IN THE FINAL legal battle over the oyster farm, two warring theories seemed to reign: the “first domino” versus the “dangerous precedent.” If the oyster farm went, the “first domino” faction argued, it would herald the end of the ranches inside the seashore, and maybe in the region as a whole. The oysters would be pulled out of the water, fecal coliform in runoff from cows on the surrounding ranches would cease to be filtered by the oysters, water quality would suffer, and the ranches would be evicted by their federal landlord in order to “protect park resources.” This hypothesis was not based on any particular scientific study, nor had such a thing occurred in any other location, but still the idea gained local traction. Dairy farming is especially dependent on a certain amount of critical mass, so that if one farm goes out of business, it can impact surrounding operations and jeopardize them. The same can be true of ranches raising beef cattle, which depend on the availability of a local slaughterhouse to make their business profitable. If there aren’t enough ranches to support a local slaughterhouse, cattlemen are forced to spend more money on trucking their animals further afield for slaughter. Thus, the worst fear on the part of the oyster farm supporters was that without DBOC, the seashore ranches would be evicted and the whole region’s celebrated local agricultural industry would collapse. On the other hand, wilderness supporters feared that reversing a wilderness designation through an act of Congress would create a “dangerous precedent” and leave all protected lands vulnerable to the interests of private business. If removing wilderness designation could be done once, they argued, it could and would be done again.
On December 3, 2012, Drakes Bay Oyster Company announced its intent to sue the federal government, represented by a team of lawyers from Cause of Action and three different law firms: Stoel Rives LLP, which focuses on environmental law; SSL Law Firm LLP, focused on real estate; and Briscoe Ivester & Bazel LLP, specializing in land use and natural resources.
“The National Park Service has not just shut down our business, but has misrepresented the law, our contracts with the State of California, and the results of scientific studies,” Kevin Lunny said in a statement. “Our family business is not going to sit back and let the government steam roll [sic] our community, which has been incredibly supportive of us.”
That same day, Cause of Action executive director Dan Epstein said his group fought federal agencies “every day” that abused power, ignored the law and wasted taxpayer dollars. “We aim to hold the National Park Service accountable for their treatment of the Lunny family and the Drakes Bay Oyster Company as we view their actions as a disregard for law and precedent that demands accountability,” he said.
On December 12, the Lunnys’ legal team of seven lawyers filed a motion for a temporary restraining order and order to show cause against Secretary Salazar, parks director Jonathan Jarvis, the Department of the Interior, the National Park Service, and various park employees. The motion claimed that the defendants had violated the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, and the Data Quality Act of 2001. Without such a restraining order, the motion argued, the Lunnys would suffer “grave and irreparable harm” due to the closure of their business, which would result in the loss of thirty-one jobs and affordable housing for fifteen people, would damage the environment, and cause “impacts to the State of California” by terminating the “interpretative and educational value” of the oyster farm.
“We have about eight to ten million oysters still in the bay being farmed at different stages of growth,” Kevin said in a media conference call on December 4, 2012. “And because we’ve only been given ninety days to wind down and get off the property, essentially, not maybe all but almost all of those oysters are going to have to be destroyed and the food is going to be lost and the investment for that inventory will be lost. And this all happened with one day’s notice. We heard on the 29th, and our agreement expired on the 30th. So as we stated before, you know, we’re not going to walk away. Instead we have incredible community support, so we’re fighting for our community, our employees and our family against a federal bureaucracy here that seems to value lies, you know, over the truth, and special interests over the welfare of a whole community.”
He said that the farm was a public resource and provided a public service. He did not argue that this was the case despite the fact that the farm was a private business.
“Cause of Action decided to get involved in this because Cause of Action is concerned any time arbitrary government action harms American free enterprise, and that’s what this issue is about,” said Dan Epstein during the same conference call. “Cause of Action first became interested in this because what we saw was the Department of Interior, through its National Park Service, was using scientific data, in what we viewed as flawed scientific data, to ultimately justify a draft Environmental Impact Statement that has now informed a decision to deny a supplemental use permit. And we think that this tells a story about how flawed agency decision-making and flawed science can have an impact upon everyday Americans. And it also tells a story about how flawed science can actually lead to real-world impacts in terms of expanding discretion of federal agencies and allowing them to engage in arbitrary and capricious action. That’s why Cause of Action has decided to fight this. It’s as simple as that. This is how the federal government has used its authority to shut down small business, and it’s something that—if Cause of Action and others don’t fight against it, it’s going to be something that allows the federal government to expand its authority at the detriment to those hard workers in this economy who are trying to keep jobs and ultimately help consumers.”
