Federal Court Opinion: National Park Service Has Misinterpreted Law Since 2004 "Bizarre"

September 9, 2013:  Robin Carpenter interviewed Drakes Bay Oyster Company attorney Peter Prows who said the case may very well reach the United States Supreme Court. Read West Marin Citizen story here.

What’s really remarkable is, going back to 2004, after the Lunnys spent a couple hundred thousand dollars to invest and fix up the oyster farm, they got a letter and a memo from the Park Service saying that the wilderness laws, in particular the 1976 Point Reyes Wilderness Act, mandated that the Park Service not issue a new permit to the oyster farm when the  existing permit expired in November of 2012. This is a legal position that the Park Service has now taken over the last 8 to 10 years.

The Park had the law wrong:

 There’s really no question anymore that the Park Service has had the law wrong all along.

Ninth District Court called this change of position "bizarre:"

For 30 years before the Park Service’s memo to the Lunnys, that’s what everybody thought that legislation meant. The Department of Interior told Congress in the 1970’s that the oyster farm was a beneficial use there and should continue notwithstanding whatever wilderness legislation was passed. The Environmental Action Committee of West Marin told Congress essentially the same thing. The Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club had the same view. Everybody had the same view of what the law should accomplish and what the law meant. It wasn’t until 30 years later that the Park Service and some of these groups changed positions. Judge Watford called that a “bizarre” change of position.

Text of Federal Court dissent: 

 The Department’s legal analysis concluded—bizarrely, given the legislative history recounted above—that by designating Drakes Estero as a potential wilderness addition in the Point Reyes Wilderness Act, Congress had “mandated” elimination of the oyster farm. The Department never identified anything in the text of the Act to support that view; it cited only a passage
from the House Report accompanying H.R. 8002. But that passage “is in no way anchored in the text of the statute,” Shannon v. United States, 512 U.S. 573, 583–84 (1994), and thus provides no support for the Department’s interpretation of the Act.