Oyster company given month to negotiate departure

A federal judge Monday gave lawyers for Drakes Bay Oyster Company and the Interior Department another month to negotiate the oyster farm's departure from Marin County's Point Reyes National Seashore.

Drakes Bay Oyster Farm owner Kevin Lunny, left,
consoles his sister, oyster farm manager Ginny Lunny Cummings

“This has been a hard-fought case,” Federal District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said during a brief case management conference at the Federal Courthouse in Oakland, urging both sides to reach an agreement on their own.
The U.S. Supreme Court's decision last week not to hear oyster farm operator Kevin Lunny's latest appeal sent the case back to Rogers, who rejected the oysterman's claim against former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in a February 2013 ruling that was subsequently upheld twice by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The high court's action extinguished Lunny's right to continue harvesting $1.5 million worth of oysters a year from Drakes Estero, a federally protected waterway in the national seashore.
Stephen Macfarlane, a government attorney, told Rogers that the oyster farm is “no longer authorized” to remain at the estero, a 2,500-acre estuary with extensive eelgrass beds and a harbor seal colony.
If no agreement is reached soon, Macfarlane said, the National Park Service may take steps to “terminate” the oyster company's presence on federal property.
Lawrence Bazel, a San Francisco attorney representing the oyster company, said he, too, hoped to reach an agreement by the end of the month.
After Monday's conference, Bazel said in an interview that the government's position, outlined in a letter, is that “we're not entitled to anything.” The National Park Service, he said, could take “administrative action” to terminate the oyster operation.
“I think it's appropriate to call that a threat,” he said.
Bazel he sent the government a letter on Monday asking for a “reasonable time” to vacate the estero. The company wants until the end of July to remove the onshore oyster sales stand and canning equipment, and wants until the end of December to remove plastic mesh bags and metal wires holding oysters from the estero waters.


Those details were not mentioned during the conference with Rogers.
The judge set another case management conference for Aug. 11.
If the oyster farm's shutdown schedule has not been negotiated by then, Rogers will be “tapping her foot” and asking what the two sides are doing, Bazel said after Monday's conference.
The government attorneys were not available for comment after the conference.
Amy Trainer, executive director of the Point Reyes Station-based Environmental Action Center of West Marin, sat in on the conference and said afterwards the prolonged case was “moving in a good direction.”
The oyster farm appears “committed to a settlement,” she said, but Trainer said company's request to keep harvesting oysters until the end of the year was “unreasonable.”
“That doesn't seem fair to the park service or to the public,” she said.
Trainer suggested that Lunny, who did not appear in court Monday, could relocate his operation to Humboldt Bay, where additional oyster beds are available.
Bazel and his legal colleague, Peter Prows, said after the conference that they still have until the end of August to amend their initial complaint, which alleged that Salazar's decision in November 2012 not to renew the oyster farm's permit was flawed.
Should they take that step, the entire legal process could start all over again.



Article and Photo Sourced From:  http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20140707/articles/140709710#page=1
You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com.