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Paving Paradise Part I: Follow the Money
The NPS and GGNRA Plan for Muir Woods and Panoramic Highway.
On October 3rd, I reprinted my letter of protest (Part I) to the National Parks Service (NPS) and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) over their plan to build a 180 car parking facility on top of Panoramic Highway. This misguided plan was sprung upon an unsuspecting public on September 18th and we were allowed only a 17 day public comment period that ended on October 4th.
Perhaps the only good thing that will come out of the federal government shutdown is that the comment period will have to be extended (I’m told the comment period in now extended until November 4th). So your emails and letters to the NPS, GGNRA and your local representatives are still important.
I was aware that something similar had been kicked around by the NPS ten years ago, which was met with great public disapproval. And I wondered how the NPS and GGNRA were able to develop this extensive new plan, without the public knowing about it.
So I started digging around to find out what the story was.
The Backstory
Muir Woods National Monument consists of 554 acres of protected redwood groves nestled in the Redwood Creek coastal watershed. It was declared a national park by Theodore Roosevelt, in 1908, after its original owner, U.S. Congressman William Kent, donated it to the federal government in order to protect it from destruction by the City of Sausalito that planned to use eminent domain to take the land and a private water company that threatened to sue Kent so they could dam Redwood Creek, to create new source of water to feed Sausalito’s growth.
Muir Woods National Monument is surrounded by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA), which was established in 1972, by President Richard Nixon. It encompasses more than 80,000 acres of open space in the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Marin Headlands and the Point Reyes National Seashore. The GGNRA is managed by the NPS. The NPS itself is part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, a branch of the government that makes HUD and ABAG look like models of efficiency and transparency by comparison.
In 1937, when the Golden Gate Bridge was completed, park attendance reached 180,000 a year. By 2005, it had reached over 700,000, and today it has surpassed 1,000,000 visitors per year. This has not escaped the attention of Washington DC bureaucrats. After the election of George Bush, in 2001, the charge of the National Parks Service saw an historic change. As Kristin Shannon has commented, that was the year “Smokey the Bear was put on a diet, dressed in a suit, and told to get his MBA in marketing.”
After 2000, Congress and the Bush Administration shifted the focus of the NPS away from conservation and protection of public lands, by mandating a “balance” between protection and public access. “Public access” turned out to be code for increasing revenues. It was another step towards privatization and “markets” driving public policy decisions.
As a result, the NPS began to cast about for prospects in their “portfolio” of properties to find good potential revenue generators. Muir Woods fit the bill nicely. In fact it looked like a cash cow.
The First Wave of the Assault
Back in July of 2003, Marin residents in Muir Beach, Stinson, and Homestead Valley began getting glossy brochures in the mail about a “Redwood Creek Protection Plan” and a new "Comprehensive Transit Management Plan" (CTMP). It proposed adding 7 new parking lots near Muir Woods and turning Muir Woods Road into a toll road. It talked about a 2-year scoping process with public participation, led by an NPS planner named Nancy Horner and GGNRA Strategic Planning Director, Mike Savidge.
By 2004, County Supervisors Steve Kinsey and Annette Rose were sending out invitations to a variety of neighborhood groups, municipal governments and stakeholders, to form a “County Citizens Advisory Committee” (the “CCAC”), to help shape the CTMP with the National Parks Service (note that in actuality there ended up being two groups: The CCAC consisted of agencies like NPS, GGNRA, State Parks, Caltrans, Marin County reps, Marin Transit, Sheriff and Fire departments, etc., and the rest of the participants became known as the Marin Advisory Council, the “MAC,” who advised the CCAC).
The stated purpose of all this was to “better manage traffic in the Southern and Western Parklands,” but Muir Woods was clearly the focus.
Some of the invited groups included the Gateway Coalition, the Marin City Community Services District, the Mt. Tam Taskforce, Muir Beach Community Services District, Muir Woods Park Community Association, Stinson Beach Village Association, Tam Valley Community Services District, the City of Sausalito, the City of Mill Valley, the Floating Homes Association and the Green Gulch Zen Center. The first meeting was held on April 7, 2004.
