Quick Take
Nearly eight years after its designation as part of the California Coastal National Monument, Cotoni-Coast Dairies is poised to open to the public, with trails likely opening as early as summer 2025. Federal approval of a trailhead and parking lot marks a breakthrough after a long struggle to balance public access, environmental protection and community concerns.
In President Barack Obama’s final week behind the Resolute desk in January 2017, he updated the eligibility criteria for the Purple Heart, revised labor relations requirements for the Department of Defense, and designated Santa Cruz County’s Cotoni-Coast Dairies as a new feature of the California Coastal National Monument.
“Visitors to Cotoni-Coast Dairies may be able to catch a glimpse of a variety of avian species, including black swifts, orange crowned warblers, American kestrels, Cooper’s hawks, white-tailed kites, and peregrine falcons,” Obama’s presidential proclamation said at the time. “The Cotoni-Coast Dairies unit of the monument shall become available for public access” as soon as the Bureau of Land Management completed a plan for the area.
Yet in the nearly eight years since, there is still no public access to the nearly 6,000 sprawling, coastal acres just south of Davenport.
The federal government had wrapped up an initial land-use plan in 2020 and planned to break ground in 2021, and then 2022, but long-simmering disagreements over the property and its management among neighborhood groups, the federal government, agricultural interests and a national land trust threw the monument into a spiral of environmental reports, land management plans and neighbor appeals.
That is now set to change as the federal government last month greenlit a plan to develop two crucial features of public access at the remote coastal park: a parking lot and a trailhead. The trails could open to the public as soon as next summer.
The Nov. 13 decision from the Bureau of Land Management marks the most significant development in the yearslong struggle to open Cotoni-Coast Dairies to the public. The federal government has gone back and forth with state and county agencies, as well as neighborhood groups in nearby Bonny Doon and Davenport. Much of that struggle has dealt with whether to allow overnight camping and the possibility of campfires, how a planned parking lot would affect monarch butterfly habitat, and how the number of entrances and parking lots could clog Highway 1 with traffic.
In the end, Cotoni-Coast Dairies will open for day use only with no overnight camping, and, to start, it will have a single parking lot and entrance, located on the north side, that will require cutting down some eucalyptus trees and impacting monarch butterfly habitat. The land will also be available for research opportunities.
Although there was no hard deadline to negotiate an agreement, District 3 Santa Cruz County Supervisor Justin Cummings said the federal government was beginning to get antsy after eight years, and said it would open the monument eventually, with or without a parking lot, potentially requiring drivers to park wherever they could find a spot, whether along Highway 1 or on neighborhood streets.
“At the end of the day, Cotoni-Coast Dairies is going to open up to the public one way or another,” Cummings said, so there was not enough time to find the perfect solution. However, he said the plan is “in a much better place” than when it started, and minimized the monument’s impact on neighbors, traffic and the environment “to the greatest extent possible.”
Jonathan Wittwer, president of the neighborhood group Friends of the North Coast, said neither he nor his organization are planning to appeal the BLM’s decision. The group had pushed the federal government to build two parking lots and trailheads to dilute some of the feared traffic impacts. However, a southern parking lot would require the federal government to take a few acres of active farmland, which has proved complicated.
Although it’s on ice, Wittwer said the southern parking lot would move forward eventually but needs “some serious discussions” still about how to make it happen.
The nonprofit Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Stewardship has been working on developing the monument’s public hiking and equestrian trails. In an email, Katy Poniatowski, communications manager for the organization, called BLM’s Nov. 13 approval a “major win” and “as a result, we expect the trails to open to the public next summer.” The group is finishing the third and final piece of the monument’s 9-mile northern trail network, and plans to begin development of the 10-mile southern network in 2025.
The path to opening Cotoni-Coast Dairies is only one piece of the larger reimagining of the North Coast as an outdoor recreation destination.
The county recently broke ground on the Davenport section of the Coastal Rail Trail project, which will provide hike-and-bike access, and eventually rail service, from Davenport to Watsonville. The parking lots at Davenport and Panther state beaches, long infamous for their moonlike surfaces, are getting repaved; both beaches are getting new bathrooms. The county has also been looking to outfit the nearby Greyhound Rock beach with low-cost camping accommodations.
“We can expect a lot more visitation in the future along the North Coast,” Cummings said. “A lot of these beaches were once remote and unknown, but now they’re on top 10 places to visit lists. As we have more amenities, we’ll get a lot more people up there.”
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