Epstein certainly had previous experience “fighting the federal government,” as he put it. From 2009 to 2011 he worked for the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, headed by California Republican congressman Darrell Issa, which mounted a series of investigations into the Obama administration. Prior to that, Epstein worked for the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, and was an alumnus of the Koch Associate Program—run by the foundation—which seeks to train professionals in “the importance of economic freedom.” One of the issues that the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform investigated was the National Park Service’s handling of the DBOC case. Epstein then left the committee’s employ in August 2011 to become the executive director of the newly formed Cause of Action. Although purportedly nonpartisan, all of Cause of Action’s seed money—close to $1 million—came from the Koch family of industries via the right-wing nonprofit organization Donors Trust, operated by the former director of fundraising for the Cato Institute, which was founded as the Charles Koch Foundation in 1974. In Cause of Action’s first year, Epstein was paid a salary of $74,500. In the next year that amount leapt to nearly $200,000, with bonus, and the group’s revenue had climbed to over $3 million, also from Koch sources, with $1.2 million listed for “other salaries and wages,” not including that of Epstein and chief legal counsel Amber Abbasi ($136,534 with bonus). According to the 990 form provided by GuideStar.org, in 2012 the group spent $38,168 on “travel.” Cause of Action also solicits donations on its website.
Ten days after the media conference call with Dan Epstein to announce the lawsuit, Kevin appeared on the Fox News television show Fox & Friends. Titled “Shell Shock,” the segment began with a dramatic animated zoom through a deserted city street and into a graveyard, landing on the all-caps title THE DEATH OF FREE ENTERPRISE floating amidst sepulchral mists and looming headstones.
“Whoa!” said cohost Gretchen Carlson as the shot returned to the studio. “That graphic should be nominated for . . . some sort of award. That’s nice! After nearly one hundred years in business the federal government is forcing them to shut down. We’re talking about Drakes Bay Oyster Farm in California, [which] was recently informed that they would not be allowed to renew their federal park lease. The Interior Department plans to turn the land into a marine wilderness area, and as a result the oyster company and its thirty employees are now out of work.”
(This was not actually the case, as the farm was continuing to harvest and plant its oysters.) Beside her, a screen showed footage of DBOC’s employees at work before cutting to a live shot of Kevin sitting in front of a high-rise window with a view of the San Francisco Bay. He wore a light-colored button-down shirt with a small microphone clipped to the collar, and his silver hair was combed back neatly from his tanned face.
“Kevin Lunny is the owner of Drakes Bay,” Carlson continued, “and he is now suing for an injunction to keep his business open. Good morning to you, Kevin!”
“Good morning, Gretchen,” he replied, before explaining the local support for his operation. “The community, and our county, and the San Francisco Bay Area loves us, but that didn’t resonate with Washington, D.C.”
“So the Interior Department wants to shut you down,” Carlson said. “Why?” Her tone was upturned with incredulity.
“Well, um,” said Kevin, “actually a small handful of folks who are really wilderness activists, who care deeply about getting people off the land, I think, is the best we can tell, want to give up something so [as] to create a humanless landscape. And it’s a little strange, because Point Reyes National Seashore was created as a working landscape. The oyster farm is completely surrounded by working ranches, and so to remove the oyster farm from the middle of the historic ranching lands is odd.”
“But aren’t the oysters part of the landscape?” Carlson asked.
“Well,” said Kevin, “they have been for a very long time. As a matter of fact the National Academy of Sciences says that Drakes Estero where the oysters live is probably healthier with the oyster farm because of the ecosystem services. It’s the reason we see oysters being planted in the Chesapeake and San Francisco Bay, and now we have an Interior Department that wants to remove them.”
“So let me ask you this, the Board of Supervisors—and let’s face it, this is not a conservative part of the country—the Board of Supervisors, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat—they looked at the claims and they also became outraged at what’s happening to you?”
