With more than two decades of advocacy efforts and many twists and turns, the site known as Tesla Park in eastern Alameda County needs protection once again.
In 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom, the Legislature, and the California Department of Parks and Recreation reached a $31 million agreement to protect the Alameda-Tesla Expansion Area from off-highway vehicle (OHV) recreation on the land.
We are now asking our supporters to reach out to legislators to ask them to support establishing Tesla as a State Natural Reserve. We need your urgent help because State Parks plans to release the general plan and Environmental Impact Report by the end of the year. We cannot let Tesla’s irreplaceable resource values be damaged by short-term thinking. Send an email to Assemblymember Bauer-Kahan and Senator McNerney in a few easy steps using this action alert!
Tesla has natural and cultural resources of statewide significance that exceed the statute for Reserve classification, from extraordinary biodiversity to an essential critical linkage wildlife corridor to important historic and prehistoric cultural resources. Learn more here.
Historic Fight
With the mobilization of a coalition of organizations, led by the Save Tesla Park campaign, Greenbelt Alliance helped fight this battle for Tesla Park—and won. The land has rare ecological value and contains an abundance of highly sensitive natural and cultural resources. Learn more here.
This agreement was part of the Natural Resources Budget Trailer Bill AB 155/SB 155, which ends plans to expand the Carnegie State Vehicular Recreation Area (SVRA) into the 3,100-acre Tesla Park and provides resources to reallocate this high-environmental-impact activity to a different, more appropriate location.
For at least two decades, Tesla Park has been at risk of becoming a destructive off-highway vehicle/motorized recreation park as an expansion project for the Carnegie SVRA. In 2019, Governor Newsom vetoed legislation that would have preserved Tesla Park, and in June 2021, threatened to line-item veto a Tesla Park protection item in the budget unless it was removed.
Now, this land will become a new state park, under the control of State Parks and the Parks and Recreation Commission, closed to motorized recreation and open to the community for low-impact recreation activities, such as hiking. A planning process will be conducted to determine the classification of Tesla Park as a unit of the park system and its management and use plan, with $1 million allocated to the planning process in this year’s budget.
The state will reimburse the off-highway vehicle fund $18.3 million for the estimated current value of the land, plus $2.4 million that the fund used for planning the current park’s expansion. Another $11.5 million will be set aside for planning and construction of an alternative off-road park, while $1 million will go toward transitioning the Tesla property into a non-OHV park.
With information from Friends of Tesla Park.
