The last commercially grown oysters will be removed from Drakes Estero in the next 13 days, and the onshore buildings used by Drakes Bay Oyster Company—including the oyster shack and eventually the worker housing—will soon be gone, too. That’s despite calls from the rancher’s association last July to consider keeping the shack open for retail sales and the housing available for ranch workers as part of the park’s Comprehensive Ranching Management Plan, a draft of which is due this summer.
Just over two years have passed since the Department of the Interior denied Drakes Bay a lease to remain in business in the Point Reyes National Seashore. The oyster farm quickly launched a legal fight with the government, asserting that the decision was arbitrary and capricious. But a federal court in Oakland and an appeals court both denied the oyster farm the injunction it needed to continue operating while litigating the merits of its suit, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in June. As part of a settlement agreement finalized in October, Drakes Bay agreed to cease operations by the end of 2014.
Even as supporters realized the farm’s fate was sealed, some ranchers hoped the ranch management planning process might provide a way to save some of the structures for use by other ranches.
In its lengthy comment letter submitted during the ranch plan’s scoping period this summer, the Point Reyes Seashore Ranchers Association cited a general need for a retail venue to sell ranch products, as well as more worker housing. Workers, it said, face a dearth of affordable housing options in West Marin, making more housing key to the future of agriculture. Some benefits listed by the association, such as the elimination of commutes, are most directly associated with workers who live on the ranch itself but could still apply to nearby housing.
In a subsequent letter, submitted in July, the association got more specific: it asked the seashore not to demolish the shack and the oyster farm’s worker housing immediately, but to put on hold any plans until the ranch planning process was complete. (The letter, written by a small subcommittee, triggered the resignation of roughly a third of association members, who told the president, Ted McIsaac, they disagreed with the group’s style of communication.)
The shack, the second letter posited, could be repurposed to sell other ranch products, and the housing could be filled with workers from other seashore ranches. “The five housing units can be used for housing workers at the Seashore ranches. As the association explained in its scoping letter, there is a need for housing for these workers… Building new housing for the ranch workers would be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive,” it said.
Drakes Bay owner Kevin Lunny said this week that the shack has “been a retail location since long before anyone thought about a seashore being here.”
But an evaluation by the State Historic Preservation Office that was used in the environmental impact statement on the oyster farm did not deem the shack historic. Melanie Gunn, the outreach coordinator for the seashore, said the onshore structures—including the shack—would be demolished early next year. Only the public toilets will remain.
Ms. Gunn said flooding of the shack during storms meant it was “not an appropriate location” for continued retail. High tides encroached on it early this month, she said. (Mr. Lunny responded that they do get water in the building but that “it’s in the same zone it’s been in for the past 50 or 60 years.”
The plan will evaluate other sites in the park for potential retail, Ms. Gunn added.
The worker housing is also slated for demolition, though that will not happen until all the workers have moved out. The dozen or so still living at Drakes Bay can remain onsite for 90 days after the farm closes, per the settlement agreement between the park and the oyster farm.
The ranch plan will consider how to facilitate new worker housing, Ms. Gunn said. “It’s been kind of the park’s standard policy with ranching that all ranch worker housing is associated with the ranch at hand. We have heard there’s an interest in expanding worker housing, which we’re interested in doing…[But we] have decided that the housing at Drakes Estero—it will be removed.” She added that it, too, is in a flood zone.
Ms. Gunn noted that one ranch, which the Light identified through another source as the J Ranch, had received funding from a county program to undertake preliminary work for building ranch worker housing. Whether that housing would actually be built depends on whether the Kehoe family receives a loan from the United States Department of Agriculture.
On Dec. 15, the park service awarded a $28,000 contract to an agency based in Long Beach, called Overland Pacific and Cutler, to provide relocation services.
Legal Aid of Marin, a nonprofit that provides legal representation for low-income or under-served communities, is representing the workers that are eligible for benefits (those that are citizens or legal residents). It has requested that the park and its contractors send all communications to the workers through the nonprofit. Paul Cohen, the executive director for the group, did not return a request for comment.
The park is also planning to dismantle the oyster racks in the estero, a longer-term project, Ms. Gunn said. It is consulting with various agencies—the Army Corps of Engineers, the California Coastal Commission, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Regional Water Quality Control Board—on how to remove them. The seashore will ultimately hire a contractor to do the work.
Mr. Lunny, who has owned the farm for a decade, said it has been painful to watch his workers empty the racks. And though they still need to pull about a million bivalves out of the estero, he says they will meet the deadline. “We’re on schedule. We were given six months to get out and get all the oysters out. So we’re on track with that, but that doesn’t make it easy,” he said.
It has been an emotional time for the workers, too, he said. The dozen still employed at the farm are accustomed to harvesting oysters for consumption: slurped from the half shell, fried in batter, slathered with barbecue sauce. Some bivalves the workers are now removing will still be sold to restaurants, but truckloads of mature ones will go unshucked—though not thrown into dumpsters—because they can’t be sold by the end of the month. “These are market size oysters…[But] we can’t create a market overnight for a million oysters,” Mr. Lunny said.
Drakes Bay is driving the uneaten oysters offsite to a friend’s ranch in Petaluma, where they will be dried out so the shell can be used in restoration projects. Mr. Lunny said they have donated shell to oyster restoration projects in San Francisco Bay; another 500 cubic feet of shell went to a snowy plover habitat project in Hayward this year.)
He is still not giving up on aquaculture and hopes to re-enter the business—in a different bay—sometime soon. Given the expense and bureaucratic tangle of obtaining a new oyster lease somewhere along the Pacific Coast, Mr. Lunny suggested he might try to join or buy an existing business.
As for his coming restaurant at the Tomales Bay Resort in Inverness, dubbed Drakes Oyster House, Mr. Lunny is hopeful they will open the doors in February. The permit from the county’s environmental health department for the restaurant has been approved; now he and Jeff Harriman, who owns the boatel, will begin preparing the menu and organizing staff. (They are working with two culinary consultants, David Cook and Mark Sheff. “Those are their real names,” Mr. Lunny said.)
With the restaurant, along with a separate forthcoming venture in selling wholesale oysters, he hopes to keep some of his workers employed, hopefully without much lag time.
Many who have been forced to leave have found new jobs: at the Palace Market, Saltwater, the Station House Café, Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company. A few, include Guadalupe Valerio, who worked at Drakes Bay for decades, have returned to Mexico, leaving grown children behind, Mr. Lunny said.
Isela Mesa, who goes by Rosa, received a degree in oceanography in Mexico and worked at Drakes Bay as a marine biologist. When her expertise was no longer needed as Drakes Bay wound down, she found a job at Bovine Bakery, selling baked goods at the front counter. Spending all day interacting with customers is a big shift from working with baby oysters at the estero. “I’m enjoying it,” she said. She misses her former job. But, she said, “I have to do something in the meantime.”
This article was corrected on Dec. 18 after we learned we had misunderstood a statement by Melanie Gunn, the outreach coordinator for the seashore, regarding worker housing on ranches. We mistakenly wrote that the seashore would stick to a traditional policy of requiring worker housing to serve only the workers of the ranch where the housing is located; in fact, Ms. Gunn said the ranch management plan underway would assess that policy, not take it for granted. In addition, Ms. Gunn did not identify the J Ranch as the recipient of funding from a county program seeking to help build worker housing; we confirmed that fact through the administering program itself.