North Coast closer to permanent protection

Kirsten Mitchell
The Press Democrat
03/03/2008

WASHINGTON - In the battle against offshore oil drilling, Sonoma County for the first time has cleared a congressional hurdle on the path toward protecting its rugged coastline forever.

Tired of a patchwork approach to keeping oil companies out of offshore waters, Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, is asking Congress to expand the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary northward from Marin County to Mendocino County, roughly doubling the sanctuary's size and permanently barring oil drilling.

A federal moratorium on oil and gas leasing has kept drilling out of much of California's offshore waters for 27 years, but extending it requires a yearly congressional vote.

A second federal moratorium offers backup, but it expires in four years, and can be undone by presidential order. President Bush lifted the ban for Bristol Bay, Alaska, in January 2007.

Congressional attempts to lift the annual moratorium off California's coast swell up from time to time, including a 2005 failed try by then Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy.

Expanding the Gulf of Farallones National Marine Sanctuary to an area larger than Delaware and covering all of Sonoma County's 76 miles of shoreline would trump both federal moratoriums. The area affected lies in federal waters, from three miles offshore to as far out as 51 miles from Bodega Head.

"The only permanent protection against offshore drilling and exploration is through national marine sanctuary status," Woolsey said. Her bill also would roughly double the size of the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary off Marin County's coast.

The proposed expansion areas run through one of the world's four most productive sea-life ecosystems, said Susan L. Williams, the director of the Bodega Bay Marine Lab, who testified at an October hearing on the bill. The waters are home to Dungeness crab, sea lions, seals and ancient deep-sea corals, among other creatures, and are on the sea highway that gray whales use annually in their breeding-to-feeding trips from Mexico to Alaska.

This is Woolsey's third attempt at protecting the waters with a national marine sanctuary label.

Two previous tries ended when her bills languished in a House subcommittee in 2004 and 2005 before Democrats took control of Congress.

In February, the House Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife and Oceans unanimously consented to sending the bill to the House Committee on Natural Resources, where it awaits a hearing.

To win approval, Woolsey agreed to remove proposed bans on aquaculture and desalinization in sanctuary waters in response to opposition from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which administers the sanctuary program.

"We've done what NOAA has suggested without gutting the bill," Woolsey said. "The most important thing is that the bill get passed."

Local fishermen support the expansion.

"I think it is a good thing," said Zeke Grader, executive director of the San Francisco-based Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Association. "I think it is going to provide some additional protections."

The state, under its Marine Life Protection Act, is designating marine protection areas along the coast where fishing may be banned in state waters within three miles. Recreational and commercial fishing continues to be allowed in national marine sanctuaries.

"It hasn't disrupted our operations in any way whatsoever," said Rick Powers, the skipper of a charter boat out of Bodega Bay and a former member of an advisory panel for the Cordell Bank sanctuary.

"The oil companies hate it, but that's fine with us," Woolsey said.

Oil companies so far have not lobbied against the bill. But the oil industry is concerned about blocking access to areas where there are known reserves at a time of increasing U.S. reliance on foreign oil imports.

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents the oil and natural gas industries, "historically has been opposed to new areas of exclusion for oil and gas exploration," said Richard Ranger, a senior policy adviser at API. "There are oil and gas resources off the California coast of significant value."

The trade group has not looked closely at Woolsey's bill and has not devoted energy to fighting moratoriums off California's coast because of the steadfast opposition statewide, he said.

"That opposition, if anything, has grown as the value of California real estate has increased and people of tremendous wealth own property out there," Ranger said.

In addition to a permanent ban on oil drilling and exploration, the national marine sanctuary label allows a sanctuary to collect penalties and settlements after oil spills for spending on restoration projects in the sanctuary.

When oil spilled in 1994 in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, the largest of the nation's 13 sanctuaries, it collected more than $17 million from the spiller for clean-up and restoration, Woolsey said in October.

Six years before the 1992 sanctuary designation, fines of $5.4 million were levied in a larger and more damaging spill.

"It took 10 years to collect the funds for the 1986 spill, 20 months for the 1994 spill," she told the House subcommittee. "No one wants to collect this kind of money, but clearly designation has paid off."

Woolsey's bill authorizes spending as much as $6.5 million a year on the expansion, but in order for the money to flow, the bill would have to pass and money would have to be included in one of the mammoth federal spending bills that Congress passes each year.

Richard Charter, government relations program manager for Defenders of Wildlife in Bodega Bay, predicts that Woolsey's legislation will pass this year.

It faces votes in a House committee as early as this spring, then the full House, and finally it must pass the Senate where Sen. Barbara Boxer, who formerly represented Marin County and parts of Sonoma County in Congress, has introduced a companion bill.

"You protect what you can when it's politically feasible," Charter said. "This is the year that it's politically feasible."

There are 13 national marine sanctuaries in 11 U.S. states and territories. The first was established off Cape Hatteras, N.C., in 1975 to protect the USS Monitor, a Civil War ship that sank in 1862.

The sanctuaries comprise more than 18,000 square miles of ocean and range in size from the one-quarter-square-mile Fagatele Bay National Marine Sanctuary near American Samoa, which encompasses a coral reef ecosystem nestled in a volcanic crater, to the 5,300-square-mile Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.

Staff Writer Robert Digitale contributed to this report.