SACRAMENTO, Calif. _ Thirty years ago, California voters approved a ballot initiative championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom's father, William Newsom, that banned mountain lion hunting in the state. The initiative was approved in part because it secured protections for ranchers to shoot mountain lions that kill or maim their livestock.
Now, the father's crusade is a thorn in the son's paw.
William Newsom's law is making it harder for Gov. Newsom to stop California's iconic big cats from getting trapped and shot _ even as the Democratic governor is feeling pressure from environmentalists seeking to protect cougars even further under the state's Endangered Species Act. Newsom's wildlife agency also is under fire for allowing a rancher in Ventura County to kill one of the rare cougars that prowl the Santa Monica hillsides of Southern California.
For the new governor, who was 22 when his father's initiative passed, the erupting dispute over killing cougars forces him to confront the unintended consequences of a signature piece of his father's legacy.
It's clear the mountain lion initiative from June 1990 is weighing on his mind. Speaking with reporters in Sacramento on Wednesday, Newsom lamented that the initiative known as Proposition 117 has tied his hands when it comes to his wildlife agency issuing permits to kill cougars after they attack livestock.
"We can't do it," Newsom said of requests he's received to ban the lethal cougar permits altogether. "I remember licking envelopes as a child, supporting 117. Explicitly, 117 affords the right for someone to take one of those permits out. Candidly, that's frustrating to me."
William Newsom, who died in 2018, was a state appeals court judge and administrator of the Getty oil family trust. He also was a founding board member of the Mountain Lion Foundation. While Newsom was on the board, the Sacramento-based group advocated for the 1990 ballot initiative. The law became a blueprint that animal-welfare groups have used to push for close to 40 successful statewide ballot measures targeting controversial hunting and livestock practices across the U.S.
Proposition 117 made permanent a moratorium on sport hunting of mountain lions that Gov. Ronald Reagan had approved years earlier. But there was a catch. To win over California voters wary of the big cats preying on livestock in rural parts of the state, 117 says the state "shall" issue what's known as a "depredation permit" to kill a cougar upon request if state officials confirm it killed livestock.
A Sacramento Bee investigation revealed in 2017 that thanks to that language, Californians have killed far more mountain lions since Proposition 117 passed then they did before.
Since Proposition 117 passed, around 100 mountain lions have been killed each year via the depredation permit system _ nearly four times the average number of lions killed each year under such permits prior to the ballot measure, according to The Bee's analysis of state records.
As with most issues involving animals in California, the debate over mountain lions is fraught with emotion. A recent example was in 2012 when Daniel Richards, then president of the California Fish and Game Commission, killed a mountain lion in Northern Idaho, where cougar hunting is legal. A photo of him with the lion's carcass was posted to a hunting magazine website, outraging animal rights activists. In response, the commission, made up of gubernatorial appointees, voted to remove him.
Newsom on Wednesday expressed a deep emotional attachment to the species tied so closely to his father and to his childhood.
"To me it's a romantic thing," Newsom said. "I was a kid shooting mountain lions by taking photographs of them. Others would tree the mountain lions and shoot them at point-blank range, claiming that was some rite of passage, some big tough thing to do when these things are easily treed by dogs."
The issue came to a head in January, when Newsom's Department of Fish and Wildlife sanctioned the killing of a mountain lion known as P-56, one of the cougars fitted with GPS-tracking collars that roam the Santa Monica Mountains of Southern California.
Southern California's cougars are closely studied because the small populations are hemmed in by development and deadly freeways. The Santa Monica cats are in particularly grave danger of dying off from inbreeding and other threats such as overdosing on rat poison.
P-56 was one of only two breeding-age males that biologists track with GPS collars in an 18-year study conducted by the National Park Service. The number "56" indicates he's the 56th cougar to be fitted with a collar.
For more than a year, P-56 kept killing sheep on a ranch in Camarillo in Ventura County. The cougar attacked 11 sheep and lambs, usually leaving the carcasses without eating them, according to state records released to The Bee in response to a California Public Records Act request.
The rancher took several steps that mountain lion advocates say will discourage attacks: She moved as many sheep as she could into a barn at night; she brought in a Pyrenees dog to guard the animals; she blasted talk radio from speakers at night so the lion would hear human voices; and she installed motion-activated lights and electric fencing.
"We are doing everything we can to protect the sheep, but we don't have enough indoor barn space for them all and they suffer tremendously from air-quality issues when confined," the rancher told state wildlife officials in a March 4 email. "Is there anything else we can do to keep this lion from killing our sheep?"
The rancher didn't return messages from The Bee.
