The Sierra Madre City Council adopted a resolution on Tuesday, April 25, declaring urbanized bears a threat to public safety, pointing to alleged mismanagement by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and California Fish and Game Commission.
The move includes a request for the Commission to formally address this issue.
“We’re saying let’s look at current policies (about bear management) which tend to be statewide and not regional,” Mayor Edward Garcia said. “Public safety is paramount.”
A copy of the resolution will be sent to the director of the Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW); the secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency, the Fish and Game Commission and elected state representatives.
Mayor Pro Tem Kelly Kriebs said the council is not advocating a particular fix.
“But we want to find a better solution than what they’re currently employing,” she said. “This is an alarm to the agencies to pay attention to the severity of this problem.”
Glenn Lambdin, former mayor of Sierra Madre, applauded the move.
He said within two weeks last October, bears broke into his kitchen before he chased them away.
- In 2016, another resident was injured when he was attacked by a bear on a hiking trail.
- In 2018, a bear lumbered into a Sierra Madre neighborhood Monday, broke into a chicken coop and devoured one of the fowls, police said.
- In 2019, an 83-year-old man sleeping in the mountains above Sierra Madre and Arcadia was attacked by a bear and suffered scratches to his face and an arm.
- In 2020, a bear that bit a Sierra Madre woman sleeping in her backyard was also found through a DNA check to have attacked a man sleeping in the Angeles National Forest the year before.
Such reports are not uncommon in foothill communities. But in Sierra Madre, officials said the surge has been troubling.
Capt. Henry Amos of the Sierra Madre Police Department told the City Council on April 11 that in 2022, his staff had responded to 130 calls about black bears making their way into residential areas, including 17 incidents in which bears entered homes and caused property damage.
According to the council’s resolution, there have been several times when a bear entered an elementary or middle school. There have been four “bear-human” conflicts, three of which ended in injuries to people, officials said.
“We’re not Yosemite, we’re not Big Bear, we’re a residential city in the greater Los Angeles area and we’re seeing bears in our elementary school during school hours and Fish and Wildlife has failed through negligence,” Lambdin said. “CDFW’s absurd ‘coexistence’ policy is a glaring admission that they’ve lost control of the bear population in the natural wilderness habitat and have forced the bears into existing, well-established residential neighborhoods, expecting residents to host the very bears they mismanaged.”
Resident Shirley Moore disagreed, saying Sierra Madre is a wildlife sanctuary and that the bears are not a threat.
“We need to learn to live with bears, we need to adjust and grow,” she told the council. “You’re going in the wrong direction with this.”
James Carlson, a city management analyst, said the action was proposed with impetus from residents and after the city implemented all state Fish and Wildlife recommendations. These include the use of the Wildlife Incident Reporting (WIR) system, a local ordinance prohibiting feeding, local Wilderness Management Plan, a program (starting soon) to provide bear-resistant trash cans to all residential Sierra Madre residents, signage, and a campaign to have residents safely “haze” the local wildlife.
“Despite all efforts, bear-human interactions and home and car break-ins continue to contribute to the public safety concerns,” he said.
Officials at the CDFW said in a statement that California’s black bear population has more than tripled over the past four decades, and matched with an increase in human population, helps explain the tick in human-bear conflicts. The state’s long drought also pushed wildlife into urban areas.
“It is important to recognize that CDFW’s policies are based on sound science that is well thought out and reasonable,” the statement read. “Good wildlife management requires periodic review and update of policies to ensure adaptive improvements are made based on sound science. And as a result, the CDFW updated the statewide bear policy in 2022 to describe the department’s response, methods, and decision-making processes in managing human/bear conflicts in California. In addition, CDFW is also in the process of updating the statewide bear management plan based on new science and data.”
Department spokesman Tim Daly said the department will continue to support and respond to Sierra Madre’s human-bear conflicts and encourage residents to follow recommended steps to deter bear visits.
Fish and Wildlife represenatives will be back in Sierra Madre on May 20 with a presentation at the library about living with wildlife in general. They held one on living with bears on April 8 and about 15 residents showed up.
According to Lambdin, who was there, the wildlife biologist agreed more needed to be done but that decision was up to higher-ranking officials.
Mayor Garcia mentioned he has spoken with other mayors through the Council on Governments, and mayors from neighboring cities, Pasadena, La Verne and Claremont, were interested in forming a task force.
Melissa Miller-Henson, executive director of the CDFW’s sister agency, California Fish and Game Commission, said her department also welcomes a dialogue with city officials.
“The California Fish and Game Commission and its staff are committed to engaging with communities about fish and wildlife issues they are facing, and the same is true in this situation,” she said.
