Efforts to restore a stunning mile-long stretch of remote oceanfront property seven miles south of Half Moon Bay that has been marred in recent years by rowdy overnight beach parties and piles of trash received a major boost this week: $5 million in Gov. Jerry Brown’s new state budget.
The money will go a long way to building a parking lot, restrooms and trail at Tunitas Creek Beach, supporters said Friday, creating a new San Mateo County beach park. It would be the first new large sandy public beach park in Northern California in decades.
“This is an incredible opportunity. It’s a spectacular beach,” said Walter Moore, president of the Peninsula Open Space Trust, a Palo Alto environmental group that purchased 58 acres of bluffs and beach there last November to help create the park, which technically is open to the public now.
The beach has a colorful and rowdy history.
Hundreds of people with stereo systems, disco balls, tents, kegs and mattresses have left huge amounts of trash, set off fireworks and used Tunitas Creek Beach as a bathroom during all-night raves. Two years ago, a San Jose man drowned there.
A company known as Todd Gelfand Trust, which is linked to pop singer Chris Isaak, purchased the bluff-top land, a small house and most of the sand on the beach in 1998 for $3.1 million. Isaak was never seen at the property, locals say, and the singer has declined interview requests to discuss why he purchased the land. But when the trust sold it to Moore’s organization last fall, a new course was set.
San Mateo County Supervisor Don Horsley, a former sheriff whose district includes the property, has led efforts to clean it, protect wildlife and plants in the area, and make it attractive to families.
Last summer, county supervisors passed an ordinance that bans overnight camping, dogs, fires, fireworks, amplified music and accumulating trash on Tunitas Creek Beach. Authorities, who have begun ticketing violators, also put up no-parking signs along Highway 1 and Tunitas Creek Road, where many of the overnight party-goers were leaving their cars. Horsley also has led efforts to hire two new park rangers to increase oversight.
“For many years, this was one of those ‘best kept secrets’ enjoyed by a few people,” said Horsley on Friday at a news conference to unveil the state money. “Then social media exploded and it became a destination for hundreds of people almost every weekend. With so many people coming to party, camp out, and use this beach as a rave location, it eventually became known as a not-so-secret disaster waiting to happen. The beauty of the beach was being lost to the environmental damage being done to it.”
The funding was inserted into the state budget by State Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, Assemblyman Marc Berman, D-Los Altos, and Assemblyman Kevin Mullin, D-San Mateo. It will be distributed by the state Coastal Conservancy.
It should take about three years, perhaps less, said Moore, for the parking lot, trails and restrooms to be finished. An old ramshackle home on the bluffs will either be torn down or converted to a ranger residence, he said.
The beach is technically open to the public now because all beaches in California are publicly owned up to the mean high-tide line, or the area where the sand is wet. But it’s difficult to access.
Studies have shown that endangered steelhead trout live in Tunitas Creek and that the beach is home to snowy plovers, a rare bird. The vast beach, with cliffs more than 100 feet tall on the northern edge, looks similar to Point Reyes National Seashore.
Famed Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola and his men camped along Tunitas Creek in 1769 during their expedition from Baja California to San Francisco Bay. The property was in private ownership for more than 100 years, its breathtaking cliffs and sand dunes hidden from motorists zooming along Highway 1 between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay.
But at Friday’s news conference, Horsley predicted a different future for the stunningly beautiful coastline: “We are standing along a strip of beach that I truly believe will become known as one of the great public beach parks in California.”
