The opening ceremony for public access onto the Federal Bureau of Land Management’s Cotoni Coast Dairies property was on August 15, 2025, a grim day for those who have followed this travesty, which will only worsen with the planned public access.

Building on a Tragic History

Nothing good led up to this moment. There is no one left who speaks the language of, or can show direct descendance from, the native people of this property. There are rich archeological sites illustrating that this land was settled for thousands of years. So, as with every spot in California we must see this property and how it has been and will be used as a colonialist endeavor. There is no attempt to give the land back to any coalition of First Peoples who represent those ancestors or to respect them in any way that approaches restorative justice. Oh, but there’s the name…(!)

After the genocide, the land has seen one extractive use after the next with little regard for conserving nature. The ‘Coast Dairies’ portion of the name points to cows, and cows there still are. The grazing regime has never focused on restoring the very endangered coastal prairies on the property and, even now, there is no plan to do so. This recreational use is a new, highly impactful extractive use. The property is rare for the Santa Cruz Mountains in having had very few human visitors for the last 100 years, so wildlife has been accustomed to roaming without disturbance. Cougars and badgers are especially wary of humans when setting up dens. A million visitors a year will soon be visiting and wildlife will flee.

The consortium of people responsible for so many other, better outcomes for conservation tried hard, won some concessions, but have seen great loss with how this property came to be open to the public. We tried to get anyone but the Federal Government to manage the property, but the Open Space Illuminati had other things in mind…’The Great Park’…a handful of boomers wanted their legacy in a wide swath of the area becoming a National Park. They stopped at nothing to achieve that legacy. The activists, biologists, conservationists, and regular citizens, were even sued to strike fear into them, to make them capitulate.

Money Made it Happen

The Wyss Foundation bankrolled cash-strapped ‘conservation’ organizations to create a fake grassroots campaign that culminated in Obama signing a Monument Proclamation adding 5 properties across a wide swath of coastal California to the California Coastal National Monument. 

Then, the BLM routed hundreds of thousands of dollars, sole-sourcing a contract to a mountain biking advocacy organization to build the kind of trails their users wanted to see. That business quickly changed their name to a ‘trails’ organization. Instead of supporting good paying local jobs, the BLM paid this organization to rally volunteers to do the work of installing trails that were placed across a landscape without regard for the wildlife written into the President’s Proclamation for protection. When asked about how they could do such things when the property’s designation required favoring conservation over visitor use, BLM cynically snickered that the majority of the property, 51%, is set aside without public access. The rest, apparently, is a sacrifice zone.

What We Wanted and Will Pursue

Those of us who care about the native peoples, the nature of the property, and the experience of future visitors have a vision, which we will pursue despite setbacks. The land should not be Federal land – if you wonder why, you need to look at the current situation with federal lands nationwide. We always knew this, but now others are starting to understand our concerns. The current administration is selling federal land for real estate development and other extractive uses. If, after cutting the federal workforce, there are any staff remaining to manage the land at all, that will be a surprise. The Administration has said Federal lands will remain open to visitors even if there is no staffing or budgets. Oh no- could my dystopian vision for the property be closer to reality?!

 If there is a chance, California should buy Cotoni Coast Dairies. Then, let’s envision taking Canada’s Indigenous Guardian’s project to this place, giving tribal people primacy in stewardship, use, and oversight. Perhaps the State could give the land back, as it has just accomplished with the Yurok.

If the property is to remain a public park with visitor access, there needs to be a radical shift in how that is approached. The regulatory designation for first managing the property for conservation needs to apply even to the areas with public access. This will require altering use patterns, even closing the trails occasionally, for the benefit of the soil, streams, wildlife and plants that Obama clearly intended to protect. There will need to be lots of monitoring and enforcement to adequately protect natural resources. The BLM will need to do a ‘carrying capacity analysis’ to determine ‘limits of acceptable change’ – thresholds that, if surpassed, trigger altered management of visitor use to bring the use into alignment with conservation. 

Next Steps

It will soon be possible for visitors to monitor the situation first hand. Those of us who asked to do baseline monitoring of wildlife and plants were refused the opportunity many times. When we asked how small children and the elderly could possibly co-recreate on trails overrun by fast-moving mountain bikes, our concerns were dismissed. We will be able to help document how well BLM’s rules are working and if there is enough enforcement. We will be able to see the spread of diseases introduced by bike tires and hiking shoes ravage the amphibians, the trees, and the soil, and we will recall how BLM staff predicted those impacts in writing, with administrators choosing to ignore even the simplest measures that hundreds of other parks managers have employed to address those concerns.

-this post updated to past tense from the one posted via Bruce Bratton’s legacy site BrattonOnline.com