THERE WAS NO mention of the Wilderness Act or the 1976 designation of Drakes Estero as a potential wilderness area in the Fox & Friends appearance at all, but it would not go unexamined in other media. On May 1, 2013, after the oyster farm’s closure was postponed again due to legal action, PBS NewsHour aired a segment on DBOC called “Strange Bedfellows Join Fight to Keep Oyster Farm in Operation.” It noted the battle’s “unlikely cast of characters” and made it clear that Salazar’s decision was due to the incompatibility of a commercial operation within a wilderness area. The footage showed Kevin standing among his workers on the dock, speaking with PBS reporter Spencer Michels, a thirty-year veteran of the station. Kevin’s small dog, a white Chihuahua mix with a black head, ran up to Kevin and jumped into his arms.
“This lease has an explicit renewal clause,” Kevin told Michels in the video. “It was always anticipated that it could be renewed by special use permit. It says it right in the original document.” In voiceover, Michels stated that Kevin bought the farm knowing the lease would expire in 2012, but that he “tried to change that.”
“This is exactly what was planned for the seashore and the oyster farm is part of the working landscape,” Kevin said, his blue eyes bright under the shade of a Drakes Bay Oyster Company baseball cap. “It’s part of the agriculture, it’s really part of the fabric, part of the history, part of the culture, that was always expected to be preserved.”
But the NewsHour crew turned then to Fred Smith’s successor at the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, Amy Trainer, who presented a different side of the story.
“Under the 1964 Wilderness Act, commercial operations and motor boats are not allowed, they are expressly prohibited, so this operation is wholly incompatible with this national park wilderness area,” she said. She stood talking to Michels on a ridge with a sweeping view of the bay behind her. “This is a very dangerous precedent. Drakes Estero is considered the ecological heart of Point Reyes National Seashore, and it absolutely should be protected for future generations, without commercial uses.”
Michels also noted that the fight had become a “conservative cause” in Washington, D.C., and mentioned that Cause of Action’s executive director, Dan Epstein, once worked for one of the Koch brothers. That connection was first uncovered by Mother Jones reporter Gavin Aronsen back in December 2012, but because the organization was so young, the 990 forms were not yet available to prove that funding came from the Koch brothers as well. After hearing Epstein’s take on how the oyster farm’s plight could affect American small businesses, the camera cut to former Department of the Interior official and attorney Tom Strickland in his Washington office.
“I think this situation has been hijacked by interest groups with different agendas who have spun out narratives that have no relationship to the facts,” Strickland said.
The NewsHour crew also interviewed Phyllis Faber, a beloved eighty-five-year-old local environmental activist who was on the board of the Point Reyes Light and had been one of the staunchest supporters of the oyster farm.
“I look at them as being sort of backward-looking, yearning for something that can’t possibly exist,” Faber said of the wilderness activists. “It’s almost like a religion.”
“Yet she is not happy to be on the same side as Cause of Action,” Michels said in voiceover, as Faber’s expression changed to one of concern, seemingly while Michels explained the connection between DBOC’s powerful new ally and Koch Industries.
“I am very disturbed by that and I don’t agree with it at all,” she said. “I think what they’re headed for is trying to use a commercial operation in a park; they want to establish that on other public lands, and I think that’s terribly unfortunate.”
Michels remarked that the controversy had overwhelmed the residents of Point Reyes, where “Lunny and his oysters are popular,” and said that many people refused to comment on the record for fear of alienating their neighbors.
He also mentioned one of the oyster farm’s most worrying associations of all: its inclusion in a bill to expedite the building of the Keystone XL Pipeline, an oil and gas pipeline system in Canada and the United States that would transport tar sands oil to the Midwest and the Gulf of Mexico from up north. According to an October 2013 article in the Huffington Post, the Koch brothers stood to make $100 billion from the project, effectively doubling their net worth. Forbes columnist Tim Worstall pointed out, however, that $100 billion was an overstatement; an estimate based on gross revenue rather than profit. The pipeline was going to cost $7 billion to build, after all. Besides, even if the estimated $100 billion was correct, Worstall argued, this would be a good thing, since that’s another $100 billion of wealth that “has been added to the stock available to us, the human race.”
“Sure,” Worstall wrote, “maybe the Kochs will have it for some period of time. But it’s still $100 billion of wealth that has been newly created.” He did not offer an alternate sum he deemed more realistic.
