714: Protecting Pismo: Keeping California’s Only Drive-On Beach Open

Oceana Dunes at Pismo Beach is the only place in California where you can legally drive on the beach. For over 25 years, Jim Suty and Friends of Oceana Dunes have been fighting to keep it that way. Jimmy and Tyler sit down with Jim to talk about what’s happening now — and what’s been happening for a long time. This one covers a lot of ground. Jim walks through the history of the snowy plover fight that started around 2001, the dust pollution battle that took center stage around 2019–2020, and the new issue that’s surfaced after all of that: SVR (the State Vehicular Recreation Area that manages the dunes) never completed the Incidental Take Permit for the snowy plover that should have been finalized as part of the original mitigation. The ITP is the document that allows recreation to continue in habitat where an endangered species is present, provided land managers mitigate impact to acceptable levels. Without it, the dunes are exposed. And because SVR was always reacting to the next crisis — the next budget cut, the next complaint from the Coastal Commission, the next thing coming down from the state level — the ITP kept getting pushed down the priority list until it didn’t get done. Jimmy and Tyler dig into why this keeps happening — turnover in land manager leadership, no consistent long-term relationships with the local OHV community, a reactive management culture that never gets ahead of anything. The parallels to what Jimmy and Tyler see with El Dorado National Forest, Tahoe National Forest, and the Rubicon are everywhere. The dust fight is a good-news story worth hearing in full. During COVID, when the dunes were closed and no OHVs were running, Friends of Oceana Dunes commissioned studies that showed the dust particulate in the town of Oceano was not being caused by OHV activity on the dunes. The science that the APCD and the Coastal Commission had been using to justify closures and restrictions was wrong. Friends of Oceana Dunes fought it in court, won, and the APCD was ruled to have been incorrect — with money that had been spent on dust mitigation going back toward recreational purposes. Tyler and Jimmy hold this up as exactly what litigation looks like when it works. On where the money needs to come from: Tyler makes the argument that $20 to a litigation organization like Friends of Oceana Dunes or Blue Ribbon Coalition does more long-term work than $20 to a trail maintenance volunteer fund. Both matter. But if you can only pick one, he argues the scale is in favor of litigation. The numbers are striking — Jim mentions that 1.5 to 2.5 million people visit Oceana Dunes per year. If every one of them gave a quarter, Friends of Oceana Dunes would have a $500K–$750K operating budget. That’s how underfunded these organizations are relative to the scale of the impact they’re having. Also in this episode: the new California OHV certification bill being pushed by KORVA (which has passed its first stages of legislation), the “two knuckleheads” problem and why bad actors in OHV get more press than bad actors in every other outdoor recreation category, why the Coastal Commission tried to stop Friends of Oceana Dunes from picking up trash on the beach, the OHV super PAC joke that maybe wasn’t entirely a joke, and Jimmy’s personal note about his college memories at Pismo. Closing call to action: time, talent, or treasures. Find your carrot, find the organization working on it, and put something toward it. **Find Friends of O