Surfers, lawmakers push back against proposal to expand marine protections in Santa Cruz County

Shawn Dollar, a born-and-bred Pleasure Point resident, is known around the globe as a big-wave surfer whose ability to navigate the intimidating swells of Mavericks and Cortes Bank has earned him trophies and world records. 

Locally, Dollar sees himself and his children as part of a long lineage of recreational fishermen who cast lines and spear dive into the lush giant kelp forests off Pleasure Point. However, that lineage has come suddenly under threat by a petition to the state government to eliminate all fishing in the area as a means of preserving the kelp. 

Dollar said he was “truly shocked” to hear about the petition, submitted by an environmental advocacy group. Now, he is fighting to preserve this piece of his culture by organizing opposition to the petition and trying to navigate the intimidating tides of local politics. In doing so, he has entered into a different lineage: that of fishermen fighting the government’s marine preservation regulations. 

“To find out that possibly we would never be able to take another fish, or really enjoy the fruits of what nature’s given us in our own backyard, broke my heart,” Dollar told the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors on March 12. “Fathers like me won’t be able to fish with our children in the kelp bed.” 

The petition, submitted to the state’s Fish and Game Commission, would establish a 3.2-square-mile state marine reserve off Pleasure Point. The same petition seeks to expand the Natural Bridges State Marine Reserve zone by another 13.7 square miles.

State marine reserves are the strictest marine protection regulation the state has in its arsenal since it established the Marine Life Protection Act of 1999. Reserves, such as those off Natural Bridges and Elkhorn Slough in Moss Landing, outlaw not just commercial fishing but any activity in which a human removes a marine animal, plant or object from the area. 

The proposed designation and expansion of two state marine reserves off Santa Cruz County’s coastline comes from Environment California, a grassroots organization that advocates for stronger environmental protections throughout the state. Environment California’s petition is just one of 20 made to the Fish and Game Commission to amend which areas are covered by the Marine Life Protection Act. 

The petitions mark the start of a process the state has been preparing for since it formally established its marine protected areas up and down the coast in 2012, after a decade of research, analysis and planning following passage of the Marine Life Protection Act. The Fish and Game Commission said the 10-year review would include an open submission for petitions and suggestions on how to adjust the rules, where to strengthen them and, in a few cases, where to weaken them. 

On March 19, the Fish and Game Commission’s Marine Resources Committee took the first step in this new process, and met in San Clemente to discuss its approach to sifting through the 20 petitions, which propose more than 80 changes to the marine protection areas. A week earlier, in the city of Santa Cruz, two local governments did their best to influence that process. 

The board of supervisors and the Santa Cruz City Council each voiced unanimous opposition to the petition, citing a lack of both local outreach and evidence that the elimination of recreational fishing off Pleasure Point and a vastly expanded area around Natural Bridges would do anything to help the giant kelp population. 

Who initiated the local push against the petition helped add some weight to the protests. At the board of supervisors, Chair Justin Cummings led the opposition. Not only does his District 3 include Natural Bridges State Beach, but Cummings also holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from UC Santa Cruz. At the city level, it was Mayor Fred Keeley, who as a state legislator co-authored the landmark Marine Life Protection Act — the tree under which the fishing regulations and marine protected areas fall. 

Keeley, in October, initially wrote a letter supporting an exploration into whether the county’s marine protected areas needed amending. However, he said Environment California’s petition was not only a foray into the extreme, but that the organization failed to seek much local input from residents and marine scientists working along Monterey Bay. 

“My feeling is the folks who initially supported it didn’t do enough work with the local interest groups here,” Keeley told Lookout. “So the city took a position to oppose the petition unless amended based on the scientific input of the, really, world-class marine research community we have here locally.” 

Cummings said he thought the state marine reserve option was “a little extreme.” 

“What would be better is that we have a conversation about how we’re impacting our ecosystem,” Cummings said. “It’s important we have those conversations before the state makes regulations that would strictly prohibit people’s access. We’ve never seen a marine protected area go from being closed [to fishing] to reopening.” 

Laura Deehan, Environment California’s state director, emphasized to Lookout that the petition to create and expand state marine reserves in Santa Cruz represents only a starting point. Currently, the Marine Resources Committee is examining only which petitions to seriously consider. By November, it will have made decisions on the petitions that will advance to the next stage, which likely involves a multiyear public process of analyzing and molding the proposed changes into something to be formally implemented. 

Deehan said, ultimately, the proposal of a state marine reserve is Environment California wanting to start with the most extreme protections of the kelp forests and working down from there during the public process. 

“We are flexible on this and are very open to amending the petition to different levels of protection,” Deehan said. “The whole motivation was to expand the marine protected areas to encompass the beautiful kelp forests that are still thriving. We want to protect the ocean, and we think of this as the very beginning of community and state dialogue.” 

Giant kelp forests are a key facilitator of Monterey Bay’s globally recognized biodiversity. More broadly, they mirror the environmental benefits of terrestrial forests, providing both habitat and a carbon sink. Yet, the state’s kelp beds have become increasingly vulnerable over the past decade thanks to a series of events that knocked the ecosystem out of balance. 

The sea star, the primary predator of the purple sea urchin, began suffering from a disease outbreak in 2013. As sea stars began disappearing, purple urchin populations, especially along the Central and North Coasts, went unchecked, which allowed them to eat their favorite food — kelp. Then the arrival of “the Blob,” the warming event that hit the Pacific Ocean from 2014 to 2016, accelerated the spread of sea star disease, completely wiping out the local populations. A warm ocean is a less nutritious ocean, which worked to only further strangle the kelp forests already falling to a rapidly growing presence of purple urchins. 

By 2020, over 90% of the kelp forests along the North Coast had disappeared; those around the Monterey Peninsula had grown increasingly thin and patchy. Yet, the giant kelp forests off Santa Cruz County’s coastline remained some of the most lush and resilient in the state. (The reasons why are not well understood.) Deehan said this drives Environment California’s motivation: Kelp forests have been acknowledged as critical to the marine environment and the healthy forests should not have to become thinned out before they receive protections. 

“One of the best ways to counter the threats facing our kelp forests is by creating more marine protected areas,” Deehan wrote on March 7. “These are like national parks offshore, spaces that are off-limits to extractive activities and allow marine life to thrive once again.” 

If the petition for the kelp forests does advance to the public process stage, comment during the March 12 supervisor and city council meetings might offer a glimpse into the tensions it could manifest locally. 

“Preventing human access to natural resources is not the best way to protect those natural resources,” Seth Nowlin, a local surfer and buyer at Pacific Wave Surf Shop, told the supervisors. 

On the opposite side of the issue, local biologist Hannah Nevins told the supervisors: “I’m very much in support of expanding the marine protected areas. I don’t think it’s the county commissioners’ role to come out against it.” 

Professor Mark Carr, who teaches in UCSC’s ecology and evolutionary biology department, helped analyze the original marine protected areas, and was brought in during the 10-year review to look at how the protections impact the environment. Generally speaking, he said, marine protected areas have resulted in positive responses to fish populations, but he called this a “no-brainer.” 

“If you’re fishing extensively in an area, and then the state prohibits fishing, you expect to see a strong response in the populations,” Carr said. “Back in the day, the fishing communities up and down the coast were quite resistant to the idea of marine protected areas. [This new process] will just rekindle the controversy between fishing communities and the preservation regulations.”

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