House Republican lawmakers have launched a federal investigation into the settlement that ended most ranching in the Point Reyes National Seashore, citing concerns about the agreement’s shrouded nature, including the possibility of self-dealing and hidden conflicts of interest.
Spurred by lobbying from a West Marin farming coalition, the House Committee on Natural Resources initiated the probe last week with letters to the Nature Conservancy and the environmental groups that announced the settlement with the National Park Service in January.
The House committee’s letters requested all documents and communications “related to any past, current or pending settlement agreements” between the Nature Conservancy, the park service and the three environmental groups—the Resource Renewal Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project—that sued the park over ranching twice in recent years.
The committee expressed alarm at what it called opaque dealings, writing that it was concerned “not only with the lack of transparency surrounding the settlement but also with the environmental and legal consequences the settlement may impose.”
Representatives of the environmental groups did not respond to the Light’s requests for comment, and a spokeswoman for the Point Reyes National Seashore declined to comment. The letters from the House committee gave a deadline of April 24 to hand over all requested material.
The inquiry is the latest incursion in a decade-long struggle over ranching in the seashore, and it lays bare the conflicting agendas surrounding the settlement and its aftermath. News of the probe on Thursday blindsided Congressman Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, who said he received no advance notice of the investigation, despite it unfolding in his district.
“That’s unusual,” Mr. Huffman said. “As the ranking Democrat, I ordinarily would get the courtesy of some notice, especially since it’s in my district. It’s a sign of the times—it’s scorched earth partisanship all the time with these folks.”
Although Mr. Huffman was not a party to the settlement, he helped lay the groundwork for the Nature Conservancy’s role in brokering the deal, and he was looped into the negotiations during the mediation process. (Seven years ago, he co-sponsored a bipartisan bill to grant 20-year leases to the ranchers, a measure that never passed the Senate.)
Now, he worries about the havoc the G.O.P.-led investigation could wreak on a deal that took so long to craft—and one that he believes has Point Reyes ranchers’ full support, even if it is belied by their reticence to say so.
“I think it’s time for them to publicly say some of the things that I’ve heard privately, which is that they do want this, that they do stand by it, that they don’t need some of these outside parties to run to court or run back to Washington to try to save them because this is the settlement they chose,” he said.
Under the agreement, which was finalized in the waning weeks of the Biden administration, the Nature Conservancy will pay six dairy farmers and six beef cattle ranchers a reported $30 million to leave the land their families had farmed long before the park was authorized by President John F. Kennedy in 1962.
The deal tolled the end of nearly three years of closed-door mediation talks initiated after environmental groups sued the park service for the second time in 2022, alleging environmental violations caused by the ranches and dairies and challenging the park’s new general management plan that offered them new leases.
Questions linger over how the ranching families truly feel about the deal, particularly since the settlement’s nondisclosure and non-disparagement clauses forbid them from openly talking about it. With their compensation on the line, most have kept quiet—an enforced silence that, according to Mr. Huffman, has been unfortunately filled with the political machinations of others.
“Their silence has left a vacuum that all of this partisan politics is going to fill,” he said. “This thing will take on a life of its own. It will be characterized as the heavy hand of government forcing these family ranchers off their property. It’ll be overly simplified and caricatured as radical environmentalists.”
The investigation’s potential to upend the settlement has rattled ranchers like Kevin Lunny, who is scheduled to hold his last cattle roundup next month before selling off the rest of his herd and departing for the Sierra Nevada foothills, where he and his wife, Nancy, have bought a house on 10 acres.
“What if it all blows up, then what happens?” Mr. Lunny asked. “We’d just stay, and the deal just disappears after we already dismantled our ranch, sold our cows? We’d be in trouble if it all falls apart. We already bought a home with dollars that are going to come from this agreement.”
He continued, “But what if we go through with the deal, then something completely changes and the agreement gets thrown out the window, but we’re already gone? That’d be a bummer.”
Mr. Lunny, who was not part of the coaltion that lobbied Congress, is no stranger to such twists and turns. A decade ago, his bid to keep operating an oyster farm in Drakes Estero became the center of a national debate. He later visited the White House as a guest during Donald Trump’s first presidency. “With us today is Kevin Lunny,” Mr. Trump had said during a 2019 press conference, “whose company was forced out of business through the terrible practice of a certain way of government handling of things. Not fair. Not right.”
Mr. Lunny maintains that the issues at Point Reyes transcend partisan lines.
“This is a community issue, this is a housing issue, a local food issue, a natural resources conservation issue,” he said. “If this is just criticized as a partisan attempt to undo a Biden-era decision, I don’t think that serves West Marin well.”
Marin, one of the bluest counties in America, may be wary of Trump-aligned Republicans parachuting into a protracted conflict that most believed had finally reached its conclusion. Yet some in agricultural circles are urging officials in Washington to unwind the deal or at least allow for more time for the ranches to shut down and clear out. They have until next April.
For months, Albert Straus, the Straus Family Creamery founder who buys milk from two Point Reyes dairies, has sent a flurry of letters to members of Congress and Trump administration appointees like Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. Mr. Straus, a lifelong Democrat, hoped to leverage the administration’s ties to the ranching and dairy industry to save the operations.
“Our efforts to appeal to Huffman and our local leaders were ringing hollow,” Mr. Straus said. “So we needed to reach out to other people that were going to listen and help us save our farms and community.”
Mr. Straus declined to name the other West Marin ranchers that are part of his coalition, citing fear of repercussions for those under N.D.A.s.
For his part, Mr. Huffman sees such efforts as misguided. “Some of the folks who think they’re helping the ranchers are really doing exactly the opposite,” he said. “They are bringing so much calamity to ranching in the seashore, I sometimes wonder what they’re thinking.”
The House Committee on Natural Resources oversees legislation dealing with climate policy, air and water quality, wildlife and fisheries, energy production, national parks and other public lands.
The lawmakers who signed the letters include committee chair Bruce Westman of Arkansas; Paul Gosar of Arizona, who leads the subcommittee on oversight and investigations; Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin, chairman of the subcommittee on federal lands; Mike Collins of Georgia; Mike Ezell of Mississippi; Lauren Boebert of Colorado; and Doug LaMalfa of California.
In their letters to the Nature Conservancy and the environmental groups, the committee wrote that the seashore’s enabling legislation permits the Secretary of the Interior to lease federal lands for agricultural use “irrespective of the environmental groups’ lawsuit outcome.” They also argued that the environmental groups “have a well-documented history of targeting ranching families” in the park, and they raised questions about conflicts of interest on the part of the Nature Conservancy.
“Given that TNC is a settlement party and specifically fundraised to buy out existing agricultural operations at PRNS, the Committee is gravely concerned about TNC’s conflicts of interest related to the future management of PRNS,” they wrote about the conservation group’s plan to manage future grazing in the seashore.
Heather Gately, a spokeswoman for the Nature Conservancy, said the group is reviewing the House committee’s letter and will soon respond.
“Our approach has always been non-partisan and non-adversarial, focusing on voluntary resolutions and community engagement,” she wrote. “That was just as true in Point Reyes, where the ranchers and other litigants looked to us to help them reach a voluntary resolution.”