Free Republic

The National Park Service used falsified data to shut down an 80-year-old oyster company in Point Reyes, Calif, its owner claims. Drakes Bay Oyster Company operated in Point Reyes for decades until National Park Service officials used falsified data to force Kevin Lunny’s family-run oyster farm to shut down. The experience has left its mark on Lunny: “We are terrified,” he told lawmakers during a hearing Thursday. “Let me be clear, we did not fail as a business,” Lunny said in his prepared testimony. “This was not bad luck. Rather, the Park Service engaged in a taxpayer-funded enterprise of corruption...

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...