Free Republic

As promised, the Drakes Bay Oyster Co. appealed to an expanded panel of a federal appeals court in San Francisco today to allow it to keep operating at Point Reyes National Seashore. The oyster farm and owner Kevin Lunny asked an 11-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a decision in which a smaller panel of the court ruled against the company by a 2 to 1 vote in September. In that ruling, the smaller panel upheld a federal trial judge’s denial of a preliminary injunction that would have allowed the oyster harvesting to continue...

Lawyers for the Drakes Bay Oyster Co. and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will square off Friday before a federal judge in Oakland in the first round of a legal battle to continue the commercial oyster operation in the Point Reyes National Seashore. At stake is Salazar's decision in November not to renew a 40-year lease that gave oyster farm operator Kevin Lunny the right to commercial operations in 2,500-acre Drakes Estero, a five-fingered estuary that features extensive eelgrass beds and a harbor seal colony. The decision, hailed by wilderness advocates, gave Lunny's company 90 days to shut down a business...

With the imminent return of Ken Salazar to Colorado, and talk of his future political aspirations bubbling up in the papers, we thought it a good time to recount a brief history of Secretary Salazar’s failures at the Interior Department. ... First and foremost amongst Salazar’s fiascos is the BP oil spill. The Deepwater Horizons disaster is firmly etched in the American conscience as an example of bumbling incompetence and haphazard, if not non-existent, leadership. Salazar mucked up his role so badly that unnamed White House sources spanked him publicly in The Washington Post as an “erratic spokesman” who was...

A California family that has operated an oyster farm on the bucolic Northern California coast is fighting back after the federal government moved to kick it off of the National Park Service property where the shellfish have been legally harvested for nearly 80 years. The Drakes Bay Oyster Company faces closure and its 30 employees will be out of work if the National Park Service reclaims some 1,100 acres of an estuary as part of a plan to create a larger marine wilderness preserve at Point Reyes National Seashore in Marin County. Owner Kevin Lunny said federal officials told him...

An historic Northern California oyster farm along Point Reyes National Seashore will be shut down and the site converted to a wilderness area, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced on Thursday. Salazar said he will not renew the Drakes Bay Oyster Co. lease that expires Friday. The move will bring a close to a yearslong environmental battle over the site.

U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar rejected a proposal to extend the lease of a popular oyster farm at Point Reyes National Seashore on Thursday, effectively ending more than a century of shellfish production on the 1,100 acres where Europeans first stepped foot in California. The decision will allow the National Park Service to turn the picturesque bay where Sir Francis Drake landed more than 400 years ago into California's first federally designated marine wilderness area.

Supporters of a Marin County oyster farmer claimed victory Tuesday after a panel of scientists concluded that National Park Service officials made errors, selectively presented information and misrepresented facts in a series of reports about his Drakes Bay shellfish operation. The findings mark the second time in a year that the Park Service has been put under a spotlight for essentially fudging data in its attempts to show that the Drakes Bay Oyster Co. harmed the environment.