California Parks Department violated state environmental laws, lawsuit alleges
California’s Parks and Recreation Department has been accused of violating the state’s bedrock environmental protection law.
The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit earlier this month in Sacramento County Superior Court alleging that the parks department disregarded key provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act when adopting a revised management plan for Red Rock Canyon State Park in Kern County.
The California Environmental Quality Act, also known as CEQA, was signed into law more than a half-century ago by Gov. Ronald Reagan to ensure that government agencies weighed the impacts of any land-use decisions and public works projects. The law was later expanded to include private developments.
Environmentalists and community groups have long endorsed CEQA as a crucial mechanism to preserve natural resources and protect public health. But over time, CEQA lawsuits have often been weaponized as a way to block housing projects, prompting growing efforts to reform the landmark law.
In this case, the lawsuit is about concerns over environmental damage from off-road vehicles, such as dirt bikes and ATVs.
The California State Park and Recreation Commission in early March approved a plan to allow the use of off-road vehicles on two roads and a campground inside Red Rock Canyon State Park, the largest park in the western Mojave Desert, for the first time since it joined the state park system in 1984.
The park, located where the southern tip of the Sierra Nevada converges with the El Paso Mountains, is known for its high desert landscape, scenic rock formations and archaeological resources. The approximately 25,000-acre desert expanse in Kern County is home to the threatened desert tortoise, Mojave ground squirrel and an array of rare plants.
The park is surrounded by other opportunities for off-road vehicle use. They include vast acreage owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management and Onyx Ranch State Vehicular Recreation Area, California State Parks’ second-largest off-road vehicle property.
The Center for Biological Diversity argues that allowing off-road vehicles inside the park will adversely impact the conservation of resources and species inside the park. The group’s lawsuit alleges that the Commission adopted an updated management plan without conducting “adequate environmental analysis of those avoidable impacts, and without adopting any measures to feasibly minimize and mitigate those impacts.”
California State Parks declined to comment, citing pending litigation.
“We think they’ve made a big mistake here,” said Ileene Anderson, California deserts director for the Center of Biological Diversity. “The purpose of state parks is to protect state resources, not to allow a destructive type of recreation to occur in the boundaries.”
Anderson worries that those riding dirt bikes and 4x4s will flatten rare plants and critical vegetation that vulnerable animals like the desert tortoise rely on. “Tortoises are already declining in the range,” she said. “A lot of it has to do with habitat degradation.”
