Group Sues U.S. to Curb Grazing on Island

Environmentalists sued the National Park Service in federal court Tuesday, charging that the agency has let free-grazing cattle, deer and elk trample and partially destroy one of its lushest holdings: Santa Rosa Island, 27 miles off the Ventura coast.

The suit by the National Parks and Conservation Assn. accuses the park service of breaching a number of environmental laws by continuing to let a 6,500-head steer ranch and wild-game hunting company operate on Santa Rosa Island under a lease that expires in 2011.

It asks a federal court in Los Angeles to order the park service to declare that the ranching permit violates a series of federal coastal, clean-water and historic-preservation laws.

The suit also asks the court to shut down the ranching operation, run by Santa Barbara-based Vail & Vickers Cattle Co., until the ranchers comply with federal environmental laws.

The park service bought Santa Rosa Island--part of Channel Islands National Park--in 1986 for $30 million from Vail & Vickers. It then signed a 25-year lease on the land, allowing the company to continue ranching herds of cattle for meat and of elk and deer for hunting.

But environmentalist Brian Huse on Tuesday accused the park service of failing to keep the grazing in check or to adhere to its own mission of preserving the island for public use.

Instead, most of the 54,000-acre island remains off limits to unescorted park visitors. And grazing animals have leveled some of the island’s vegetation to stubble and fouled its creeks with waste and bacteria, said Huse, regional director of the conservation association, a private group.

“In our opinion, the park service has failed to live up to its part of that bargain,” Huse said. “Under the [agency’s rules], the park service has to manage the park so the resources are available now and for future generations.”

Holly Bundock, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service’s Western Region, said, “The park service believes it’s in compliance with the applicable laws with regards to any national park, but specifically with regards to the Channel Islands.” Park service officials declined further comment.

Santa Rosa Island is home to the Western snowy plover and several other threatened or endangered animal and plant species, and to about 2,000 archeological sites once peopled by Chumash Indians and Chinese abalone fishermen.

While one of the island’s principal ranchers declined to comment directly on the suit, he dismissed it as “extremists in action” and said that Vail & Vickers disagrees that its cattle are damaging the island.

“Cattle and sheep have been there for 160 years, and there are still some of those rare plants out there,” said Russ Vail, the ranch’s office manager and part owner of the hunting operation. “We don’t call them endangered; they’re rare.”

Vail & Vickers has used the island since 1902 to fatten cattle before sending them to market.

But only after the state Regional Water Quality Control Board ordered the park service in 1991 to reduce the cattle’s impact on streams and other habitat for native plants did the park service draft a plan to improve environmental conditions on the island.