Editorial: Preserving the miracle of Ormond Beach

Ventura County is home to two of the nation’s 568 National Wildlife Refuges, but unless you’re a condor or a bear, you can’t set foot on them. The Bitter Creek and Hopper Mountain refuges are adjacent to the 53,000-acre Sespe Condor Sanctuary and are closed to the public to protect the endangered species’ habitat.

Now, the county may be poised to get a third National Wildlife Refuge, one that would carry out the mission of preserving species and habitat but would also accommodate birdwatchers and wildlife observers, providing benefits to both nature and man.

The owners of Ormond Beach — the city of Oxnard and two conservancies — have applied to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, asking that it purchase and manage the 650 acres of coastal wetlands situated between the city of Port Hueneme and Naval Base Ventura County, Point Mugu.

More: Oxnard to seek national wildlife refuge status for Ormond Beach

If that happens, it would be a most welcome development. The National Wildlife Refuge program, established in 1906, has a thoughtful history of land and wildlife conservation. It has the experience, expertise and resources to permanently provide for Ormond Beach the kind of sensitive management the wetlands require while also enabling public enjoyment of the natural resource.

Across the nation, such refuges now accommodate 67 million annual visits.

The Southern California coast was once home to about 26,000 acres of wetlands, but decades of development have eliminated up to 90% of the marshes. These wetlands are literally incubators of life, home to fish nurseries and bird nesting grounds.

In Ventura County, the resource was held in such little regard that large industrial uses were directed there, including the Ormond Beach electrical generation plant and the former Halaco Engineering Co., which operated a metal smelter and dumped waste metals into a settling pond. It is now a Superfund cleanup site.

Those two properties are privately owned and are not included in the request for Wildlife Refuge consideration. But the power station is slated to close sometime in the next few years and the Environmental Protection Agency continues to work on a cleanup plan for the Halaco site, with feasibility studies scheduled to be released this summer. Potentially, that land could be added to a refuge in future years.

The attainment of Wildlife Refuge status would be a fitting progression in the decades-long fight to preserve the Ormond Beach wetlands, home to more than 200 bird species and nearly three dozen rare and endangered plants and birds.

A plucky group of environmental advocates, calling themselves the Ormond Beach Observers, successfully engaged the fight in the 1980s. For their efforts, two retired schoolteachers, the late Jean Harris and the late Roma Armbrust, received a national volunteer leadership award from the Environmental Law Institute.

Their grassroots activism built the momentum that led to the 2002 purchase of 293 wetlands acres by the California Coastal Conservancy, followed in 2005 with the purchase of an additional 276 acres by the Nature Conservancy.

It is the vision of conservationists that ultimately Ormond Beach can be connected to neighboring wetlands, including the Mugu Lagoon, to create what would become Southern California’s largest coastal wetlands.

The application for National Wildlife Refuge status will now be subject to a lengthy period of review and consideration. It is a process that should be watched over and encouraged by Ventura County’s congressional representatives, Reps. Julia Brownley and Salud Carbajal.

When the Nature Conservancy made its purchase nearly 20 years ago, its project director noted that after years of development and misuse of coastal lands in Southern California, it was “almost miraculous” that these Ormond Beach sand dunes and salt marshes had survived intact. This action would be the logical next step to ensure that the miracle endures.

This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Editorial: Preserving the miracle of Ormond Beach