The Department of Justice says the lawsuit objecting to the Point Reyes National Seashore’s first-ever comprehensive ranch management plan is meritless, according to court filings.
In documents submitted in federal district court in Oakland on May 13, department lawyers wrote that the lawsuit filed by the Resource Renewal Institute, the Center For Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project essentially attempts to mandate actions—like management plan updates—over which courts have no jurisdiction, since agencies like the National Park Service have broad discretion to manage land and to update management plans as they see fit.
“Rather than waiting to challenge a final decision adopting a ranch management plan, plaintiffs seek to derail that public process before it is completed,” the filing says.
The lawyers made a motion for Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong to dismiss the suit.
Elizabeth Zultoski, an attorney with the nonprofits’ legal team, called the government’s motion and its arguments “baseless,” claiming that it was “filed for the purposes of delay.”
In February, the three environmental nonprofits sued the Interior Department and Superintendent Cicely Muldoon, alleging that the seashore had unlawfully undertaken the ranch management plan before updating its general management plan, which is over three decades old.
The ranch plan, a delayed draft of which is slated for release this year, will address a number of management issues, like how to handle tule elk in the pastoral zone and to what degree ranches may diversify their operations.
But the nonprofits argue that first, the general plan should be updated, since it is supposed to guide specific plans. (The seashore started updating its general management plan in the late ’90s and continued to update the public on its progress as late as the mid-2000s, but never released a draft.) The seashore has also endured many changes in recent decades, including more visitation, the specter of climate change and “other factors adversely impacting wildlife and natural resources,” the lawyers said in court filings.
Many people see the lawsuit as an attempt to eliminate or severely restrict ranching in the seashore. While some believe it is unlikely to succeed, county supervisors took it seriously enough to attempt to intervene in the suit, so that Marin, too, could be a defendant.
In its motion, the Department of Justice dismissed claims about the general management plan. While environmental groups argued that Congress requires the park to update plans in a “timely manner,” the federal lawyers said that courts can only mandate actions that are required by law. Congress never defined “timely,” thereby giving the agency broad leeway to decide when to update the plan.
The lawsuit also targeted ranching leases and other short-term ranch authorizations, arguing that the seashore has illegally renewed them over the past six years without proper federal environmental review. But federal lawyers say that argument constitutes “[i]mproper blanket challenges to the ranching program at Point Reyes as a whole.”
They go on to say that there is a significant difference between a “final agency action,” which can be reviewed by a court, and ongoing management decisions, which cannot be contested in court.
They also stress that the environmental assessment the nonprofits are looking for “will be accomplished by the very process they seek to stop.”
Seashore spokespeople have previously declined to comment on the pending litigation.
Ms. Zultoski said the environmental groups will file a full response on Friday. But she said that there was “a long list of case law” that allows courts to decide if management plan delays are reasonable, and that courts like the Ninth Circuit had “made clear that the authorizations of livestock grazing are final agency actions” that can be challenged.