The Monterey Bay Sanctuary Fund will have the freedom to oppose offshore drilling, so oil rigs won’t be in the background as gray whales raise their flukes. Photo: David Weller/NOAA
By Christine Heinrichs
The Monterey Bay Sanctuary Fund is a new independent local nonprofit, announced in April. Its mission is to protect the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The intention is for the organization to speak freely and take more action to protect MBNMS, including opposing any federal effort to allow offshore oil drilling within the sanctuary boundaries, Dan Haifley, secretary of the Board, said. Haifley helped create MBNMS as director of Save Our Shores in the 1980s and 90s and formerly served on the Sanctuary Advisory Council.
The Monterey Bay Sanctuary Fund replaces the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, a chapter of the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, a national organization dedicated to protecting marine sanctuaries across the United States — including the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which runs from Marin to Cambria.
The sanctuary itself isn’t affected by the change. The supporting organization, the Monterey chapter of the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, will be dissolved and replaced with the independent Monterey Bay Sanctuary Fund.
The fund will retain the foundation’s leadership, co-chairs Hilary Bryant and Leon Panetta, and the rest of the leadership team.
Offshore drilling
Panetta advocated for the Monterey chapter of the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation to oppose the Trump administration’s March order to restart the Santa Ynez offshore oil platform and pipeline off the Santa Barbara coast.
The national foundation said they would not be able to do that.
“That’s really one of the things that made clear to us that if we are going to continue to be able to speak out for protecting Monterey Bay, particularly from the threat of offshore drilling, we would have to go independent,” Panetta said.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the Trump administration to prevent the Las Flores pipelines from being reactivated. It’s the second lawsuit Bonta has filed to prevent reopening the pipelines.
“Protecting California’s rights, coastlines, and communities is our guiding light,” Bonta said. “We won’t let this outrageous federal overreach go without a fight.”
Local fundraising for local projects
While the national foundation has effectively defended the NMS budget in Congress, “We’re really the ones to fundraise for local projects,” Haifley said.
The regional organization raises about $750,000 a year, which goes to projects such as whale disentanglement, educational programs, and the Sanctuary Exploration Center in Santa Cruz and the Coastal Discovery Center in San Simeon. Programs help the public appreciate the importance of the sanctuary to the local community.
“Not everybody is aware of the benefits of having a national marine sanctuary covering our 276 miles of coastline,” he said.
The new fund ensures that all the money raised locally remains under local governance to support the sanctuary’s protection, research and education, Panetta told the Santa Cruz Sentinel. He added that the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation worked with the Monterey Bay chapter’s leaders to help them become independent, as they recognized that they felt deeply about being able to speak out freely.
“Having been around Washington for almost the last 50 years in one capacity or another, I recognized how important it was for us to be able to be an independent voice on this issue,” Panetta said. “It was important for us not to have our hands tied when it came to defending Monterey Bay.”
The nonprofit will be fully functional in a few months, after its IRS status as a 501c3 organization is approved, the California secretary of state recognizes its nonprofit status, and Articles of Incorporation are approved.
Then donations to support the MBNMS Fund will be tax deductible and welcome.
Christine Heinrichs is the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council SLO At-Large member. Follow her on Facebook, Bluesky, LinkedIn and Substack.