The bill, known as the Energy Production and Project Delivery Act of 2013, was introduced by Louisiana republican David Vitter that February. The final portion of the bill, Section 310 (“Drakes Bay Oyster Company”), which directly followed a section on “Keystone XL permit approval,” stated that DBOC would be granted a renewing ten-year reservation of use and occupancy, and that “Drakes Estero in the State of California shall not be converted to a designated wilderness.”
The bill is, quite frankly, a terrifying document. It proposed to repeal any agreement seeking to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including international agreements with Russia, China and India, and also included several amendments to the Endangered Species Act, such as prohibiting consideration of the impact of “greenhouse gases and climate change” when seeking to protect endangered plants or animals.
While the PBS NewsHour segment did give Kevin the chance to state his case, the overall presentation was less than flattering to the oyster farm, what with its allusions to Koch money and dirty tar sands oil. Cause of Action was not happy, and two weeks later sent a threatening fourteen-page Freedom of Information Act request to Michael Getler, ombudsman of PBS. The letter complained that Dan Epstein was unfairly represented, and demanded that the station release all of the footage taped for the segment so that Cause of Action could decide whether the story had been presented accurately or not, and make that footage available to the public. In the letter, Cause of Action claimed that mentioning Epstein’s Koch connections was not “balanced” reporting, since PBS had described Tom Strickland without mentioning his “long track record in Democratic politics and lobbying” or Amy Trainer’s “litany of left-leaning organizations and clients.” The letter also suggested that Phyllis Faber’s negative reaction to Cause of Action was manipulated, and expressed annoyance that NewsHour had strayed from the scripted description of Cause of Action’s activities provided by Epstein himself in an interview. There were no factual inaccuracies in the PBS segment, but Epstein and his associates still felt their portrayal was unjust.
“Cause of Action is concerned that the NewsHour piece misconstrued key facts, withheld material information, and misled the audience and an interviewee,” the letter stated.
In the interests of public education, Cause of Action believes that PBS must release the full video recordings involved in the preparation of the May 1, 2013 NewsHour story so that the public may understand the full factual picture of the issues involved and judge the facts and questions raised by the content of the video.
The letter then went on to attack PBS’s integrity, invoking the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and alleging that PBS was failing to adhere to the required objectivity and balance. Cause of Action demanded that all video and sound footage of the interviews, including those passersby who had been willing to appear on camera, be delivered free of charge within twenty business days. While the materials of the Public Broadcasting Service would not typically be thought of as government agency records, the letter said, Cause of Action argued that “several factors exist that motivate disclosure,” such as a “moral and mission-related obligation” to do so.
Kevin, his wife Nancy, and Corey Goodman were, by all appearances, horrified by the tactic, and sent a letter of their own to the station, saying that they had severed their relationship with the government watchdog. Cause of Action’s letter was a clear instance of intimidation and interference with the freedom of the press, they admitted: Epstein’s group had gone too far.
“We recently learned of the May 17, 2013 letter and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to you from Cause of Action,” Kevin, Nancy and Corey wrote in their joint letter to PBS executives. “Regrettably, all three of our names were cited in the Cause of Action letter as if we condoned it, which we did not, and as if it was submitted on our behalf, which it was not.”
Yet while the Lunny-Goodman letter made it clear that they “steadfastly defend the freedom of the press,” they nevertheless stood by the assertion that the NewsHour segment was “biased.”
“The piece by Spencer Michels which aired on the PBS NewsHour on May 1 uncritically repeated the false accusations that we have ‘. . . spun out narratives that have no relationship to the facts,’” the letter stated. “On the contrary, our ‘narratives’—the virtue of a small family farm, the absence of any scientific evidence of harm to the environment, and misrepresentations of science made by a federal agency in its obsession to eliminate the farm—are indisputably true.”
The quote about spinning narratives had not been Michels’s but Strickland’s, but by then it was common practice for DBOC and its supporters to conflate a quote by their opposition with a show of opposition from the journalist presenting that quote. Goodman and the Lunnys encouraged PBS to be “more balanced” in future coverage, and asked PBS executives to get together with them again, in order to better understand their side of the story and once more hear their tales of scientific misconduct. The executives declined.
