Quick Take
Environmental activist Dan Haifley says that Congress should defend national marine sanctuaries, including ours in Monterey Bay, from a proposed budget cut of nearly 40%, which would eliminate jobs in the 18 sanctuaries in U.S. ocean and Great Lakes waters.
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A nearly 40% cut. That’s the administration’s budget request to Congress to support our 18 national marine sanctuaries that cover 629,000 square miles of water, for the fiscal year starting on Oct. 1. If approved, it would represent a steep drop in funding from $66 million to $40 million.
We look to a bipartisan coalition of sanctuary in Congress and hope they can restore the money necessary to support this American institution which stewards our exceptional underwater places.
The proposed cuts would affect our own Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which covers 6,094 square miles of ocean from the Marin headlands to Cambria, including the 2.5-mile-deep Monterey Bay submarine canyon. The sanctuary also includes the biologically rich Davidson Seamount, 80 miles southwest of Monterey, whose base is 12,743 feet, and summit 4,100 feet, below the ocean’s surface.
The proposed reduction is described in a budget estimate sent to Congress on June 30 that includes cuts to vital National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) programs, including elimination of the National Estuarine Research Reserve system, which supports coastal wetlands.
It proposes eliminating 56 jobs as part of the $26 million cut to marine sanctuaries. It says NOAA will “prioritize the maintenance and installation of mooring buoys and will continue to support contracts for mission-critical services.”
NOAA would also “eliminate many of its services, agreements and contracts with external partners, and will reduce on-water operations. NOAA will prioritize existing sanctuaries and will not advance the designation of new national marine sanctuaries,” the proposal says.
How would the cuts affect the 18 sanctuary sites? We don’t yet know.
We still hope that Congress will act – that it will not accept this budget and instead vote to up the allocation to $115 million, as suggested by the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.
We know this is an uphill battle.
That’s why it’s time to contact your representatives. We need to protect an American institution that has stewarded ocean and Great Lakes waters for more than half a century. The National Marine Sanctuary Foundation has already gathered thousands of signatures from citizens across the country in favor of a minimum allocation of $115 million for national sanctuaries, and is working with members of Congress of both parties.
Much more funding is needed to properly steward these areas. A 2021 review by the National Academy of Public Administration indicates that while our underfunded national parks receive $30 per acre, national marine sanctuaries get around 14 cents per acre. Managing an acre of land is different from an acre of ocean, which can be hundreds or thousands of feet deep.
Why is it important? Roughly 71% of our planet is covered by water, and 97% of that is our ocean. Our nation’s marine sanctuary system protects strategic corners of the Great Lakes and U.S. ocean for their cultural, ecological, research or historical values.
Congress approved the Marine Sanctuaries Act in 1972. That’s when the work began. The first was a 1-square-mile area off North Carolina, preserving the remains of the sunken Union Army ironclad USS Monitor and the 16 crew members lost in battle. In November, the tribally nominated Chumash Heritage, located along San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties, became the latest sanctuary, the sixth one off Washington state and California.
Each site conducts research, resource protection, education and outreach, including a maritime heritage program that catalogues and protects shipwrecks and cultural resources, such as sacred Indigenous sites.
The work is usually collaborative. For example, research about Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary’s Davidson Seamount is often done with other institutions, such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. The research adds to our knowledge of the sea, and will benefit the ocean which, among other things, provides half the oxygen we breathe, is a source of food, supports the world economy and influences weather.
These partnerships stretch the federal taxpayer dollars we invest, and allow us to benefit from the talent and expertise provided by these institutions.
Tens of thousands of visitors come to the volunteer-driven Sanctuary Exploration Center near the Santa Cruz Wharf. The sanctuary team also works to improve the resilience of our kelp forests, organizes volunteers who protect the area’s water quality, responds to vessel incidents that threaten the environment – like the one that happened Wednesday when a fishing vessel caught fire off Pleasure Point – and is preserving ancient deep-sea coral.
There are also benefits to our local communities. For example, in 2023, tourism spending in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties was $4.4 billion.
West Coast sanctuaries, including Monterey Bay, Cordell Bank, Channel Islands, Chumash Heritage, Olympic Coast and Greater Farallones, collaborate to deploy trained teams to free entangled whales, successfully encourage cargo ships to slow down to avoid fatally striking whales, catalogue and preserve historic shipwrecks and conduct research along our biologically rich West Coast.
The work that goes into stewarding these places deserves support.
Please contact your U.S. representatives (Jimmy Panetta, Zoe Lofgren or Sam Liccardo) and Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff to request a minimum funding level of $115 million for national marine sanctuaries.
Let’s show our federal government how much we in Santa Cruz care about our ocean.
Former Save Our Shores and O’Neill Sea Odyssey director Dan Haifley serves on the board of the Monterey Bay chapter of the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation. These views are his own. To learn more about our national marine sanctuaries, go to https://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/. Haifley can be reached at dan.haifley@gmail.com.