By the end of 2004, this group had ostensibly expanded to solicit or include input from the California State Parks Dept., the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the Dipsea Race Foundation, the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, the Environmental Forum of Marin, the Federated Indians of Graton Ranchero, the Homestead Valley Community Association, the Homestead Valley Land Trust, Marin Audubon, Marin Conservation League, Marin County Bicycle Coalition, Marin County Convention and Visitors Bureau, Marin County Department of Public Works, Marin County Fire Department, Marin Horse Council, Marin Transit, Mill Valley Chamber of Commerce, NOAA, People for Parks, Sierra Club, Southern Marin Fire Department, the State Historic Preservation Office, the Tamalpais Conservation Club, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services.
A pretty exhaustive list, to be sure. But to cut to the chase, what was the bottom line outcome of this inclusive participatory planning process?
The Public Push Back
After more than a year and a half of meetings, plans, discussions, feedback and presentations, and millions of dollars of consultant studies, NPS and GGNRA presented a CTMP proposal that included 4 Alternative “solutions” to the rapidly increasing number of tourists coming to see Muir Woods. The Alternatives primarily dealt with various parking capacity-increasing and public transit schemes, which included adding more and more revenue generating parking fees and bus fares. But none of the Alternatives adequately addressed the over-riding concerns of the community and local service agencies about preservation, community impacts or basic questions about fire safety, watershed protection, and other such issues.
By the winter of 2005 local stakeholders and municipality representatives had rejected all the proposed Alternatives. As has become commonplace these days, if you ask the public what they think of grandiose, over-reaching, top down government schemes, they don’t want anything to do with them.
The stakeholder groups sought stewardship, a cap on visitors, and local oversight to protect Muir Woods. They wanted the CTMP abandoned and conservation and preservation to be the first and foremost goals of anything that was done. They recommended "soft" changes, if any, such as information signs on 101, and a "pilot" shuttle under local control. They sought an independent capacity study for the health of Muir Woods, not a marketing study, to determine a realistic target for maximum visitors per day.
As a result, Marin County supervisors negotiated an "amicable divorce" settlement with NPS and took 50 percent control of the pilot shuttle buses using an extension of a normal Marin bus route, the shuttle bus service that now runs to Muir Woods from the shared parking area near the Manzanita bus stop.
No new parking lots were built. County Supervisor Steve Kinsey publicly promised to work with the Sheriff’s Department to help manage the illegal parking problems along the county roads leading to Muir Woods. But to the best of my knowledge from the research I did and participants that I interviewed, that never happened. In fact some of the “no parking” signs that used to be along Muir Woods Road are no longer even there.
Though no formal agreement was codified in writing as a result of the CCAC / MAC process, its participants’ comments and suggestions were posted on the NPS and GGNRA web sites, and they assumed that the Comprehensive Transit Management Plan and all its Alternatives were dead and buried. They also assumed their comments about them would remain in the public record as a cautionary tale for future starry-eyed planners. But as I’ve said before, never underestimate the power of a bad idea.
Mysteriously, if you look for those comments and the record of the CCAC process on NPS or GGNRA web sites, today, they are nowhere to be found. It appears they were removed some time before the NPS / GGNRA rolled out its latest “transit solutions” / parking lot proposal.
The Second Wave of the Assault - Stealth Mode
The negative impacts of ever increasing tourism at Muir Woods have only grown more severe with time. Wear and tear on county roads and public facilities, traffic congestion, watershed and soils degradation, habitat loss, environmental pollution and toxic runoff from exhaust, tire wear, oil and gas leaks, and litter and trash continue to take their toll on our pristine open space. Illegal visitor parking on roadways and road shoulders has reached an average of over 250 cars and trucks every day, and 475 on weekends. And there is no end in sight.
