(CN) — The Bureau of Land Management failed to consider up-to-date air quality data and ignored wilderness designated areas when it approved oil and gas leases on 58,573 acres of public land in 2018, a federal judge in Colorado ruled Tuesday.
Instead of developing a new environmental assessment for the proposal, the federal agency attempted to use an environmental assessment developed in 2017 for an earlier auction.
"The findings in the 2017 EA are sometimes difficult to square with other evidence in the record,” Senior U.S. District Judge Marcia Krieger wrote in a 20-page opinion.
Four environmental groups led by Rocky Mountain Wild sued the federal government in September 2018, calling the recycled assessment arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act and a violation of the National Environmental Protection Act.
Rocky Mountain Wild led another lawsuit in 2019 over subsequent leases.
The leases at issue include land in the Dinosaur National Monument, which spans the border of Utah and Colorado and was established in 1915. Visitors can still view 1,500 fossils exposed on the cliff face inside the Quarry Exhibit Hall.
The environmental groups argued that the earlier assessment failed to take into account newer, more accurate air quality data from monitors updated in late 2017. In low development scenarios, the air pollution models predicted western Colorado would experience air exceeding National Ambient Air Quality Standards for ozone through 2025.
The federal agency countered that it intended to calculate air quality issues during the permitting phase, after the land was leased.
“Even assuming (without necessarily finding) that the Bureau of Land Management is not required to undertake extensive particularized air pollutant analyses until lessees actually seek drilling permits, the BLM may not simply ignore evidence of reasonably foreseeable environmental effects that is available to it at the time it makes its decisions,” wrote Krieger, a George W. Bush appointee.
The environmental groups also condemned the environmental assessment for failing to reflect the 2018 parcels which were “previously identified as having wilderness characteristics.”
The court noted that the federal government isn’t required to protect all wilderness areas but that it must acknowledge them in order to assess which areas to prioritize.
"It may be that, upon further evaluation, the wilderness character in the identified lands is not so significant that it outweighs the reasons why the Bureau of Land Management selected those particular parcels for leasing in the first place. But the National Environmental Protection Act requires the Bureau of Land Management to at least consider that question,” Krieger wrote. “Because it has not done so, the 2018 leasing decision as to those parcels in the Little Snake Field Office violated NEPA."
The judge remanded the case to the Bureau of Land Management, leaving the question of vacating or modifying existing leases to the agency.
The Bureau of Land Management did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For more follow Courthouse News and Amanda Pampuro on Twitter
Follow @bright_lamp
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
