$3.6 million fine tossed in fight over duck club
Owner of delta site wins round in challenge to state
An East Bay man battling environmental watchdog agencies over his efforts to establish an elite duck club and kite-surfing center in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta won a legal victory when a judge overturned a $3.6 million fine that the agencies had imposed against him.
Solano County Superior Court Judge Harry Kinnicutt found that two state water agencies — the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board and the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission — had acted with “an appearance of vindictiveness” in “imposing the highest penalties the Regional Board and BCDC had ever imposed” against John Sweeney, who owns Point Buckler, a 39acre island in the Suisun Marsh wetlands area near Pittsburg.
The delta duck duel pits Sweeney against environmentalists who argue that the property owner violated the Suisun Marsh Preservation Act in reconstructing about a mile of levees in the wetlands around Point Buckler, an island that was operated as a duck club until the 1990s. In a May 2016 lawsuit, water board officials said the levees blocked tidal flows onto the property, compromising habitat for endangered species, including migrating salmon and delta smelt.
But in his decision on Wednesday, Kinnicutt said BCDC staff started monitoring the levee repair work that Sweeney was doing in March of 2014 but waited six months to issue a cleanup
and abatement order. They then delayed another four months before imposing millions in penalties against the property owner.
“If the levee work was the most egregious violation in the Regional Board’s history, why didn’t the (board) take action when it learned about the work in 2014?” Kinnicutt wrote. The answer, Kinnicutt said, is that the penalties were “imposed in retribution” for a related lawsuit that Sweeney’s business, Point Buckler Club LLC, filed against the regional water board in September 2015.
Sweeney, who said he has racked up $2 million in legal fees on the case, characterized the decision as “a big victory for the little landowner.”
“This was all in retaliation for my wife and I accusing them of fraud,” said Sweeney. “They wanted us to go away, but we fought them and we won.”
BCDC Executive Director Larry Goldzband said his agency has yet to see the ruling and can’t comment on it.
“Assuming we get it next
“This was all in retaliation for my wife and I accusing them of fraud. They wanted us to go away, but we fought them and we won.” John Sweeney, owner of Point Buckler, a 39-acre island in the Suisun Marsh
week, we will sit down with the attorney general, figure out what the next steps are, and go from there,” he said. “What I can tell you is that the BCDC based its finding on firsthand observation, site visits and a lot of scientific evidence.”
The Suisun Marsh area is home to about 160 duck clubs, which take up about 90 percent of the brackish territory just east of the Carquinez Strait, an area also popular with kite surfers. Duck clubs use levees and tide gates to maintain duck ponds, and they plant vegetation that provides food for ducks and other waterfowl.
Under the surface of the legal battle is the question of what Sweeney intends to do with the property. Sweeney, who made his money selling advertising space on sailboats and bought the island in 2011, insists that the motivation for his work is to reopen the duck club that closed in the 1990s when the wooden clubhouse on the island burned down. Sweeney said the plan is to sell shares to “eight to 10 partners” and operate in a similar manner as other duck clubs in the delta.
But marketing materials Sweeney put together suggest his more ambitious goal was to create a hangout for wealthy Silicon Valley tech executives who would be able to land helicopters on the island and spend weekends both hunting waterfowl and kite-surfing. The Point Buckler website offers a “private island 50 miles from San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Marin” featuring “kiteboarding in summer and fishing and hunting in winter.”