LINGUISTICALLY, AGRICULTURE AND wilderness are antonyms. In the 1500s, the English word ‘wild’ meant an uncultivated or desolate region. Its roots lie in words for wild beasts and untamed places. The wild meant woodlands, but also evolved from the word welt, meaning world. This sprang from a time when the world was largely unknown to the men and women living in it, or rather, in their own cultivated corners of it. The wider world was a mystery. It was undomesticated, uncontrolled and seemingly endless, ceasing as they imagined it must with a waterfall into space, a steep and sudden drop into darkness. Civilization, the cleared fields and tamed hillsides, was the exception while the wild was the rule. Barring heaven, hell, and what culture humanity could carve out for itself, the wild was all there was.
I always assumed that estero was a Spanish word, but if so it must have been a dialect, because the Spanish for “estuary” is not estero but estuario. In Italian, the word estero means “foreign.” The language in which estero actually means “estuary” is Esperanto, the international auxiliary language first created in the nineteenth century to help foster world peace (esperanto means “one who hopes”).
SPEAKING OF HOPE, when Joey Mendoza lost his cows in the summer of 2009 due to financial hardship within the dairy industry, he vowed that one way or another he would put his family back in business again. Jarrod, his son, had not seemed too interested in taking over the family farm, at least by Joey’s initial estimation. The young man was studying criminal justice at Chico State University, but wound up getting a job near campus at an organic dairy. He was fascinated by what he learned, and realized that gaining an organic certification for the Mendoza dairy could be what saved the day. However, in the beginning of 2010, when he started to look into the idea seriously, the organic dairy industry around Point Reyes was already saturated.
“We had talked to Organic Valley, Straus, Horizon, a lot of these big organic companies, kind of pleading our case to let us back in,” Jarrod told the Point Reyes Light. “And they were all pretty much, ‘We are so full of organic milk right now that we can’t take anyone else on.’” Then in June another local dairy agreed to sell the Mendozas 120 certified organic cows, as well as an existing contract with Sierra Organic, a boutique dairy company with distribution in Southern California. As had been the case with the Lunny ranch, it was not difficult to get the family’s parkland pastures certified organic. By 2012, the Mendoza herd was up to two hundred animals.
Jarrod told the Light that organic farming was something he was still working to perfect, with the need to rotate pastures and keep a keen watch for illnesses in the animals. “I’ve definitely made some dumb mistakes along the way—moments when it was like, ‘What the hell are you thinking?’” he told the paper.
His father, on the other hand, was proud. “He’s doing a good job, getting his cows bred on time and producing a really good quality of milk,” Joey said. His son was now the fourth Mendoza man to farm the land that Zena Mendoza insisted they buy.
For their neighbors the Lunnys however, the legal battle continued. Famed chef Alice Waters wrote an amicus brief in support of the oyster farm, as did many local businesses and agricultural operations. West Marin’s Alliance for Local Sustainable Agriculture (ALSA) organized painting parties to make signs to give out to supporters to display in front of their homes or businesses. The signs were uniform, virtually identical. They pictured an expanse of blue water and a white sky above with a yellow sun in it, and all read “SAVE OUR DRAKES BAY OYSTER FARM” with either “AlsaMarin.com” or “SaveOurShellfish.com” written below—a whole new “SOS” campaign, with shellfish having replaced the seashore. Volunteers made more than eight hundred of these signs, ranging in size from twenty-four inches square to four by eight feet. The ALSA signs appeared on the sides of barns in Point Reyes and on terraces in San Francisco. They were nailed to telephone poles and propped on hillsides. They were placed next to official signs for the Point Reyes National Seashore, hung on garden gates and printed out and tacked to bulletin boards in coffee shops and supermarkets and laundromats all over the Bay Area. Volunteers made them en masse, assembly line style, with kids helping to paint, too. The group’s website showed photos of the signs drying in the sun in varying stages of completion. One shot shows a group of painters standing in front of a massive sign affixed to the side of a barn. They are covering their faces with hats, bandanas or their hands, because they know that the sign is too big to be legally displayed on the roadside. (It is, in fact, the kind of thing that the original members of the Marin Conservation League fought to forbid in the 1930s, when they didn’t want the view cluttered up with advertising or political messages for those driving out to the beach.) Anyone could request a sign through the website, and someone from ALSA would deliver it. Some homes and businesses displayed many signs—the gas station in Point Reyes, for example, had at least five at one point.
