Overview:
Low-impact camping has potentially high-impact results, writes Bonny Doon resident Ted Benhari, who, along with a band of neighbors, last week helped convince the county board of supervisors to put a low-impact camping ordinance on hold for more study. Here, he explains why low-impact camping is potentially dangerous business.
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Dozens of Santa Cruz Mountain dwellers – mostly Bonny Dooners – persuaded the Board of Supervisors on June 25 that low impact camping isn’t ready for prime time in Santa Cruz County.
Residents went all out to make their point. They played generator noise and offered up chilling accounts of fire danger and environmental impacts of allowing strangers to camp on private land for fees. They also outlined the sketchy emergency services available in our county’s remote spaces.
Fire officials lent their opposition, too, as did the Sierra Club, Sempervirens, and land use attorneys, who said the county would need an expensive California Environmental Quality Act study to determine actual risk.
All this made it easy for wavering supervisors to put the low impact camping area ordinance (LICA) on the back burner.
This is a good thing. Proposed by outgoing Supervisor Zach Friend, LICA would have applied to more than 1,900 private, rural properties, covering 30,000 acres, with little consideration for its negative impacts.
For the sake of some cash for the few, most rural residents would have had to live with greatly increased fire danger, noise and the decreased availability and potentially soaring costs of homeowners’ insurance.
Friend said he proposed the ordinance to get ahead of a similar state proposal, SB 620, currently bottled up in the state senate appropriations committee while lawmakers hesitate to pass anything that will add to the current budget woes. His fellow supervisors said they want to see what the state does before reconsidering a local LICA, and they also want to get state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara’s take on how allowing commercial low-impact camping in areas prone to wildfires will affect insurance rates and availability.
The supervisors learned that while two properties, one in La Selva Beach and one in Boulder Creek, are legally categorized as high fire risk areas where “low impact camping” would be allowed, they are much different: the La Selva property abuts open farm land, while the Boulder Creek acreage sits in deep forest.
Most wildfires are caused by people. Campfires are the largest single cause of human-sparked wildfires, igniting nearly half of the 23,303 human-caused wildfires in the U.S. since 2006, according to the U.S. Fire Service.
Dooners pointed out that narrow mountain roads, accessed by narrower, steep driveways, often are not up to the county standard for safe fire truck access. They are often even more dangerous for unfamiliar drivers piloting large vehicles, and will inevitably lead to calls to already overtaxed emergency personnel — who might not even be reachable since rural cell coverage is poor to non-existent.
Imagine RVs negotiating those driveways, which have few and often inadequate turnouts. Ever tried backing up an RV on a steep curve? And RVs’ impact on roads is 16 times that of a midsize SUV, according to a federal government study. Neighbors won’t be happy when dozens or hundreds of RV trips, each equal to 16 car trips, tear up their jointly maintained driveways.
Only one deputy patrols the North Coast, a large area including Davenport, Bonny Doon and the San Lorenzo Valley’s northern areas. Help will be at best a half hour or more away.
At least these areas do have volunteer fire departments and CalFire stations. But elected officials and the civil grand jury have expressed concern in recent years about the decline in the number of local firefighters, both paid and volunteer.
During wildfire season, local CalFire crews are often away. They are then backed up by other crews. Do you live in an area that was ravaged by the 2020 CZU Fire? In Bonny Doon, we waited days for a CalFire crew to show up, and the only way we saved our homes was by forming neighborhood brigades that fought the flames to a standstill.
Once campers are off enjoying Wilder or Cotoni-Coast Dairies, we hope nothing bad happens, because state parks and the Bureau of Land Management are both woefully underfunded and have alarmingly few rangers available to deal with an emergency in the thousands of acres under their management.
One of the appeals of being in the wilderness is the chance to view mountain lions, bobcats and other wildlife. Good luck. Numerous studies prove wild animals want nothing to do with us. They skedaddle when they hear a human voice and don’t come back.
Weeks ago we were alerted by our supervisor, Justin Cummings, that this well-intentioned, but poorly thought out, proposal was coming down the trail. Led by the Rural Bonny Doon Association, a group of us marshaled our arguments against it.
We hope the state bill gets the same scrutiny.
Ted Benhari is a former chairman of the Rural Bonny Doon Association, an organization that since 1957 has campaigned for improved services and wilderness protection and against commercial development in Bonny Doon. He is currently an adviser to the RBDA executive board. In his former life, he was the public information officer for Dominican Hospital.