Oceano Dunes ATV rental contracts expire this month. What happens next?
The future isn’t entirely clear for the all-terrain and off-highway vehicle rental businesses that operate out of Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area.
Their 10-year contracts expire on April 30, and California State Parks has not communicated with the ATV and OHV rental business owners regarding what happens next.
Wayne Foster, the owner of BJ’s ATV Rentals in Grover Beach, said he’s heard “absolutely nothing” from State Parks about his contract.
“We’ve not been told that we’re not going to get renewed,” Foster said. “It was just in the Public Works Plan that they submitted to the Coastal Commission back in January, that they were not going to renew our lease. But that plan was never accepted, so it’s a no plan. So we have no idea. But also, we haven’t been given a new lease opportunity either.”
Luckily for him and the other rental shops, their current contracts note that should State Parks forego giving a 30-day notice that their contracts will be void after they expire, the businesses are allowed to continue renting ATVs in the popular off-roading park, according to the shop owners. Their contracts would then only be valid on a month-to-month basis, however.
The ATV rental contracts earn State Parks hundreds of thousands of dollars every month. As part of being allowed to rent ATVs to visitors, each rental shop owner is required to pay State Parks a cut of their earnings.
For Foster, that’s 10% of his gross monthly income, or about $220,000 in 2019. Collectively, BJ’s ATV Rentals and the three other local ATV rental shops that operate near the Oceano Dunes bring in about $11 million a year, according to estimates by the shop owners.
State Parks “continues to review the ATV contracts” and is “considering next steps,” Jorge Moreno, a spokesperson for the department, wrote in an email to The Tribune.
State Parks originally broke the word that it would not renew its ATV concession contracts in its Public Works Plan for the Oceano Dunes, which was released in December 2020 after two years of work costing the department millions of dollars. That plan, although never approved or implemented, proposed massive changes to the off-roading park’s future, as well as to surrounding parks and areas.
A reason for the plan’s derailment was the California Coastal Commission unanimously voting in March 2021 to require State Parks to phase out off-roading in most of the Oceano Dunes by 2024.
Although camping and OHVs will be allowed on a one-mile stretch of the beach between Grand and Pier avenues after then, the majority of the off-roading area of the park will be roped off and only accessible by foot, horse, bikes and other non-motorized uses.
It’s likely that the restriction on off-roading in the park by 2024 will hurt the local ATV rental shops.
Local politicians have asked the Coastal Commission to provide economic relief to those local business owners, but there is no indication yet whether that will happen.
The Coastal Commission’s requirement of State Parks to prohibit OHV use in much of the park is currently under heavy litigation, mainly by the off-roading advocacy group Friends of Oceano Dunes.
Two lawsuits against the March 2021 vote are underway in San Luis Obispo Superior Court: one alleging the Coastal Commission abused its discretion in mandating State Parks limit off-roading in the Oceano Dunes; the second asking a judge to grant a “quiet title” for much of the park’s land to settle the “dedicated use” of the dunes as for OHV use.
