Saturday, May 2, 2015

Federal Fraud in CA

Oyster Farmer: ‘We Are Terrified’ of the Government, Posted on April 30, 2015 Written by dailycaller.com

Drakes Bay Oys­ter Com­pany oper­ated in Point Reyes for decades until National Park Ser­vice offi­cials used fal­si­fied data to force Kevin Lunny’s family-run oys­ter farm to shut down. The expe­ri­ence has left its mark on Lunny: “We are ter­ri­fied,” he told law­mak­ers dur­ing a hear­ing Thursday.

“Let me be clear, we did not fail as a busi­ness,” Lunny said in his pre­pared tes­ti­mony. “This was not bad luck. Rather, the Park Ser­vice engaged in a taxpayer-funded enter­prise of cor­rup­tion to run our small busi­ness out of Point Reyes.”

Lunny made this state­ment in response to a ques­tion by Repub­li­can Rep. Raul Labrador ask­ing whether or not Lunny felt like there could be con­se­quences from his tes­ti­mony against the National Parks Service.

Even Demo­c­ra­tic Cal­i­for­nia Rep. Jared Huff­man admit­ted that in the rush to get rid of indus­try from Point Reyes, gov­ern­ment offi­cials and envi­ron­men­tal­ists “over­stated” evi­dence that Lunny’s farm was harm­ing the environment. “No one has apol­o­gized,” Lunny said.

Drakes Bay Oys­ter Com­pany is located in North­ern California’s Point Reyes National Seashore, where it has been for decades. Point Reyes isn’t your typ­i­cal national park because it was cre­ated to pre­serve the his­toric coast­line where peo­ple have been set­tled since the Gold Rush. It was never intended to be a major tourist attrac­tion like Yellowstone.

For decades the Park Ser­vice had a good rela­tion­ship with the oys­ter com­pany, but that all changed in the mid-2000s. All of the sud­den, NPS offi­cials started blam­ing the com­pany for an 80 per­cent decline in the local har­bor seal pop­u­la­tion. Offi­cials also blamed Lunny’s farm for upset­ting the eco­log­i­cal bal­ance of Drakes Estero.

But all of these accu­sa­tions against Drakes Bay Oys­ter Com­pany turned out to be com­pletely false. The National Parks Ser­vice lacked any sci­en­tific data to back up its claims that the com­pany was killing seals and hurt­ing the local envi­ron­ment. In fact, stud­ies done by the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey and the Cal­i­for­nia State Health Depart­ment showed the Parks Ser­vice was com­pletely wrong.

NPS, how­ever, didn’t stop there and kept mak­ing false claims against the oys­ter company. “The Park Ser­vice mis­rep­re­sented that study,” Lunny said. “They instead attempted to demon­strate harm by sub­sti­tut­ing data from a sixty-year-old study con­ducted at the Sea of Japan and attribut­ing it to our farm.”

“For exam­ple, in assess­ing the noise impact of our small out­board motor boats, the Park Ser­vice, rather than mea­sur­ing our boats on our sound­scape [as required], instead used the mea­sure­ments from a seventy-horsepower, 700cc Kawasaki jet ski in New Jer­sey,” Lunny added.

Lunny appealed to higher ups at the National Park Ser­vice for help in the mat­ter and to cor­rect the record on false state­ments made by the agency, but he got no help from the government.

“The local Park Ser­vice staff were not will­ing to cor­rect the false claims, so we went to the Regional Direc­tor,” Lunny said. “No help there. Then we went to the Park Ser­vice Direc­tor, and finally the Sec­re­tary of Inte­rior. No one, at any level, was will­ing to admit that false sci­ence was being used against us, or to at least cor­rect the record and stop the false accusations.”

The Inte­rior Department’s own inspec­tor gen­eral even found mis­con­duct by agency offi­cials and that they mis­rep­re­sented facts. But even so, the inspec­tor gen­eral was pow­er­less to stop Parks Ser­vice offi­cials from attack­ing Lunny’s business.

Even­tu­ally, Drakes Bay Oys­ter Farm closed its doors because of the lit­i­ga­tion and reg­u­la­tory actions taken by the fed­eral government.

“What the Park Ser­vice did to our fam­ily was uncon­scionable,” Lunny said. “This pol­luted legacy of false sci­ence has tainted our deal­ings with state and fed­eral agen­cies, and has resulted in unnec­es­sary reg­u­la­tory and legal action against our fam­ily and our farm.”

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