In the latest fallout from a settlement ending most agriculture in the Point Reyes National Seashore, an attorney representing dozens of ranch tenants and workers has filed a new lawsuit aiming to block their eviction.
The complaint accuses the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy of conspiring to drive ranchers from the park, ensnaring a prominent environmental organization—one that has cast itself as referee and benefactor—in new litigation.
“This was an illegal arrangement between the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy,” attorney Andrew Giacomini told the Light.
With the lawsuit pending and a looming deadline to vacate their homes next year, ranch residents say they are mired in uncertainty, with few details about a promised transition plan that is reportedly imminent.
The new complaint by his firm, Hanson Bridgett, contends that the Nature Conservancy’s plan to compensate ranchers to relinquish their leases runs afoul of federal law. “When the government takes away property from people, it has to pay for it,” Mr. Giacomini said. “You can’t just have somebody else pay the compensation. That’s illegal.”
The National Park Service did not respond to a request for comment.
Under the contested settlement, reached in January, the Nature Conservancy is providing financial incentives for ranchers to vacate their leases by May 2026, after a 15-month wind-down period. The deal resolved litigation brought by three environmental groups—the Resource Renewal Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project—challenging ranching in the park.
Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the suit seeks to prevent the eviction of more than 60 individuals who live or work on four dairies—operated by the Mendoza, McClure, Nunes and Kehoe families—out of the dozen cattle operations slated to shut down. According to Mr. Giacomini, more tenants are signing on to the complaint each week.
The suit says the ranchers face financial penalties if their tenants remain in their homes when their landlords seek to collect their payouts.
“There’s a carrot-and-stick component to each of those individual settlement agreements,” said Bianca Velez, co-counsel for the plaintiffs. “If there are still residents living on the premises after operations cease, then what will happen?”
In an earlier version of the lawsuit, the ranchers themselves were named as defendants, but Mr. Giacomini said they assured him they would not evict workers before the case could be heard. Their dismissal as defendants was without prejudice, leaving open the possibility that they could be renamed in the suit if circumstances change.
The lawsuit alleges that the park service “secretly sided” with the environmental groups and, alongside the Nature Conservancy, “contrived a plan to avoid issuing the 20-year leases” authorized under the park’s 2021 general management plan amendment.
Although the park service had approved the longer leases following an extensive public process under the National Environmental Policy Act, the environmental organizations swiftly filed suit, leading to nearly three years of closed-door mediation between the agency, the plaintiffs, the intervening ranch families and the Nature Conservancy.
When the parties emerged from the shroud of settlement talks in January, they did so with an agreement that included voluntary departures by the intervening ranch families. Under the settlement, the vacated ranchland would be designated as a scenic landscape zone, with the Nature Conservancy overseeing targeted grazing and other conservation measures.
Mr. Giacomini’s clients allege these actions violate several federal statutes, including the Fifth Amendment, the Fair Housing Act, the Declaratory Judgment Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.
A previous effort by Mr. Giacomini to join the original litigation was opposed by the park service and environmental organizations and was ultimately denied by Judge Maxine M. Chesney of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Judge Chesney, who deemed the new suit related to the earlier one, is presiding over the current claims.
“I don’t think she’s super sympathetic to our clients,” Ms. Velez said. “But that could change.”
The complaint catalogues what it calls a series of “overt actions” by the park service and the conservancy to further their alleged conspiracy. Chief among them is the reversal of the park’s commitment to 20-year leases and its failure to issue them even while they remained legally valid. It also contends that the conservancy obtained a lease option and entered a cooperative agreement without a competitive bidding process, and it calls for access to confidential documents tied to the settlement, including lease terminations, payment agreements and the wind-down plans for departing ranchers.
When the settlement was announced, the parties said they were planning assistance for ranch tenants, offering “severance packages for affected employees, housing financial assistance packages, employee transition support services, and housing transition support services.” But ranch workers and their families say information about these efforts has been scant.
“To this day, we have not received direct communication regarding any details of the transition plan,” said Jasmine Bravo, who grew up on a Point Reyes ranch and whose mother and sister still live on one. “We are directly impacted and don’t have any more information than the public does.”
Chance Cutrano of the Resource Renewal Institute said the concerns of ranch workers and residents were “never an afterthought” and that the parties are close to finalizing a transition plan after a period of meeting with ranch workers, tenants and other stakeholders.
“We’ve come a long way to improve the draft transition support plan for ranch workers and tenants,” Mr. Cutrano said. “We’re taking feedback from the affected families and sharing that with all the parties, hoping to ensure any transition and support will have a meaningful impact.”
The Nature Conservancy is also reaching out to families through a newly hired firm specializing in transition plans. Michael Bell, the conservancy’s protection strategy director, said these one-on-one bilingual meetings are scheduled to begin in March in collaboration with West Marin Community Services.
“If someone is involved [with Mr. Giacomini’s lawsuit], they can still have these conversations and understand the financial, housing and employment support that is available to them,” Mr. Bell said. “This is designed to be agnostic. We are not trying to divide people.”
Although initial discussions centered on providing the equivalent of 12 months’ rental costs in Marin County, Mr. Bell said local feedback led the conservancy to consider up to 18 months. “We want to maximize the financial payment for this transition, given the nature of all of this,” he said, acknowledging the “significant” fundraising challenge ahead.
Representatives of Círculo de Esperanza Latina and Las Familias Afectadas de Rancho, two grassroots groups in which Ms. Bravo is involved, are conducting a census of park residents to determine the true number of people who could lose housing.
“They don’t have an accurate number of people being impacted,” Ms. Bravo said. “We want relocation compensation to reflect the actual number of residents facing eviction.”
Both groups have met with the conservancy three times since January to relay community concerns. But doubts about fair treatment run deep. “We are demanding that any transition plan, any transition phase, starts only once it is clearly communicated in Spanish, in writing, to us,” Ms. Bravo said.