Coast Dairies National Monument? - Not So Fast

the north coast of santa cruz county and surrounding beaches and local mountain roads will be unable to handle all the additional traffic , some estimate at upwards of 300,000, to a half million visitors a year!!!

We do not need, nor would the land or any locals, benefit from a 'monument' designation.

Please engage in a comprehensive and reasoned planning process prior to designating the area as "Open for Business" to the world. We do not have the infrastructure - either human such as rangers, BLM personnel or maintenance staffing resources or physical such as roads, parking or alternate access means - to accommodate the increased use. Without the ability to allocate the resources necessary and the detailed planning required to accommodate the changes inherent in National Monument designation it would be counter protective as well as counterproductive to do so.

Please leave this beautiful piece of land as it is. Designating it as a national monument is unnecessary and over regulating it will cause more harm than good.

Think twice about how best to preserve this space.

Thank you for giving a voice to those of us that want to proceed with due caution on this NMS designation.

11 years ago Featured

while i am a lover of the great outdoors, i think we need to scale back any more parks. we haven't even made parking available for Gray Whale from the Bonny Doon side. we make new parks without adequate funds to maintain and monitor them.

I strongly agree with petition to re-evaluate wisdom of proceeding with "national monument" status.

Traffic jams are the order of the day. How can the community deals with hundreds of thousands of additional visitors? Completion of a detailed environmental study is mandatory.

Regional management makes sense.

After attending meetings in Santa Cruz and at Cal Poly on Swanton Rd., I think that it is premature to seek monument status at this time. The land has protections now so there is no need to rush the issue, especially with budgetary constraints on the BLM, local governments, and the state & federal governments.

Slow this down and take a look at the full impact before going further. Plans need to be made for traffic, parking, maintaining the area.

Please leave the land alone! This will only bring harm to our already fragile ecosystem

Where will the wild things go? We have plenty of public land for recreation in Santa Cruz and San Mateo County for locals and visitors alike. To actively protect our plant and animal neighbors for generations to come, we must minimize human impact on our most fragile ecosystems. We simply cannot enhance human impact, which is what will happen if The Coast Dairies Land is designated as a National Monument. This land constitutes the most densely inhabited mountain lion habitat in Santa Cruz County and is home to bobcats, foxes, badgers, and numerous other mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, rapidly disappearing from the California landscape due to human overuse. One only need look at the destruction and loss of local flora and fauna in neighboring land holdings; Wilder Ranch, Grey Whale, and the UCSC Upper Campus Reserve, to understand what is at stake if we adopt Eshoo and Boxer’s bill without any environmental impact study or input from local agencies and community members.

Eco-toursim is seldom beneficial. Stay home, or go to Maui, but don't encourage additional visitations to critical habitats.

Driving up Highway 1 the other day, we remarked how lucky it was that this precious land was not developed. Please deeply consider the impact of more human habitat to the eco-system. This land deserves protection.

We need to study the impacts more deeply before proceeding.

I agree that it is wise to proceed with caution and to carefully consider the full impact of conferring National Monument status on the Coast Dairies property. We do not want to make the mistake of "preserving and protecting" the land with a National Monument designation only to produce exactly the opposite result. As a resident of Santa Cruz and as someone who, like many Santa Cruzans, enjoys time outdoors and has eagerly looked forward to being permitted access to the Coast Dairies' lands, I would nevertheless favor restrictions on the public's right to access this property in order to truly preserve and protect it. I support measures that would permit access to the property within parameters that place specific restrictions on numbers of visitors and frequency of visits annually, such that the National Monument status does not undo the stringent and protective mandates already in place for the Coast Dairies lands.

This will be a disaster for human residents and the ecosystem unless a detailed environmental study is done. And I suspect that a non-biased study will show what disaster the current plan is.

The impact of this needs to be reviewed more in this area. This should be done with careful consideration of the local people and wildlife.