In late January, after P-56 killed the rancher's 12th sheep and wounded another, the rancher got a state permit to have the animal killed. An official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services trapped and shot the cougar. Biologists estimate he was between four and five years old, and they believe he had sired at least four kittens.
After P-56's death, which received widespread media attention, 38 animal welfare groups urged Newsom to put a moratorium on depredation permits.
"The recent death of the mountain lion ... at the hands of a rancher who received a lethal depredation permit from your administration's Department of Fish and Wildlife is a horrifying example of how we are prioritizing privately owned livestock over the wildlife that all Californians cherish," they wrote to Newsom in mid-February.
Instead of issuing a moratorium that would be unlikely to survive a legal challenge, the department immediately extended a policy enacted in 2018 following The Bee's investigation. That year, the Department of Fish and Wildlife wrote what became known as a "three strikes" policy for killing a Southern California mountain lion.
In that region, after a mountain lion has killed or injured livestock or pets, the property owner must first use non-lethal deterrents like the ones the Camarillo rancher tried to deter a lion. After three livestock attacks, the state will issue a lethal permit upon request, but only after it's been cleared by the top brass at the wildlife agency. Previously, a game warden in the region could give out the permits in the field.
The 2018 policy also mapped boundaries around the state in which mountain lions would fall under the three-strikes rule. After P-56, which was killed on the outskirts of the three-strikes boundary, the state wildlife agency extended the geographic range of policy to include the entire Central Coast region to above the Bay Area.
"I wish I could bring P-56 back, but I can't, and I have regret about that," Chuck Bonham, Newsom's top wildlife appointee told the Fish and Game Commission in January. "We do not want to be the people who watch that rare population of lions in Southern California go extinct."
Bonham's remarks came after his department signed off on a petition by the Mountain Lion Foundation and the Center for Biological Diversity that seeks to have the Fish and Game Commission protect Central Coast and Southern California mountain lions under the state's Endangered Species Act.
The commission could vote on the proposal as early as April.
Newsom's options are limited by the way Proposition 117 was written.
Ranching and farm groups oppose listing the cougars under the Endangered Species Act, and they argue Proposition 117 prevents the commission from doing so, just as it's limited Newsom's ability to stop issuing depredation permits.
The initiative contains language that says the state's wildlife regulators can't "adopt any regulation that conflicts with or supersedes" with certain provisions in Proposition 117. The ranching associations argue listing the cougars as endangered or threatened would violate the ballot initiative.
"There is pretty clearly statutory direction on what the commission is and isn't allowed to do for mountain lions," Noelle Cremers of the California Farm Bureau Federation told the commission in January.
Environmental groups disagree, saying the state has the legal authority to protect the big cats.
However the commission rules it will likely prompt a long court fight, but the initiative itself could be tweaked to avoid a legal challenge. That's something Newsom said Wednesday he's considering, although it's hardly an easy prospect.
Any tweaks to Proposition 117 must either be done at the ballot box or by a four-fifths vote of the Legislature. Democrats outnumber Republicans in California's statehouse, but GOP lawmakers who count ranchers as key allies still hold enough seats to make a four-fifths vote a long shot.
State Sen. Henry Stern, D-Los Angeles, said he's considering introducing a bill to amend the ballot measure, given how close mountain lions are to extinction in Southern California.
"A four-fifths vote would be hard. We're still considering whether to introduce that legislation," he said. "I'm really scared. ... If we let these lions go extinct on my watch, I don't know what I'm going to say to people."
The other option would be going back to the ballot to change the wording, but that's a costly prospect with no guarantee of success.
As California voters head to the polls this year, experts say the dilemma over Proposition 117 should serve a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences of voters using the ballot box to pass new laws.
"The problem with initiatives is precisely this: They make things difficult when circumstances change," said Fredric Woocher, a Los Angeles attorney who served as special counsel to former California Attorney General John Van de Kamp.
Stern said Newsom talked about his childhood experiences with mountain lions in August when they toured a planned wildlife corridor project in Agoura Hills that would allow mountain lions to safely cross the 101 freeway. Stern said Newsom's personal connection to the issue gives him hope that the governor will champion the cause.
"This isn't a theoretical issue for him," Stern said. "The guy, when he was a young man with his dad, went out and collared lions himself."
Speaking with reporters Wednesday, Newsom noted an incident earlier in February where a mountain lion attacked a 6-year-old girl in a Santa Clara County nature preserve. The girl survived, but state officials killed that lion. DNA from its saliva was used to ensure it was the same cat. Proposition 117 allows for cougars to be killed when they attack people.
"We moved into the territory where these lions reign supreme," Newsom said. "We want to protect our children. ... Same time, we want to protect the species."
