The North Coast’s Glaring Gap

For nearly a decade almost all state-controlled tidelands from the northern Santa Barbara County line to the Oregon border have been a formal part of a marine sanctuary and have been protected from oil and gas exploration and drilling. But there has been one glaring gap: a stretch of coast along Mendocino County and the southern third of Humboldt County. This gap would have been closed with the final approval of Assembly Bill 284, sponsored by Assemblyman Dan Hauser (D-Arcata), who represents the north coast region.

Similar measures by Hauser passed the Assembly in the 1983-84 and 1985-86 sessions, only to fail in the state Senate. This year, however, AB 284 passed the senate on a vote of 28 to 6, and the bill went to the governor’s desk. The measure had the support of the California Coastal Commission. Further, the state Lands Commission staff said that there would be no monetary loss to California, since it was not likely that there would be any leasing of this north coast stretch of state tidelands area before 1995, when the sanctuary statute will expire.

Nonetheless, the bill was vetoed by Gov. George Deukmejian, who sent the Legislature an extraordinarily expansive letter of explanation that sounded as if it had been written by the same people who have been responsible for the Reagan Administration’s alleged energy policies of the past eight years--the policies that have focused so heavily on plundering the California coastline. In his veto message the governor talked at length about the need to develop domestic American oil and gas resources, saying that a failure to do so now might result in crash development later that would devastate the coastal environment. He added that “we cannot afford, as this bill proposes, to simply lock away our vast offshore resources in a blanket moratorium.” It was the sort of language that would have made James G. Watt glow with pride.

What Deukmejian glossed over was the fact that Hauser’s bill would have merely added a narrow band of coast, with relatively slight oil prospects, to a vast state marine sanctuary that has existed throughout this decade. The sanctuary law will expire in 1995 unless a reassessment of the need for available petroleum resources at that time concludes that the Legislature can extend it. Further, this is the state-owned three miles of tidelands that is adjacent to the proposed federal oil and gas lease sale that caused so much controversy this year. Even Vice President George Bush said that the federal lease sale should be postponed until the environmental effects could be studied further.

The governor’s veto came just as Bush was pledging an accelerated effort to protect the environment if he is elected President in November. Deukmejian recycled the same tired oil boilerplate language of Reagan interior secretaries about not drilling until “we can fully protect the quality of the environment.” To his credit, Deukmejian added that local coastal industry, presumably tourism, must be protected, too. There simply are places along the California coast where there is not enough oil to justify the building of any oil platforms, especially within three miles of land. These are places where the very presence of platforms damages the environment and threatens the tourist industry. This portion of the Mendocino and Humboldt coast is one such place.

At least the governor does not have a controlling vote on the state Lands Commission, which leases state tidelands. For now, it will be up to the Lands Commission to assure this priceless wilderness of coast the protection that it deserves.