In a sizable settlement announced late last week, Tomales Bay Oyster Company has agreed to pay the National Park Service $280,000 for building a parking area on an acre of federal land adjacent to the Marshall business—land the business had believed it owned, based on confusing county assessor maps.
The oyster company used a quarter-acre of the property from 2010 to 2014, a federal complaint filed on Jan. 19 states. The business, run by Tod Friend since 2009, removed vegetation and graded the land so that up to 17 cars could park there. At the time, droves of customers were buying oysters and picnicking seven days a week, activities the county has severely curtailed due to permitting issues and code violations.
“We are going to be neighbors for a long time, and we want to be good neighbors,” Mr. Friend said. “We want to resolve this, and hopefully we’ve done that. The park and the Department of Justice were quite reasonable.”
Remediation work on the site will include removing gravel, introducing native plants and removing and monitoring invasive plants, according to the park service.
“We are pleased to bring this case to a close and begin restoration of the site as soon as possible,” Acting Superintendent Dave Brouillette said in a statement. “We cannot allow any modifications to national park lands to occur without permit or authorization, as it is a violation of the law. These are special places that belong to all of us and we do not take that responsibility lightly.”
The property, which includes an old railway cut, belonged to previous owners of the oyster farm for several decades, between the 1930s and 1994. That year, the son of Mr. Friend’s predecessor, Edward Johansson, sold off a small portion to the park service. Mr. Friend said Mr. Johansson offered the park the entire parcel, but the park did not want the bayside area where the business operated.
When Mr. Friend purchased the business in 2009, he based his understanding of the property line on county assessor maps. The maps, which Mr. Friend admitted are not official survey maps, suggested the railway cut was on oyster farm property. And it didn’t help that when he arrived, abandoned oyster equipment was on the land.
A few years later, in 2013, the farm was working on a permit application to address code enforcement issues and legalize its seven-day-a-week operation. As part of the application, Mr. Friend commissioned an official survey. The more detailed maps made clear that the area—which he had included in his permit plans—was in fact park property.
Around the same time, seashore Superintendent Cicely Muldoon wrote in a letter to the county that the park had not learned about the application, which designated parking spaces in the railway cut, until the fall of 2013. Maps included in the application showed the area as federal property, but the park had not given permission for its use, she wrote.
In a letter to the park service in December 2013, Mr. Friend asked permission to continue parking cars there to accommodate his customers. At the time, summer weekends could bring 100 or more cars at a time along the shoulder of Highway 1. “Tomales Bay Oyster Company continues to need to use the 17 parking spaces located on your land… in order to safely accommodate our customers to visit the farm to purchase oysters and picnic,” he wrote.
Two months later, the park reponded that the assessor map did not “adequately represent the property boundaries.” But it declined Mr. Friend’s request, saying parking for a commercial business was “not consistent with the long-term protection and management of NPS lands along the shoreline of Tomales Bay.” The park told Mr. Friend to stop using the land and to provide a plan to “restore the site to natural condition.”
But about a month later, the park asserted that a recent site visit found that work had been done on the property after Mr. Friend discovered the land was federally owned. In a letter to Mr. Friend, the park said that work had violated the Coastal Act and said that under federal law, Mr. Friend would be liable for covering the cost of assessing the damage, restoring the site and monitoring “the ongoing effects of the incident.”
The government’s complaint alleges that the business removed a berm, graded the land, brought in invasive plants like stinkwort and French broom, cleared native vegetation, cut 19 trees and caused soil erosion.
Mr. Friend said that after learning about the erroneous maps, he had removed a berm to make it easier for customers to avoid walking on Highway 1. “That indeed was a big problem. We conceded to that point,” he said.
Under the terms of the settlement, released publicly the same day as the complaint, the business will pay the federal government $280,000. Of that, the government will send $267,742 to the Department of the Interior’s Natural Resources Damage Assessment and Restoration Fund; the rest will go to the United States Treasury. The consent decree is subject to a 30-day public comment period before final approval; that period began Wednesday.
“I am glad we reached an agreement,” said Mr. Friend’s lawyer, Peter Prows, of Briscoe Ivester and Bazel LLP. “I think it’s a fair and equitable agreement.”
Mr. Friend said now that he has resolved the issue with the park service, the business intends to submit an application for an updated permit. In late 2015, the farm pulled the application—which included a request to allow picnicking, daily retail sales, a new septic system and the construction of a parking area on a parcel it owns across Highway 1—after county staffers recommended denying it due to ongoing concerns.
To read the complaint and consent decree, visit justice.gov/enrd/consent-decree/us-v-tomales-bay-oyster-company. To comment, email [email protected] or send snail mail to Assistant Attorney General, U.S. DOJ–ENRD, P.O. Box 7611, Washington, DC 20044-7611 by Feb. 24. Refer to United States v. Tomales Bay Oyster Company, LLC, D.J. Ref. No. 90-5-1-1-11544, in comments.