A coalition of restaurants and food purveyors from West Marin and the Bay Area dropped their case against the federal government this week, putting an end to legal action centered around Drakes Bay Oyster Company, which must cease operations by the end of this month. The move follows a federal government motion in November asking Yvonne Gonzales, a federal district judge in Oakland, to dismiss the claims made by the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs—which included Tomales Bay Oyster Company, Saltwater Oyster Depot, Osteria Stellina and Margaret Grade, the owner of Sir and Star and Manka’s Inverness Lodge—filed their lawsuit a month after the United States Supreme Court declined to hear Drakes Bay’s own case against the Department of the Interior, effectively ending any chance to reverse the Secretary of the Interior’s decision in 2012 to close the farm. The group alleged that the economic harms to them from the farm’s closure were not sufficiently analyzed. In a hearing last September, Judge Gonzales disparaged the restaurants’ case and said she considered sanctioning them for filing a frivolous suit. In the government’s call for the judge to dismiss the restaurants’ case, it wrote, “Because [Drakes Bay] has agreed to discontinue its shellfish operations in Drakes Estero and no longer pursues a permit to operate, Plaintiffs’ claims are not redressable by the Court and are moot.” Tod Friend, owner of Tomales Bay Oyster Company, said he and his fellow businesses dropped the complaint in large part because of a consensual agreement between Drakes Bay and the federal government that was finalized in October. (The government had argued that the October settlement agreement would remain in effect even if, theoretically, the Secretary of the Interior reversed the 2012 order from the Interior.) Community fatigue over Drakes Bay also factored into the decision. “The community itself was exhausted. You know, the fight had been engaged and fought for years… Many in the community would want to fight forever, but the other feeling is that it was time for it to come to an end,” Mr. Friend said.