New Times / Letter To The Editor

Supervisors must reduce dunes pollution

Nell Langford

The San Luis Obispo Health Commission took a bold heroic step at its March 8 meeting, regarding the APCD Phase 2 Study.  It passed two motions to advise the Board of Supervisors to do everything possible to stop the health-threatening air pollution from the ODSVRA immediately, and to inform the public about the dangers. Among the actions the BOS can take are:

1. Use its police powers to impose a temporary moratorium on off-roading to protect public health, as authorized by its Planning area (South County) Standards for Pismo State Beach and State Vehicular Recreation Area, and California Coastal permit.

2. Give OHV a 30-day notice that it will discontinue its month-to-month operational agreement regarding county-owned land, the La Grande Tract, which is more than  40 percent of the riding area. If the agreement is discontinued, the OHV will have no access to the rest of the riding area on state land either, since the beach between the two properties is a plover exclosure from March 1 to Sept. 30.

3. Enforce the county’s “buffer area” that begins at Pier Avenue. This will preclude the only access to the ODSVRA for the noisy hoards of fossil-fuel machines that speed down a public beach, through a creek, and through the shoreline ecosystem of a natural preserve.

4. Evacuate residents on the mesa and Oceano Beach where particulate matter surpasses health standards, so that off-roaders can continue to break the dune’s crust upwind of the mesa and drag dust down Pier Avenue.