NPS Questions Environmental Harm of Lighting Up Ocean Beach

As you know, the National Park Service (NPS) has jurisdiction over the entire Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA,) and with the Coastal Commission, is highly engaged in issues that affect the coast-side environment, such as Ocean Beach in San Francisco.

The proposal to reconstruct the Beach Chalet soccer fields with artificial turf and artificial lighting has generated a draft environmental impact report (EIR) and a firm National Park Service reply, a deeply questioning letter pointing out the incompleteness of this document to the Planning Department (the agency handling the EIR). Since the EIR takes no notice of Ocean Beach at all, even though it is directly across the Great Highway from the proposed soccer complex, the NPS letter asks that Ocean Beach, both on-shore and off-shore, be included in the study area in its full presence “as a National Park resource”.  It requests, furthermore, that the SPUR master planning process be referenced in the DEIR.  (Amazing it is that these two major points could have been overlooked in the EIR.)

The NPS letter firmly requests that the EIR “consider a reasonable range of alternatives, including:

• renovating other athletic fields not adjacent to Ocean Beach;
• improving the Beach Chalet fields without the proposed lighting;
• scheduling games earlier in the day to accommodate play during the hours before sunset;
• seasonal lighting limitations to avoid adding night lighting to the area during the times of bird migrations and the snowy plover presence.

The NPS letter comments that one of the Project Objectives,” Improve and increase nighttime use at the west end of Golden Gate Park” should be amended to add “while minimizing impacts to adjacent undeveloped open space areas”.

The NPS states its concerns that increased nighttime use could impact Ocean Beach resources: “The area around Sutro Heights Park and Land’s End is one of the darkest areas in the city and is emerging as a stargazing location for the public. Though the eastern skyline is dominated by the light from San Francisco, nearby lighting has the potential to measurably degrade the entire night sky quality as it is only 1.0 mile away.  As a rule of thumb, lights that are half the distance exert six times more impact upon the night sky.  Thus, a single light at the project site would have the same impact as 55 lights of the same design in downtown San Francisco.”   (See San Francisco Tomorrow’s EIR comment letter on the website SFTomorrow.org)