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President Barack Obama significantly expanded his conservation legacy last month when he established a new national monument in Maine’s North Woods and then quadrupled the size of an existing monument around the remote Northern Hawaiian Islands, banning commercial fishing and deep sea mining there forever.

Now, California’s coast may be next on his list.

Environmental groups and Democratic congressional leaders are pushing for the president, who only has four months left in office, to add six pieces of land to the existing California Coastal National Monument, an area set up 16 years ago by President Bill Clinton to protect offshore rocks and islands.

The properties, all owned by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, total roughly 6,300 acres. They include rugged oceanfront bluffs along Humboldt County’s Lost Coast, a six-mile-long stretch of the north coast of Santa Cruz County near the town of Davenport and the historic Piedras Blancas lighthouse near Hearst Castle.

Congressional supporters will hold a public meeting Friday in Cambria, San Luis Obispo County, with Neil Kornze, director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, to get public comments. Such public meetings with White House officials in the past have been the final step before Obama has established monuments.

“President Obama has done so much to preserve our public lands, including in California,” said U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who is hosting the public meeting. “This could be another great addition to his conservation legacy.”

Presidents can establish national monuments on federally owned land where logging, mining and other activities are banned without a vote of Congress, using their authority under the 1906 Antiquities Act.

Nearly every president has used the law since it was first signed by President Theodore Roosevelt to establish new national monuments, and many eventually were upgraded by Congress to become national parks. Roosevelt used it to set aside the Grand Canyon, Herbert Hoover used it to protect Arches in Utah and Death Valley in California, and President George W. Bush used it to set aside vast areas of the remote Pacific Ocean, including the world’s deepest location, the Marianas Trench.

Most of the properties under consideration are not controversial.

But critics who live near the Santa Cruz property, a 5,800-acre expanse known as Coast Dairies, are urging a delay. They fear the designation could entice hordes of people with no place to park, no restrooms and other problems to descend on the area along Highway 1, particularly since monument designation doesn’t guarantee any new federal funding or rangers.

“There’s a very, very good chance we put out a huge welcome sign to everybody on the planet and that will bring illegal camping, people dumping garbage and forest fires,” said Andy Davidson, a software engineer who is chairman of the Rural Bonny Doon Association, a community group in northern Santa Cruz County. “The Big Sur fire burning right now was started by an illegal campfire.”

Home to postcard-worthy rolling hills, redwood forests and scenic trails, Coast Dairies was preserved from development in 1998 when environmentalists purchased the land with roughly $40 million from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

For most of the 20th century, the property was run as a farm and ranching operation by the descendants of two Swiss families. After purchase by Save the Redwoods League in 1998, it was transferred to the Trust for Public Land. Then, in 2006, about 400 acres of its beaches were donated to the state parks department. And in 2014, the trust transferred most of the rest of the land to the Bureau of Land Management with permanent deed restrictions banning mining, fracking, recreational motorcycle riding and other uses.

Last year, the BLM began docent-led hiking tours and is now patrolling the land. But it has not yet set a date for broad public access because of the limited number of rangers and funds. Although BLM has owned the property for two years, there are no signs, parking areas or restrooms, or a management plan for the land, which is padlocked.

In fact, there are only four law enforcement rangers in the BLM’s entire Central Coast field office, an area of 284,000 acres — 10 times the size of the city of San Francisco — that stretches from the Coast Dairies property to southern Monterey County and out to Interstate 5 near San Luis Reservoir in Merced County.

Sempervirens Fund, a nonprofit environmental group based in Los Altos, is leading the effort to have Coast Dairies declared a national monument, under the name Cotoni-Coast Dairies, a reference to an Indian tribe that once lived on the property.

“Monument status brings a kind of national attention and recognition that will attract financial resources and staffing resources to help restore the landscape,” said Sara Barth, the group’s executive director. “It becomes part of a large network of lands that are of gold star value, which can attract private and public resources.”

Barth said her group envisions a public visitor center and parking area one day at the site of the former Cemex cement plant in Davenport, an industrial facility that closed several years ago. From there trails could lead into Coast Dairies and nearby properties like Wilder Ranch State Park and San Vicente Redwoods, an 8,000-acre property owned by several land trusts.

“I understand the concerns of people who worry it isn’t going to give guaranteed new funding,” she said. “But the alternative is certainly no funding.”

David Christy, a BLM spokesman, said there is about $5 million a year in the California BLM budget to pay for staffing, signs, restrooms, trails and other needs at nine BLM properties from the King Range in Humboldt County to the Carrizo Plain near Paso Robles to desert areas in Palm Springs.

He said that after Obama designated a new national monument in 2012 on more than 14,000 acres at the former Fort Ord Army base in Monterey County, the number of visitors jumped from 250,000 a year to 400,000. His agency will figure out a way to shift resources to protect Coast Dairies if monument status comes, he said, and likely wouldn’t open it to broad public access for about three years while plans were drawn up to protect sensitive plants and animals.

“In the short term, we’ll use the resources we have,” he said.

NEXT ON CALIFORNIA’S LIST OF NATIONAL MONUMENTS?

President Obama’s administration is considering adding six federally owned properties to the California Coastal National Monument by presidential proclamation.

Coast Dairies — a 5,800-acre former dairy ranch that stretches for six miles along Highway 1 near Davenport in Santa Cruz County.

Trinidad Head — 13 acres of rocky shoreline in Humboldt County, which is home to the Trinidad Head lighthouse, built in 1871.

The Lost Coast Headlands — 440 acres in Humboldt County just south of the mouth of the Eel River, with rugged forests and beaches.

Lighthouse Ranch — 8 acres located 11 miles south of Eureka, with panoramic views of the Eel River Delta, Humboldt Bay and the Pacific Ocean.

Piedras Blancas — 20 acres in northern San Luis Obispo that is well-known for its 1874 lighthouse and nearby colony of elephant seals.

Orange County offshore — A group of small rocks and islands off the coast of Orange County that in the 1930s were considered by the Coast Guard for lighthouses.