John Sweeney Files New Point Buckler Island Lawsuits
It’s just like kiteboarding. He’s up. No, he’s down. He’s back up. The long story of Bay Area sailor John Sweeney’s legal battle with state and federal regulatory agencies over his ownership and management of Point Buckler Island has been a decade-long knock-down, drag-out battle. It started when the BCDC and the California Regional Water Quality Control Board filed a suit against Sweeney in 2014 about Point Buckler Island in the Delta, which Sweeney bought in 2011. Sweeney filed a countersuit in 2016. He was arrested last January, and the island was sold at auction to the John Muir Land Trust. Now, almost 10 years after it all began, Sweeney is again back on the offensive.
There have been very few uplifting moments over the past several years, but with the help of AI, both Grok and ChatGPT, Sweeney has managed to get the case accepted in the Ninth Circuit court as US v. Sweeney, No. 25-2498. Sweeney spent several months pouring all the materials collected over 10 years of lawsuits into AI, and came up with a lawsuit that has gained some traction and support.
Sweeney is asking the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a federal judge’s finding that he and Point Buckler Club LLC violated the Clean Water Act at Point Buckler Island in the Suisun Marsh, and that Point Buckler Island is, in fact, an island and should never have been classified as wetlands.
His case is helped by a US Supreme Court 2023 decision in the Sackett case, narrowing which wetlands fall under federal Clean Water Act jurisdiction. The narrowed definition affects much of the broad, wet Delta cruising area dotted with islands, levees and marsh. There are many places in the Delta where cruisers anchor and tie up to the shore, reminding us there’s a place where Delta wetlands become Delta islands. Sweeney says the government and the district court treated his dry land as regulated wetlands.
The dispute is partly about the definition of Point Buckler as an island or as wetlands, and also, Sweeney’s repair of dikes. As Sweeney describes it, the island’s interior had been elevated, diked and dry for ages. He was driving equipment on the island to repair the levees, which presumably wouldn’t be possible in marshlands. The lawsuit says that in violation of federal permitting duties, the Army Corps failed to process and ultimately concealed Sweeney’s 2015 permit application for more than a decade.
In a sign of support, the Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit public-interest law firm, has now filed an amicus brief (meaning a “friend of the court”) on December 1, 2025, urging reversal and saying the district court failed to analyze whether Point Buckler’s tidal channels are “relatively permanent waters,” and whether the island’s wetlands are actually “indistinguishable” from those channels.
Meanwhile, for now, the island itself has new owners. As we reported earlier, the John Muir Land Trust bought the property at a Solano County sheriff’s office auction with a $3.8 million credit bid in January 2025, with restoration framed as the next chapter for the site.
Many people might have given up after losing the court case, and with their former island sold. However, Sweeney is tenacious, and beyond trying to reestablish ownership of his island, he also has a separate lawsuit alleging that the state and federal government have been fraudulently classifying wetlands, falsifying maps, and seizing lands improperly. In the suit, he is going after scientists who helped create the alleged fraudulent maps. And in another lawsuit, Sweeney v. Solano County, he alleges they did not have the legal right to auction off the property, and the auction was rigged in advance.
This is all a long way from his days of sailing in the America’s Cup, organizing racing on the Bay, or when he and his wife Jennifer Frost sailed south with the Baja Ha-Ha on their Chance 55, Glory.
As this has been going on for over 10 years, we’re not expecting clarity any time soon. However, the case continues in the Ninth Circuit, and there’s a chance a decision will come sometime in 2026. With a lot of environmental law currently in flux, the court ruling could have wide-ranging implications, far beyond Sweeney’s (John Muir Trust’s?) 50-acre island in the Delta.
This is all happening just a couple of miles north of Port Chicago on Suisun Bay. It’s hard to imagine such drama as you head up the Delta for your relaxing summer cruise, but as we know from the Delta tunnel controversy and many environmental rulings, the water we relax on is also a source of tension.
Time will tell. At some point, the courts will rule again on whether Point Buckler Island is an island or a wetland, and if the many agencies, government officials and scientists have been following the law or have participated in bureaucratic overreach, and ultimately, fraud. The result could have far-reaching impact.