West Marin elk fence removal approved by federal park

Point Reyes National Seashore announced that it has finalized a new management plan for the Tomales Point area that calls for removal of a tule elk enclosure fence.

“The benefit of removing this enclosure is to allow elk to access additional habitat, increase the species’ population resilience during drought, and promote a more natural population cycle,” said Anne Altman, the park superintendent.

Melanie Gunn, a spokesperson for the park, said its personnel may begin as soon as this week to dismantle sections of the 2-mile-long fence that are not immediately adjacent to agricultural lands. Tomales Point is on the northern tip of the Point Reyes National Seashore peninsula.

The announcement Monday was celebrated by advocates for the park’s elk. Members of the county’s agricultural community, however, say the decision is another blow to the viability of Marin’s struggling dairy farms and ranches.

“It’s an exciting moment,” said Chance Cutrano, director of programs for the Fairfax-based Resource Renewal Institute. “It definitely marks a new chapter at Point Reyes National Seashore.”

Jim Coda, a wildlife photographer and former assistant U.S. attorney who worked for the Department of the Interior, said, “The elk will be a lot better off once they can freely roam like all wild animals should be allowed to do.”

But Albert Straus, founder of the Straus Family Creamery, said, “It shows a lack of sensitivity and support for our community-centered farms and our food system.”

The National Park Service decided to update its management plan for the area in 2022 after two severe droughts took a toll on the wild tule elk population at Point Reyes National Seashore. Once thought to be extinct, the elk were reintroduced into the park in the late 1970s.

“Five hundred elk died during two droughts,” Coda said. “Two-hundred and fifty died very slow, inhumane deaths during each drought.”

The National Park Service provided supplemental water and minerals for the tule elk at Tomales Point in the summer of 2021.

Coda helped spark the interest of Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Clinic, which sued the National Park Service in 2021 alleging it was negligent in its management of the elk at Tomales Point. That suit is still pending in court.

“There is nothing left for the Court of Appeals to do except dismiss it,” Coda said. “It’s moot because the decision has been made to do what the plaintiffs sued over.”

The National Park Service finalized its management plan after conducting an environmental assessment of its expected impact but without preparing a full-blown environmental impact statement.

“They didn’t even do a full report,” Straus said. “They didn’t look at the impact of the elk being released onto the ranch land.”

The management plan calls for removing a 2.2-mile fence that confines the elk to the 2,900-acre Tomales Point Tule Elk Reserve. The agency’s environmental assessment for the plan determined that this relatively small area lacks the carrying capacity to support the elk population, particularly during droughts.

In addition to removing the fence, the plan will result in removal of tanks, troughs and pipelines installed in 2021 during the drought; removal of 12 vegetation monitoring plots; and the installation of a low fence designed to prevent cattle from entering the Tomales Point area.

When the California Coastal Commission approved the plan for removing the fence in September, Joseph Street, a manager at the agency, wrote that while the management plan won’t convert any agricultural lands to non-agricultural use, it will “allow the elk to expand their range into other portions of the Seashore, including grazing lands.”

The National Park Service’s environmental assessment dismissed the issue of “socioeconomic impacts” on ranches with the removal of the fence. The assessment anticipates that most elk will likely remain within Tomales Point when the fence is gone.

As Street noted in his report to the commission, however, the assessment also states that “the response of the elk immediately following the removal of the fencing is not fully understood.”

“It is anticipated that some elk will expand their range,” he said.

Straus said, “They have no way to support their claim that the elk will not move out of this area.”

In 2021, several environmental groups prodded the National Park Service into adopting a new general management plan amendment for Point Reyes National Seashore. That plan allows park staffers to shoot elk in the Drake Beach herd to keep the population at a maximum of 140.

In 2022, however, the Resource Renewal Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project jointly sued the National Park Service to prevent implementation of the general management plan. They objected to the fact that it allows for extending the leases of agricultural operators in the park for another 20 years, as well as the culling of tule elk.

The ranches and dairies of the Point Reyes Seashore Ranchers Association intervened in the suit. Since then, the National Park Service, the environmental groups and the ranches and dairies have been engaging in closed-door negotiations. More recently, the Nature Conservancy joined the talks.

Straus contends that the Nature Conservancy’s goal is to remove all of the dairies and ranches from the park by buying out their leases. The Nature Conservancy has declined to comment. Straus said the removal of the elk fence could affect the outcome of the negotiations.

“It puts the ranchers and dairy farmers at a disadvantage,” he said, “because now they have much less leverage to negotiate with, to get either a buyout or an extended lease.”

The leases of the agricultural operators working inside the federal park have been periodically extended as the negotiations have dragged on. They are due to expire on Jan 10.

“They’re pushing to get a solution as quickly as possible,” Straus said. “They’re trying to finalize this before the Trump administration takes over.”