We will wait until next month at least to find out if popular beaches will be closed year-round - Off-road vehicle use on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore is again threatened by the latest salvo in a round of attacks on the tradition of beach driving by environmental groups. It will be at least several weeks before residents, visitors, and business owners find out if a federal judge will agree with environmental groups and shut down the most popular recreational areas of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore to off-road vehicles year-round.
U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle has set Tuesday, March 18, for a hearing in a request by The Defenders of Wildlife and the National Audubon Society, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), for a preliminary injunction to stop driving on parts of the seashore beaches until after a trial in a lawsuit the groups filed on Oct. 18.
That lawsuit challenges the National Park Service's interim plan to protect threatened and vulnerable species of shorebirds that nest on the seashore. The groups contend that the plan does not go far enough to protect the birds, which include the threatened piping plovers, as well as black skimmers, American oystercatchers, and gull-billed and common terns.
The request for the preliminary injunction, filed Feb. 20, asks that Boyle replace the interim plan with more restrictive measures until after the lawsuit is settled. Specifically, the plaintiffs are asking Boyle to stop ORV use year-round at the most environmentally sensitive areas of the seashore – Bodie Island spit, Cape Point and part of the South Beach, Hatteras Inlet, and the north and south points of Ocracoke. These are also the areas that are most popular for recreation, especially fishing.
Boyle met with attorneys for both sides in his Raleigh courtroom on Friday, Feb. 22, for a scheduling conference on the October lawsuit that had been set before the request for the preliminary injunction.
In addition to setting March 18 as the date for briefs and arguments in the request for the temporary injunction, Boyle also denied a motion by the intervenors to dismiss three of six claims made in the plaintiffs' lawsuit.
Three groups of lawyers were present. The plaintiffs were represented by attorneys for the environmental organizations and SELC. The defendants, the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, were represented by attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice. In addition, attorneys from Washington, D.C., and Elizabeth City represented the intervenors in the lawsuit – Dare and Hyde counties and the Cape Hatteras Access Preservation Alliance. Boyle had granted their request to intervene behalf of the people of Dare and Hyde counties and other beach users in mid-December.
Most observers expect a fairly speedy ruling by Boyle after the March 18 hearing, since a major reason that the environmental groups asked for the preliminary injunction is that nesting season for shorebirds will begin in late March.
“At this point, every breeding season is critically important to the shorebirds that nest on Hatteras,” SELC attorney Derb Carter said in a press release. “Fortunately, by limiting driving on even this small area would help protect them during this season, giving the Park Service time to develop and implement a reasonable long-term plan to manage driving on the beach.Each year we see fewer and fewer of these species on Hatteras. Waiting any longer for the Park Service to properly manage beach driving could very well mean we have nothing left to protect.”
The environmental groups claim that the areas they seek to close have already been identified by scientists for NPS and USFWS as the most critical for nesting shorebirds.
They also claim that the areas represent only 12 percent of the available shoreline in the seashore, and they note that the areas would still be open to pedestrians.
Furthermore, in the lawsuit and the request for the preliminary injunction, the plantiffs refer to a study of the economic impacts of designating critical habitat for piping plovers on the seashore that was done by Industrial Economics, Inc. The 2007 report concludes that closing of additional critical bird nesting areas to ORVs would result in a lost of only 5 to 8 percent of the dollars generated by visitation to the seashore.
Islanders, regular visitors, and business owners reacted immediately to the request for the temporary injunction with a mixture of outrage, disappointment, amazement, and fear about what a closure of the most popular areas of the beach might do to the economy of Hatteras and Ocracoke islands.
Few business people on the island have any confidence in the Industrial Economics report. Even the casual observer should be skeptical given the popularity of the areas to be closed to fishermen and other beachgoers.
Irene Nolan, Island Free Press
Continued with second part tomorrow...
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