A lawsuit between prominent Kismet contractor and business leader Sam Wood and the National Park Service (NPS) has ended with a settlement. The settlement ended the almost year-long legal dispute between Wood and the NPS fought over a 30-day March 2023 suspension of Wood’s essential services business driving permit.
Wood launched the lawsuit on August 18, 2023, naming Fire Island National Seashore (FINS) Superintendent Alexcy Romero, the NPS, and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, as defendants. Wood notified the court that he had reached an “agreement in principle” with these defendants to settle the case on June 24, 2024, and by July 10, 2024, the case was formally dismissed, according to court records. The settlement calls for the defendants to “vacate and expunge” Wood’s 2023 driving permit suspension. According to Wood, the settlement did not award him any financial compensation or cover attorney’s fees because of regulations regarding lawsuits targeting federal government institutions.
When asked how he was feeling about the settlement by Fire Island News, Wood said: “I’m feeling great about it, that somebody finally did something like this and it worked.” Wood also said via a press release that the settlement: “ensures that Romero will follow a proper process for revoking the permits of others going forward.” Now, because of the settlement, only driving permit violations adjudicated by the Central Violations Bureau in which the permit holder was found guilty or “agreed to pay a fine to dispose of the violation” can be used to justify permit suspensions. This will be the case until such a time as the NPS creates regulations to change this new rule.
Wood alleges that this situation began when Romero illegally targeted him for political reasons. Wood alleged to Fire Island News last year that he was given three frivolous tickets because he was the largest donor to the defense fund of a ranger who had allegedly been wrongfully fired for enforcing anti-nudity laws in Fire Island Pines and Cherry Grove over the objections of Romero. These allegations, particularly the anti-nudity law enforcement angle of the story, attracted attention from regional and national media outlets including Newsday and the New York Post.
It should be noted that none of these allegations have necessarily been vindicated by the lawsuit settlement and are not mentioned in the settlement’s text. Still, Wood repeated his allegations when speaking with Fire Island News about the new settlement and made indirect reference to many of them in his press release about the settlement as well.
Regardless, the three tickets Wood received were used as justification to suspend his essential services driving permit forcing his business to carry out Kismet’s trash pickup and removal via wagon for an entire month. Wood also emphasized that two of the tickets were thrown out and that the third one was given for delivering groceries and cat food to his family in his commercial vehicle at the height of the pandemic. “This cat food ticket will eventually be in the paper and that’s what it is,” he said remembering his thinking at the time of the ticketing incident.
Wood also attacked Romero’s leadership and accused him of “abusing his authority by enforcing arbitrary rules in an inconsistent and retaliatory manner” in the press release about the settlement. Fire Island News reached out to Romero for comment about the settlement but he simply referred us to the media contact for the case at the Department of Justice, John Marzulli. Marzulli in turn declined to comment.
Even though this lawsuit is now settled, Wood says he is “still gonna hold (Romero and FINS) accountable. We’re just gonna focus on keeping track of what they do and how they do it.” Wood also mentioned that he is seriously considering filing a second lawsuit against the NPS over numerous unanswered Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed over the last year. So, this settlement may not be the true end of Wood’s legal disputes with the NPS.
