Our Challenge
Background:
Rancho Corral de Tierra includes 4,000 acres of land managed by GGNRA (National Park Service).
Four horse barns with stable facilities for 220 horses (Moss Beach Ranch, Ember Ridge Equestrian Center, Ocean View Farm, Redtail Ranch) operate within the Rancho Corral de Tierra area, from Pacifica to El Granada. These ranches host many public-serving programs including summer camps, horse clinics, public and private trail rides, and horseback riding lessons and adaptive riding/job training programs for disabled and neurodiverse children and adults, and help veterans and others cope with PTSD. Many of these programs are not available anywhere else in San Mateo County.
Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) acquired Rancho Corral de Tierra in 2011 from Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST).
Our Current Challenge:
In January 2024, a Freedom of Information Act request by the Coastside Horse Council revealed that in 2021, the GGNRA/National Park Service had hired a group of consultants to develop an “Equestrian Facilities Management Study” as part of a “Rancho Corral de Tierra Comprehensive Site Management Plan” .
These plans propose radical changes to existing GGNRA land use and reductions in equestrian operations in Rancho Corral de Tierra.
Coastside Horse Council is opposed to these NPS plans based on the following:
#1: The National Park Service plan centers around misinterpretation and misrepresentation of water quality research and data from the San Mateo Conservation Resource District, wrongly claiming that the local population of horses pollutes San Vicente Creek with pathogenic bacteria.
#2: The NPS plan was developed without ANY equestrian community input and with limited to no meaningful community input (Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy outreach/NPS booths at non-equestrian related community events).
#3: The new National Park Service Site Management Plan outlines devastating impacts to current equestrian operations and the local equestrian community and business community:
Closes down and eliminates 2 equestrian centers (Ocean View, Redtail Ranch) including horse boarding and public riding lessons.
Consolidates, downsizes and moves horse operations at the 2 other equestrian centers (Moss Beach Ranch, Ember Ridge Equestrian Center)
Reduces the current 210 horse boarding capacity to 40 or fewer. This will affect 80% of horses boarded at RCdT.
Eliminates horse-related recreation areas including arenas, pastures, equipment facilities/workshops and replaces them with a visitors’ center, parking lot and campsites.
The Coastside Horse Council’s Position:
Horse-centric recreation has been integral to the Rancho Corral de Tierra community for generations.
The National Park Service has a plan that will devastate long-standing equestrian public programs and horse populations within Rancho Corral de Tierra.
If horses and ranches are removed from Rancho, our equestrian way of life will not survive on the Coastside potentially impacting horse properties and related businesses from Montara and Moss Beach to Half Moon Bay and Pescadero.
As the local equestrian advocacy group for the Pacifica, Montara, Moss Beach, El Granada, Half Moon Bay and Pescadero communities, Coastside Horse Council is leading the charge this important issue.
Our goal is to get the National Park Service to conduct a fair and transparent planning process—one that gives the entire Coastside community the opportunity to participate in all planning and decisions regarding Rancho’s future, including the future of its equestrian facilities and trails.
We want an active voice and involvement in all Park Service planning and decisions regarding equine facilities and trails on Rancho Corral de Tierra.
We want to keep existing Rancho Corral de Tierra multi-user trails and horse centric programming and ensure future programs/trails are accessible and available to all community members including the less affluent, disabled.
We want to maintain all equestrian centers’ public programming and private horse-boarding at expanded or at a minimum full capacity in Rancho.
The equestrian community across Coastside Horse Council’s geographic scope has reacted with shock to this news and the local media have begun to actively cover this controversy.