Oceano Dunes again violates plover protection rules. Will it ever be held accountable?

Once again, California State Parks has been caught violating rules aimed at protecting threatened and endangered shore birds at the Oceano Dunes off-road vehicle park.

This time, the agency reopened a 300-acre nesting area at the Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area (SVRA), in blatant violation of a state Coastal Commission order that called for permanent closure of the acreage.

State Parks then gave a pitifully lame excuse: Essentially, it was worried the temporary fencing was too wimpy.

“Parks was concerned that leaving the temporary fencing in place could result in failure and other maintenance and public health and safety issues,” Gloria Sandoval, State Parks’ deputy director of public affairs, wrote in a statement to The Tribune.

Installing a permanent fence will require design work and an environmental review, she added, and that means time and money.

So apparently, no fence is somehow better than a temporary, imperfect one.

That doesn’t make sense.

State Parks can try to spin this all it wants, but the agency knew about the order on March 18, when the Coastal Commission made its decision, at the same time that it voted to phase out all off-highway vehicle recreation by 2024.

The agency had six full months to work on this.

If that wasn’t enough time to install a permanent fence or even shore up the existing one, shouldn’t it at least have alerted the Coastal Commission about plans it knew would clearly be in violation?

Yet it didn’t, according to reporting by The Tribune’s Mackenzie Shuman.

“We were surprised and dismayed to learn on Monday that State Parks reopened the area without coordinating with us,” Coastal Commission Executive Director Jack Ainsworth wrote her in an email. “We are going to request they put the fencing back up immediately.”

State Parks has been reinstalling fencing, though some damage already has been done.

“As soon as those fences go down, all of the vegetation is being destroyed; those habitats are damaged,” said Jeff Miller, senior conservation advocate for the nonprofit environmental organization Center for Biological Diversity. It’s been monitoring protected species at the dunes.

We might have more sympathy if this weren’t just the latest in a series of lapses.

Last summer, when the SVRA was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, State Parks was accused of disturbing the nesting ground of the federally threatened Western snowy plover, presumably to prevent them from expanding into areas that eventually would be reopened to off-roading.

The Center for Biological Diversity — which made the violations public — said State Parks officials interfered with nesting by grading, installing mylar flags, scuffing out nesting ‘scrapes’ made by plovers and directing and moving plovers to enclosed areas without permits.

The nonprofit is now suing State Parks over those violations, and plans to add the latest ones as well.

“We intend to pursue maximum financial penalties that we can get a court to impose on State Parks,” said Miller.

That’s all well and good, but enforcement shouldn’t be left up to private individuals and nonprofits.

Yet that’s exactly what’s happening here.

The Coastal Commission’s enforcement division has the power to impose penalties, though as Shuman reported, it currently has 2,600 open, unresolved cases.

Frankly, we don’t care.

State agencies are not above the law, and the Coastal Commission should make it a priority to go after them, especially for repeat violations.

It’s true that the Oceano Dunes OHV Park will be shutting down in a few years — unless a court intervenes — but that’s no excuse to ignore regulations in the meantime.

We commend the Center for Biological Diversity for pursuing a civil case, but we have to ask the same question we posed last year: Will any regulatory agency or political body ever hold State Parks truly accountable for its lapses in management of the Oceano Dunes?

We aren’t holding our breath.