However, none of this appears to be a problem for the NPS or GGNRA. To them, it looks like a golden opportunity to generate more revenues and a rationale for building paid parking facilities and creating a gigantic tour bus way station on top of Panoramic Highway. The obvious fact that inviting more and more passenger cars and trucks to come up from Highway 101, into the GGNRA open space, just to park and take diesel powered buses to Muir Woods is counterproductive to relieving traffic congestion on Route 1 or preserving the natural environment, doesn’t seem to have ever crossed their minds.
In addition, they propose this as a “solution,” in spite of the fact that they know full well that if any added parking is built, still more visitors will quickly refill those 250 to 475 illegal parking spaces in a heartbeat. The only thing this will accomplish is an even bigger increase in annual visitor attendance. But perhaps that’s really their plan since it equates to even more park entry fees for NPS/GGNRA. The only losers are the cities and residents of Marin.
But why get bogged down in details like that, right?
The group that has led the NPS process, from the beginning, is based in Denver, Colorado. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that an NPS team out of Denver would be clueless about how extremely precious our ecosystems and natural assets are here in Marin.
Having lived in Colorado for almost 14 years, I can attest to the fact that the NPS concept of “nature” there is that it is a business: oil and gas extraction, mining, hunting, timber and ski resort operators are the “clients” and the public pays to service them with roads, bridges, retaining walls, tailing ponds, and tour bus stations and endless parking lots.
In the Colorado Rocky Mountains, the NPS and their cohorts at the Bureau of Land Management wouldn’t think twice about cutting out a wide swath of a mountain meadow to build a thousand car parking area to hold hundreds of tour buses, RVs, campers and day tripper cars and trucks, serviced by rest rooms and “Visitor Information” buildings. It’s just good business. And what the heck, the elk have another million square miles of open space to roam on down over “that-a-way.” So what’s the big deal?
But here in the Bay Area, and particularly in Marin, our natural resources and environmental “assets” are many times more precious and scarce, and in need of protection.
I’m not saying that the ecosystems of forested wilderness areas at 12,000 feet above sea level in the Rocky Mountain Front Range aren’t precious or that there aren’t endangered species and habitats that need careful stewardship and preservation. But comparing the challenges of good stewardship of the Rocky Mountain West to Marin’s GGNRA is like comparing an area in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where life is relatively rare and very spread out, to the intensely productive ecosystem of the Monterrey Bay Peninsula. And building a 180 car parking facility, with restrooms, bus stop structures, and all the required road reconfiguration and drainage management development, right on top of Panoramic Highway, or anywhere in the GGNRA Headlands open space, would have the same proportional, physical impact as building a 100 square mile city, like Denver, in Aspen, Colorado.
In a word, it would be insanity. But these subtleties apparently go unrecognized by the NPS and their compatriots at the GGNRA. They can only see green, but the not the eco-friendly kind.
There’s actually a fairly simple reason for their apparent single minded focus on revenue enhancement from parking and bus fares. Congress controls the amounts they can charge for entry fees to national parks. And Congress has, so far, been fairly stingy about raising those fees. The entry fee to Muir Woods, that was $2 in 2002, is still only $7. So the NPS and GGNRA are left to their own devices to balance their books and deal with their sequester-driven revenue shortfalls.
An independent accounting that was sent to me has estimated that the new plan NPS is now proposing could generate as much as $15 million dollars more per year in parking fees, bus fares and increased gate fees. And the County of Marin wouldn’t get any of that to maintain our roads and services.
So when the CMTP project was rejected and the CCAC dissolved, in 2005, community participants went off confident that the dragon had been slain and put to rest, it appears that the NPS and GGNRA were not on the same page. It appears that, for them, the plan was only put on hold until such time when a better opportunity might present itself.
Ironically, that “opportunity” came in the form of the banking crash of 2008.
READ "PAVING PARADISE PART II"
WRITE THE NPS/GGNRA:
Send letters commenting on the NPS/GGNRA proposal to: GGNRA, Attn: Muir Woods Transportation Projects, Fort Mason, Building 201, San Francisco 94123.