Not everyone was a fan of the signs, though. Some were vandalized. Some disappeared in the night. Some were squiggled over with spray paint while others had their message changed. On one, displayed prominently near downtown Point Reyes Station, someone crossed out the “Our” in “Save Our Drakes Bay Oyster Farm” and replaced it with “His.” The desire to make such a distinction was not entirely isolated to a single vandal, either. More than one resident wrote in to the local papers saying that even if they wanted the farm to continue, it wasn’t really their farm, it was Lunny’s. At times it seemed that all of West Marin had been roped into the cause, whether everyone liked it or not.
Drakes Bay Oyster Company remained open throughout 2013, as a tangle of lawsuits played out in the California courts. One of the judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Margaret McKeown, likened the case to a Rubik’s cube, or Russian nesting dolls, as each aspect of the case seemed to circle back or fold in on itself, much the same way the scientific reports had done.
Throughout the trial, Kevin seemed to retain an ironclad conviction that what he was doing was right.
“We’re confident that the courts have jurisdiction and that they’re going to correct this mistake,” he told the Point Reyes Light in May 2013. “We didn’t know that we’d ever have to go through a political battle, not only to protect our way of life but to protect sustainable agriculture in West Marin from government abuse and misuse of science driving some sort of agenda for a human-less landscape that we think is going to benefit very few people.”
In September 2013, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the request for an injunction with a ruling of 2–1, although the dissenting opinion gave the oyster farm fuel to keep going. In January 2014, the courts granted DBOC a motion allowing it to remain open, and the planting and harvesting of oysters in Drakes Estero continued. In April, DBOC petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari to review the Ninth Circuit Court’s judgment, but on June 30 that request was declined, and July 31, 2014, was set as the closure date for Drakes Bay Oyster’s retail portion of the company. In other words, there would be no more Oyster Shack.
During that July, Kevin used his position on the Point Reyes Seashore Ranchers Association to submit a request to NPS and various politicians on behalf of himself and his neighbors, asking that the Oyster Shack building be repurposed for selling other goods, like vegetables or dairy products. He did this without getting the approval or consent of the association, however. In response, twelve of the twenty-three Point Reyes Seashore Ranchers Association members signed and submitted a letter of mass resignation.
“It has become increasingly evident that our styles of communication in matters pertinent to the Point Reyes National Seashore are very different,” the resigning ranchers wrote. “This was most recently evidenced by the letter dated July 21, 2014, which was sent on behalf of the Association to Superintendent Muldoon and various elected officials. We felt that we had inadequate time to review and respond and consider the implications of such a letter being sent.”
Among the signatories was Little Joey Mendoza. His children, Jarrod and Jolyn, both of whom had followed their father in the Point Reyes dairying business, declined to comment at the time on whether or not they were still members. The others offering their resignation were Betty Nunes of A and E Ranches, Daniel and Dolores Evans of H Ranch, Robert McClure of I Ranch, Tim, Thomas and Mike Kehoe of J Ranch, Julie Rossotti of K Ranch, Dave Evans of Rogers Ranch (and owner of Bay Area favorite Marin Sun Farms), Elmer Leroy Martinelli of Martinelli Ranch, and Bob Giacomini, whose children now run the celebrated Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company. Although he is a member of the association, Giacomini’s cows and dairy are not located inside the national park, but are inside the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, administered by the Seashore.
“We think we’re stronger if we can be unified, and we were,” Kevin Lunny told the Point Reyes Light of the split. He said the intent of the letter that the twelve members had objected to was “to underscore to the park service that we know that the oyster farm is getting kicked out, but remember, we want a place to sell our products.” It was a plea to keep the buildings from the oyster farm standing after the closure. After all, the land-based site was not inside the wilderness area, just the water.
“We respect their decision to resign and we will obviously continue to work with every rancher and the ranchers association,” a park representative said of the split.
A bundle of local food-based businesses attempted to bring their own lawsuit to stop the closure of DBOC, claiming the closure would cause them economic hardship. But Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who had ruled against the Lunnys the previous year, dismissed the lawsuit with no small amount of contempt, saying it was “frivolous,” “nonsensical,” and “strains credulity.”
The oyster farm and the National Park Service finally reached a settlement agreement that fall: the Lunnys would cease their operations on December 31, 2014. After almost ten years fighting the federal government, with millions spent on both sides, the Drakes Bay Oyster Company had lost.