When the CZM Committee met in early October we all hoped that the Summers End project would be voted down by at least one of the two Commissioners eligible to vote on the proposal. That didn’t happen, and we immediately began our organized efforts to stop this destructive project from ever seeing the light of day.
We knew we would need funds to hire the best legal team we could find, so a first priority was establishing a crowd-funding effort. We used GoFundMe and Facebook as our principal forms of community engagement. A very amateur but very effective video was produced and the GoFundMe site was established. Within a couple weeks we had raised $75,000 which was sufficient to retain legal counsel and begin work on our appeals.
We interviewed a number of lawyers with experience in Virgin Islands regulatory and environmental matters, and settled upon Attorneys Jennifer Jones and Andrew Simpson to file our appeals. Attorney Jones had extensive experience working with DPNR and CZM, and Attorney Simpson had a long relationship with the Virgin Islands Conservation Society, so we believed this team would be well suited to represent our interests.
In addition to our talented local counsel, we were also extremely fortunate to be introduced to Attorney Robb Fox of the law firm Manko, Gold, Katcher and Fox. Robb Fox was a regular visitor to St John, and had become aware of the legal battle being initiated in Coral Bay. He reached out to us and offered to represent our interests, pro bono, in the upcoming federal permitting process. We were thrilled to have such a high profile attorney joining us for what we knew would be a complex, technically challenging interaction with the United States Army Corps of Engineers and the myriad of federal regulatory agencies.
