Point Reyes park litigants want residents excluded from talks

The National Park Service and several environmental organizations are resisting a bid to include people living on agricultural operations in the Point Reyes National Seashore in closed-door negotiations that could determine the fate of the residents’ housing.

In 2022, the Resource Renewal Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project sued the National Park Service to prevent it from implementing an amendment to its general management plan that had been approved the prior year.

The new plan allowed the parks agency to issue 20-year agricultural leases to 24 ranch families for continued operations. The leases permitted residential use of park lands on 14 ranches while restricting residential occupancy to family members and workers.

The environmental groups sought to stop the National Park Service from approving the 20-year leases and instead require it to expand elk herds in the area. The ranches and dairies of the Point Reyes Seashore Ranchers Association intervened in the suit.

Since then, the National Park Service, the environmental groups and the ranches and dairies have been engaging in closed-door negotiations.

A recent stay of the litigation to enable the private talks to continue stated that the Nature Conservancy has “entered into confidentiality agreements with the parties to facilitate its participation in the mediation negotiations aimed at facilitating a comprehensive settlement.”

Albert Straus, founder and executive chairman of the Straus Family Creamery, has contended that the Nature Conservancy’s goal is to remove all of the dairies and ranches from the park by buying out their leases. The Nature Conservancy has declined to comment on its objectives.

A number of people, not just agricultural workers, live on dairies and ranches in the park. The National Park Service has said that if agricultural operators lose their leases there, all people living on those farms and ranches would have to leave.

Last month, Andrew Giacomini, a prominent West Marin lawyer, filed a motion in federal court to allow the more than 70 people living on the ranches and dairies inside the park to intervene in the legal action as interested parties, just as the Point Reyes Seashore Ranchers Association did.

Giacomini is asking the court to allow his clients to use pseudonyms in place of their true names because some of them are undocumented.

The National Park Service and the environmental groups have filed legal responses seeking to prevent that.

In its response to Giacomini’s filing, the National Park Service wrote that it “is committed to working with the ranchers to provide timely notice and appropriate financial and other assistance to ranch employees and their families to facilitate their transition to new housing and if needed, new jobs.”

“But because resolution of this action cannot produce long term housing that is not associated with an operating ranch,” it said, “the Park Service opposes the motion to intervene.”

The agency said the park’s enabling act prohibits it from authorizing housing for members of the public uncoupled to ranching.

The environmental organizations filed a similar response.

“Repurposing commercial ranches for permanent community housing would require a new public process under the NPS Organic Act and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA),” they wrote.

“Moreover, repurposing commercial ranches for community housing will likely require an act of Congress, since the enabling legislation for Point Reyes National Seashore provides that no freehold, leasehold, or lesser interest in any lands hereafter acquired within the boundaries of the Point Reyes National Seashore shall be conveyed for residential or commercial purposes,” they wrote.

In reply, Giacomini wrote: “Plaintiffs and the National Park Service now attack proposed intervenors in a disingenuous effort to marginalize their interests, just as those interests have been marginalized in the secret negotiations the parties have been undertaking to undermine the findings of the Department of the Interior, the NPS and Congress that ranching in the Park should continue.”

The Point Reyes Seashore Ranchers Association took no formal position on the new motion to intervene. But it wrote that the environmental groups’ “myopic view on elimination of ranching ignores the social disruption of employees, tenants, and families who may be forced to vacate the Seashore should the ranches and dairies be unable to remain in business.”

“The PRSRA members do not want to evict any tenants; they support agricultural workers and recognize the critical need to ensure adequate housing is available for ranch and dairy workers on the Seashore,” the organization said.

The stay on the environmental groups’ litigation extends until Nov. 22. The hearing on Giacomini’s motion to intervene is set for the same date.