County supervisors unanimously approved allocating up to $200,000 to reimburse two groups of ranchers in the Point Reyes National Seashore for legal fees related to the lawsuit against the National Park Service centered on the ranch management plan.
The county is providing the reimbursement— officially defined as 20 percent of ranchers’ legal fees, up to a $200,000 cap—because any decrease in ranching in the seashore goes against policies in the Countywide Plan and the Local Coastal Program that support the continuation of agriculture.
“From the beginning, it’s been important to support our ranching community…It’s money well spent,” Supervisor Kate Sears said.
Fears that the lawsuit could lead to the demise of ranching in the park led supervisors last April to approve intervening in the suit, which would give them standing in litigation and settlement talks. The county does not keep tabs on exactly how much time it spends on every court case it is involved in, but county lawyers have spent over 100 hours working on the case, said David Zaltsman, deputy county counsel.
The lawsuit, filed almost a year ago by three environmental nonprofits, specifically charges that the National Park Service improperly went forward with a plan to guide the management of ranching in the park without first updating its General Management Plan, which has not been updated since 1980.
The nonprofits—the Resource Renewal Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project—also argued that ranch leases do not undergo proper environmental review. (That part of the suit has been stayed for the time being.)
In response, the park service has countered in court filings that it has discretion to decide when to create or update plans, and that ranchers are worried that delaying the ranch plan will likewise delay the issuance of longer leases, the ability to diversify and the management of elk in the pastoral zone—issues ranchers say are pressing.
Park officials have said it could easily take years to update the general plan were it prioritized over the ranch plan.
“In reality, this lawsuit is really a frontal assault on the leases that the various ranchers rely upon for their livelihood,” Mr. Zaltsman said at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting. He also said the county, which succeeded in its bid to intervene in a limited fashion, is now involved in settlement talks.
Dennis Rodoni, the new supervisor representing District 4, said the lawsuit was “a very, very important issue for the county” and that he was pleased settlement talks were in process.
But Supervisor Rodoni also asked Mr. Zaltsman for “more background on how we came to support a private law firm” and how the county would ensure the money given to these two groups would be used for “the purpose that we’re intending,” expressing concerns that one group may be a “splinter group.”
Supervisor Sears also alluded to the separate groups of ranchers with different legal teams, saying, “It’s had its bumps, but overall it’s proved to be a good collaboration between all the lawyers involved, and the lawyers outside of the county coming from very different circumstances, different kinds of legal practices.”
Two groups of ranchers are being represented separately. One group hired a private international law firm, Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer. Another cohort is being represented by Western Resources Legal Center, an Oregon nonprofit that assists those in “natural resource industries,” according to its website. The judge in the lawsuit has allowed both groups to intervene on a limited basis.
Matthew Hymel, the county administrator, responded to Supervisor Rodoni’s concerns, saying that two years ago the county had allocated $125,000 to help ranchers with the difficult impacts of the drought. But then rain fell, and the funds were never paid out.
The county has since been discussing how the money should be spent, and ultimately decided to repurpose it for the ranchers’ legal fees, with an extra infusion of $75,000.
Mr. Hymel added that the funds were “directly related to our interest in the legal challenge” and that administrative staff and county counsel would review the reimbursement requests to make sure they adhered to the specifics of what supervisors were authorizing.
Each group would be reimbursed proportionally. Mr. Zaltsman said in an email that he assumed that means “each group would get the same percentage of their overall bill reimbursed. But those niceties will be handled by our [administrator’s] office and budget folks.”
Parties involved in the settlement talks, which were ordered by a judge, are bound by a confidentiality agreement not to reveal the specifics of those discussions. But Mr. Zaltsman said at the hearing that a settlement is in process.
“In fact I just got a notice from the magistrate [judge] today that they’re doing a further settlement conference to work on a few last problems, apparently, in the proposed settlement agreement,” Mr. Zaltsman said.
Kevin Lunny, of G Ranch, said the financial assistance was important on two counts: it is “really, really needed,” he said, adding that protracted litigation would be a financial burden. But it also symbolized the supervisors “taking a stand for agriculture in Marin.”
“It was truly a blessing to the ranchers to have the Board of Supervisors show such support for the continuation of ranching in the seashore,” he said.