Coastal Commission green-lights proposed maps for Chumash marine sanctuary
The California Coastal Commission approved all of the potential submitted maps for the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary at its Thursday meeting.
Right now, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is considering at least 10 options for the sanctuary boundaries — many of which exclude parts of the San Luis Obispo County coast to accommodate offshore wind development.
The agency plans to pick the official boundaries and publish the sanctuary management plan in October, acting regional director of NOAA’s Office of Marine Sanctuaries Mike Murray said.
“This is such a historic opportunity,” Murray said at the meeting. “Our dream is to get this sanctuary designated and bring people together.”
On Thursday, the commission voted unanimously to pass a so-called “consistency determination” for the sanctuary, which says that the proposed designs and management plans follow the 1972 Coastal Zone Management Act.
The Chumash marine sanctuary would serve to protect marine ecosystems, shipwrecks and underwater Chumash cultural and historic sites off the Central Coast. Offshore oil drilling and certain sea floor disturbances would be prohibited in the sanctuary.
“This is a very important day for us,” Northern Chumash Tribal Council tribal chair Violet Sage Walker said. “We’re on the verge of generations of hard work becoming reality.”
What could the marine sanctuary look like?
In 2015, the Northern Chumash Tribal Council proposed a sanctuary design that started at the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary and extended north to meet the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The sanctuary would also stretch 80 miles offshore to include the seabed west of Santa Lucia Bank.
This design would protect about 7,600 square miles of the Pacific Ocean.
If the original Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary map is approved, it would effectively create a trio of contiguous sanctuaries that stretch from the southern tip of the Anacapa Islands offshore Ventura County to Rocky Point, seven miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge.
NOAA, however, proposed in the draft environmental impact report a smaller, alternative design that would encompass 5,617 square miles of the ocean.
This design would leave a 30-mile gap between Hazard Canyon Reef south of Morro Bay and the southern edge of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary near Cambria, to allow for the development of underwater cables that would carry electricity from offshore wind turbines to shore.
NOAA could use the sanctuary’s regulations to establish a permit process for the cables without the gap, but the disturbance caused by development would be “unprecedented in a national marine sanctuary,” the staff report said.
The agency also prefers this design because it avoids areas of the coast that Salinan bands claimed as their ancestral homeland. The Salinan bands objected to naming the sanctuary after the Chumash in areas from Cambria to south of Morro Bay, while the Chumash bands prefer the whole sanctuary to be called “Chumash Heritage,” the staff report said.
“We will proceed very respectfully” with naming the sanctuary, Murray said.
The other designs offer a combination of options for the boundaries, including one that adds the Morro Bay Estuary to the sanctuary and another that carves a gap from Cambria to the marina at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.
Though NOAA identified a preferred design in the draft environmental impact report, the agency is still considering all of the boundary options, Murray said.
“All the alternatives have been squarely in play for some time now,” he said.
Numerous agencies urged NOAA to approve the marine sanctuary in two phases — first establishing the boundaries from Naples, a spot north of Goleta in Santa Barbara County, to Hazard Canyon Reef, then later extending the sanctuary to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary after offshore wind infrastructure is built.
This would support the “co-existence” of the sanctuary and offshore wind, the Northern Chumash Tribal Council and the three Morro Bay offshore wind leaseholders wrote in a shared letter to NOAA in April.
A phased approval of the sanctuary allows NOAA to protect the majority of the coastline immediately, while giving offshore wind some time and space to develop, the letter said.
The letter recommended that NOAA add a Sanctuary Expansion Action Plan to the Sanctuary’s Management Plan that promises to add the rest of the coastline to the sanctuary.
Murray said its customary for a sanctuary to review its management plan every five to seven years. This would be a natural time for the sanctuary to consider expanding, he said.
“If NOAA were to go with a smaller boundary … there of course could be possibilities to propose down the line an expansion,” Murray said.
If proposed, NOAA would still need to take public comment and perform an environmental impact report on the expansion, but current research and discussions around the expansion would accelerate the process, he said.
“We will save a tremendous amount of work and time and efficiency because of the studies that have been done in this particular area,” Murray said.
Still, the Sanctuary Expansion Plan would not be legally binding, Murray said — so it’s possible that the second phase of the sanctuary would never be approved.
At the meeting, members of the Environmental Defense Center said they support a phased approach to approving the sanctuary if NOAA commits to completing the expansion in a timely manner and temporarily prohibits sea mining and oil and gas production in the gap in the sanctuaries.
Gianna Patchen, the coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Santa Lucia Chapter, agreed, noting that environmental justice, conservation and expanding renewable energy infrastructure can be achieved together.
“The Chumash sanctuary lies at the intersection of these goals,” she said.
This story was originally published August 8, 2024 at 3:53 PM.
