 20, from 6:30 to 8 p.m., at Fort Bragg Town Hall. The EIR is a legal document that analyzes any potential negative impacts to the environment, but finds none in this case.
The EIR will be followed by new proposed California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) regulations. There will also be hearings for those regulations after the 45-day comment period for the EIR, which opened on March 1.
For anyone who has a few spare hours for reading, the DFG website has the massive EIR posted which includes facts about everything from the socioeconomic plight of Fort Bragg to the value of annual harvests by species in Noyo Harbor (red urchin is the biggest crop with 1.7 million pounds annually). It is also available at the Fort Bragg Public Library, among many places.
An overall map, the best presented so far, shows exactly where new marine MPAs would be. Detailed maps of each new MPA are drawn into latitude/longitude lines (something the U.S. Navy didn”t do and later admitted they should have done after controversy broke out over the exact boundaries of the Navy training range).
The EIR references the many biological benefits attributed to MPAs. It also acknowledges that increased pressures on other areas that will be created by closures. But it says the areas to be closed are mostly remote and will likely offer increased fish production that will benefit fish and fishermen in the entire area.
The Marine Life Protection Act of 1999 authorized the creation of new offshore protected areas, which are called reserves, conservation areas and parks in the official terminology.
Using four “boards,” including a Regional Stakeholders Group, the private Marine Life Protection Act Initiative in 2010 and 2011 gathered public input on what areas of the California Coast to close to fishing, or to restrict fishing uses. The privatized nature of the process, operating on a contract with the state, created local controversy and confusion over whether public meetings and properly noticed agendas were required.
Three dozen regional stakeholders representing Mendocino, Humboldt and Del Norte counties” environmental, tribal and fishing interests created a proposed map that creates new MPAs: fishing uses, or closing to fishing, uses about 13 percent of the offshore areas of these three counties. This is a smaller percentage than in other areas of California and the first and only time a regional stakeholders group was able to agree on a single proposal to recommend. With a few revisions, that proposal was approved by other MLPAI organizations and the California Fish and Game Commission, which then ordered the current EIR.
Although the EIR provides interesting reading, it is not designed to offer anything new in the process. The only public criticisms the EIR analyzes are only those that came during four sparsely attended “scoping” sessions late last year. The EIR says 10 people came to the Fort Bragg scoping meeting.
Northern California Indian tribes made full use of the scoping sessions. The privatized Marine Life Protection Act Initiative (MLPAI) process was created in Southern California and did not conceive of the existence of the far North Coast”s wide open spaces and Native American tribal claims, nor deal with them.
When tribes learned of the process, they staged peaceful takeovers of two Blue Ribbon Task Force Meetings. State officials went back to redo and rethink the process to incorporate the legal claims of Indians. Native American groups provided the bulk of comments during the scoping and a special appendix is given to address those concerns. The Native American rights issue is not fully resolved and legislation may still be needed.
The EIR is a step beyond the MLPAI process, which ended last year. Horizon Water and Environment, LLC, an Oakland consulting firm that specializes in CEQA compliance compiled the EIR. Like the MLPAI, the Resources Legacy Foundation paid for the EIR, explains Susan Ashcraft of DFG. Public comments are to be sent to Horizon. The consulting firm is also co-hosting the public meetings with DFG.
Despite regular criticism on the subject from the beginning of the process, the new protected areas only target “takes,” which means fishing. Takes include urchin and abalone diving and seaweed gathering, as well as commercial and recreational fishing.
Nowhere is any statement ever made that other uses, such as wave energy, aquaculture or even oil and gas drilling, should be banned in new MPAs. To locals who repeatedly asked this statement, the fact that no strong special protection against oil has to do with California”s top oil industry lobbyist, Catherine Reheis-Boyd, being chosen to lead the MLPAI, as chair of the Blue Ribbon Task Force in every region but the North Coast, where she was a member.
“If you can take the time to send in comments on this EIR, please ask why the “marine protected areas” negligently do nothing to protect the closed areas from oil drilling, wind and wave industrial projects, ocean mining, navy testing, fish farming, or any other human impacts on the ocean besides throwing the people of California off of their water,” said Ed Oberweiser and Elaine Charkowski, the newsletter editors for the Ocean Protection Coalition of Mendocino County. “These are located in areas that are of obvious commercial and economic interest to the very people who conjured up this version of the 1999 Marine Life Protection Act.”
The comments posted on local listserves were also featured in an article by MLPAI critic Dan Bacher.
The EIR does state that the current Green Wave energy proposal off the town of Mendocino does not intersect with the small marine protected area at Point Cabrillo. It also references potential conflicts with other wave energy proposals outside the area.
If another wave energy project did come on top of a new protected area, the developer would only need to deal with fish kills, not the overall marine impact.
“If a future wave energy site was proposed to overlap with an existing MPA, it would need to go to the Fish and Game Commission to request approval. The approval would not be for the activity itself, but rather for the take of living marine resources within the MPA that could result from the wave energy project indirectly. Certainly, they would recommend that other locations be considered that would not overlap with or interfere with the goals of that MPA,” Ashcraft said.
Although the problem presented to game wardens in charge of enforcing the law along 517 miles of coastline is described in the EIR as significant, there is very little discussion of how this problem will be solved.
What”s next after the EIR?
“The comments will be used to prepare a final EIR, and responses to the comments will also be prepared. Public meetings are not required for the final EIR phase,” Ashcraft explains.
“Similarly, there will be a public comment period for the proposed regulations when they are published with an initial statement of reasons for regulatory change (ISOR). The Commission will receive public comments on the proposed regulations at a discussion hearing in April. At this same meeting, they will receive comments on the analysis of the impact of the proposed regulations on the environment (the Draft EIR). A decision hearing will be held in June to certify the Final EIR, and to adopt MPA regulations,” Ashcraft said.
The Draft EIR is available for a 45-day public review and comment period, which began March 1 and ends at 5 p.m. on April 16, 2012. Comments on the Draft EIR are sought at the earliest possible date, but postmarked no later than 5 p.m. on April 16.
Comments may be mailed to the following address: MLPA North Coast CEQA Comments, California Department of Fish and Game c/o Horizon Water and Environment, P.O. Box 2727, Oakland, CA 94602. Written comments may also be submitted by email to: MLPAcomments@HorizonWater.com.
Other public comment meetings for the EIR will take place in Crescent City: Wednesday, March 21 from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the Del Norte County Board Chamber Building, 981 H Street, Crescent City; and at a California Fish and Game commission meeting in Eureka Wednesday, April 11 at the Red Lion Hotel, 1929 Fourth St., Eureka.
