After years spent running afoul of regulations, then years working toward compliance, Tomales Bay Oyster Company secured California Coastal Commission approval for its shellfish farming operation. California’s top coastal regulators took a congratulatory tone last week as they unanimously approved a permit that brought the 113-year-old operation up to snuff, retroactively authorizing the company’s unpermitted cultivation equipment and the removal of abandoned equipment and debris from its leased area, with conditions meant especially to protect eelgrass habitat.
“I think it’s pretty monumental because this is the first coastal permit T.B.O.C. has had,” said Heidi Gregory, who co-owns and manages the oyster farm.
Later this year, the company will seek approval for its onshore structures, bringing the whole business into compliance.
“T.B.O.C. was a mess when my dad took it over in 2009,” Ms. Gregory said at the Aug. 10 hearing. “This lease had not been monitored by any agency for a very long time, and had gotten away from everyone.”
Ms. Gregory’s father was Tod Friend, a maverick oysterman who co-owned the business until he died in a 2017 boating accident on the bay. Mr. Friend started the work of cleaning up the abandoned, decades-old oystering equipment that littered the waters he was leasing from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. But he also got into trouble with regulators. In 2015, the county ordered T.B.O.C. to remove its picnic tables and barbecues, which were violating the company’s 1987 use permit and agricultural zoning restrictions. Later, Mr. Friend paid a $280,000 settlement after building a parking area on neighboring land owned by the National Park Service.
Since Ms. Gregory took over from her father, she said, the company has been transparent with the commission and worked consistently to clean up the bay. But she stressed that much of the unpermitted equipment was decades old. Some of the equipment that received after-the-fact approval—bottom bags, tipping bags, racks and floating longline—predated the coastal commission itself, and almost all of it predated Mr. Friend’s arrival more than a decade ago.
“There wasn’t much enforcement going on in the years before that,” Ms. Gregory said. “This oyster company was created before the Coastal Act, when Fish and Wildlife was only about four years old.”
Ms. Gregory and T.B.O.C. manager Martin Seiler said they knew relatively little about the cultivation techniques used before Mr. Friend’s time, piecing together some of the locations of cultivation bags from old aerial photographs. Floating bags may not be perfect, they said, but they do much less harm to the ecosystem than old techniques, which included dredging the bay floor and throwing oysters into the mud behind a large fence that kept bat rays from eating them.
The company’s approval was moved to the commission’s consent calendar, a fact that commissioners said was remarkable in and of itself, given its years-old violations and the sometimes-fraught relationship between regulators and aquaculture.
“I am so glad to see this item, especially the T.B.O.C., as part of the consent calendar,” said Commissioner Katie Rice, a Marin native who worked at the oyster farm in the 1980s. She described aquaculture as the “canary in the coal mine” for water quality and the health of marine ecosystems.
The unanimous approval was the product of a compromise between T.B.O.C., commission staff and the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, which generally opposes after-the-fact permitting. The nonprofit expressed concerns about potential ongoing damage to beds of eelgrass, a sensitive seagrass that cleans Tomales Bay’s waters, and feeds and shelters many species.
In its final approval, the commission added several conditions. The company must remove all the remaining abandoned cultivation equipment within two years. It must also seek an amendment to its coastal permit if it wants to expand shellfish cultivation within its lease beyond the existing 33 acres, so as not to encroach on eelgrass beds. T.B.O.C. will have to submit annual cleanup reports to the commission, draft a hazardous spill response plan, and train employees to minimize marine debris and avoid spawning herring when harvesting.
“The strong natural resource conditions in this permit will help protect Tomales Bay’s sensitive and dynamic habitat,” E.A.C. legal and policy director Ashley Eagle-Gibbs said in a press release.
Ms. Gregory said the conditions are feasible, and some are already being practiced. The 33 acres where the company harvests shellfish represent just one-fifth of its lease area, allowing the remainder of the lease to protect rich eelgrass habitat. The company already trains its staff not to disturb spawning herring, she said.
As part of a 2013 state initiative to streamline shellfish permits, the commission found that most of the state’s 18 aquaculture farmers were operating without a coastal permit, like T.B.O.C., or were in violation of their permits. The commission sent out notices of violation in the ensuing years, spurring Marin Oyster Company, Hog Island Oyster Company and T.B.O.C. and others to action. When Hog Island secured its retroactive approval from the commission in 2019, E.A.C. was also involved and helped add similar mitigation strategies, including eelgrass surveying.
T.B.O.C. is also making changes to the onshore side of its business, awaiting county approval to open on weekdays, hire more than three times as many employees, and retroactively permit a group of structures on its property. Once it gets the green light from Marin’s Deputy Zoning Administrator, the company will return to the coastal commission for approval of the structures, which include retaining walls, a covered work area, a trellis, sheds, trash and recycling enclosures and portable restrooms. Picnic tables, Ms. Gregory said, will never return to the farm because they would violate its use permit.
“When this is done, we’ll celebrate,” she said. “We hope this goes as well as the last part.”