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 that plants and harvests 8 million oysters —
worth about $1.5 million a year — from the near-pristine estero. The
deadline was subsequently extended to March 15. Four
days after Salazar's Nov. 29 decision, a Washington, D.C.-based
nonprofit filed a federal lawsuit alleging it violated federal rules and
was based on faulty science.“The
government has doubled down on bad science, refusing to listen to
anyone who tells them anything to the contrary,” said Amber Abbasi, an
attorney for the group Cause of Action, who will argue Lunny's case on
Friday before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers...more
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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