Local biologist says agency’s Management Plan doesn’t plan for
protection of endangered Pajaro River, wetlands
Monday, August 14, is the last day for public input on a massive
BLM management plan that environmentalists say doesn’t go far
enough to restore the threatened Pajaro River and other sensitive
areas.
Local biologist says agency’s Management Plan doesn’t plan for protection of endangered Pajaro River, wetlands
Monday, August 14, is the last day for public input on a massive BLM management plan that environmentalists say doesn’t go far enough to restore the threatened Pajaro River and other sensitive areas.
The final plan at issue replaces one that’s 22 years old and is called the “Bureau of Land Management Proposed Resource Management Plan Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Southern Diablo Mountain Range and Central Coast of California, June 2006.”
It’s the size of an L.A. basin phone book. The plan covers 274,000 BLM acres that span 12 counties, under the jurisdiction of the BLM Hollister Field Office.
But local conservationists, such as retired biology teacher Ken Bone, say he’s concerned that the plan doesn’t address reforestation of the Pajaro River riparian forest on public and private land and the preservation of the wetlands. Bone, who is actively involved with groups trying to protect the river, lives just two miles from the Soap Lake wetlands on the Santa Clara/San Benito county borders.
“My concerns is that BLM is not addressing the wetlands at all, nor the deforestation along the Pajaro’s banks and its riparian forest,” Bone said. “It’s not anywhere in the statement.”
Earlier this year the American Rivers Association named the Pajaro River the Most Endangered in the nation, a designation that alarmed naturalists and sent local bureaucrats scrambling for damage control. But it hasn’t set into motion any official government plans for its preservation. In fact, just weeks ago the public learned that the City of Gilroy is ballyhooing plans to build a new mall on top of wetlands that contribute to the Uvas Creek, a tributary to the Pajaro.
BLM officials say Gilroy isn’t in their jurisdiction, as vast as it is. They add that the plan does mention upper tributaries to the Pajaro, such as the San Benito River, and the public lands that might contribute to sediment erosion of the Pajaro.
“San Benito River watershed can have an impact (on the Pajaro River), but to have a program that spans the length of the river isn’t something we would lay out in this plan,” said Sky Murphy, BLM’s Environmental Planning Specialist.
Murphy added that BLM’s mission is to walk the lines between “resource development,” such as oil, gas, mining and grazing leases, recreational management and helping to protect the environment.
“We make sure our management activities upstream aren’t contributing to downstream water degradation,” he said. “We feel we’ve struck a balance between those uses and species habitat.”
It may not be enough to save the Pajaro River. David Collier of the Pajaro River Watershed Committee, an arm of the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club, says the Pajaro is facing threats from many fronts, the most critical being the affects of development.
“Then you have continued gravel and mining operations, which change the hydrodynamic functions of the river, plus chemical run-off from ag operations, which eventually make their way into the National Marine Sanctuary in Monterey,” Collier said.
Bone says that government agencies aren’t paying attention to their destruction of the environment, and that more often than not, separate agencies don’t know what another is doing. Some eight years ago after the floods of 1998, the Army Corps of Engineers ripped out a riparian forest that stretched from the mouth of the Pajaro along eight miles of its banks, leaving only one tree for every 100 feet.
“In their panic of flooding, they stripped it nude,” he said. “There’s no shade, no protection for animals – it wiped out species and denuded the levees. If they just let it grow it would naturally control the flooding.”
Similarly, said Bone, in BLM’s quest to strike a balance between exploitation of resources and enhancing the public’s environment, it’s the environment that usually loses.
Murphy said that a resource management plan as extensive as the one BLM is about to launch “is quite an undertaking” and serves as a guideline for his agency.
“We hope to address a number of issues over time,” Murphy said. “But within this field office we don’t manage any coastal properties.”
Monday is the last day to file a formal public protest against any part of the extensive management plan. The plan can be read online (a massive PDF file) at http://www.blm.gov/ca/hollister/ and protests must be postmarked as of August 14 and addressed to the BLM office in Washington DC.
