CSPA Sues Department of Parks and Recreation

CSPA
California Sportfishing Protection Alliance
“Conserving California’s Fisheries"

Your 501(c)(3) tax deductible cash donations are desperately needed if the fight for our fisheries is to continue. Read how you can donate!

Enter your Email address to sign up
for our Weekly Newsletter

For Email Marketing you can trust

CSPA Sues Department of Parks and Recreation

By Bill Jennings, Executive Director, CSPA

September 21, 2009 -- On 17 September 2009, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) has filed a lawsuit in Alameda Superior Court charging the California Department of Parks and Recreation and its Off-Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Division (OHMVR Division). The lawsuit alleges that the OHMVR Division violated the state's Water Code and their own regulations, by allowing off-road vehicle activities to pollute Corral Hollow Creek at Carnegie State Vehicular Recreation area.

Specifically, the Carnegie State Vehicular Recreation Area (Carnegie), near Tracy, discharges quantities of sediment and heavy metals into the creek from Carnegie's heavily used off-road trails and open areas. The lawsuit also charges the OHMVR Division with failing to comply with its own regulations, which require annual monitoring of soil loss and damage to wildlife habitat.

The lawsuit includes an Application for an Alternative Writ of Mandate requesting the Court to order the OHMVR Division to immediately submit a report of waste discharge to the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board and to immediately suspend all off-highway motor vehicle activity at Carnegie and Corral Hollow Creek until the Division secures the legally required permit. A hearing on the Writ of Mandate is scheduled for Tuesday, 22 September 2009 at 11:00 a.m. in Department 31 of the Alameda Superior Court.

Carnegie's denuded hillsides, a result of decades of damaging “hillclimbs” by off-road vehicles, stand in stark contrast to the lushly vegetated slopes on adjoining private lands. Inside the park, steep trails are badly eroded and Corral Hollow Creek is itself used as an off-road play area, with off road vehicles routinely traveling the length of the creek within the park.

CSPA/PEER conducted extensive water quality monitoring of Corral Hollow Creek that document extremely high levels of total suspended solids, copper, lead, aluminum and iron in the creek that exceed water quality standards. Water samples taken above the park contained negligible quantities of these pollutants. Following rainfall, prodigious quantities of sediments are deposited in the creek because of a failure to install and maintain mandated pollution prevention control measures. Again, water samples collected upstream show little sediment in the water.

The OHMVR Division is responsible for ensuring responsible management of off-road use throughout the state, including on thousands of acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land that have receive hundreds of millions of dollars over the 38-year old life of the program. Conservation groups have, for years, charged the program with putting recreation interests over environmental protection.