Idaho logging projects hits new roadblock

(CN) — The Ninth Circuit on Thursday found an Idaho federal court got it wrong in ruling the Forest Service had properly decided a massive logging project in the Idaho Panhandle National Forest didn’t require environmental review.

“This court decision is one step in the right direction — government agencies must follow the law just like everyone else,” Alliance for the Wild Rockies Executive Director Mike Garrity said in a statement.

Environmental group Alliance for the Wild Rockies sued the Forest Service in 2019 after the authorization of the Hanna Flats Good Neighbor Authority project, which permitted extensive commercial logging and prescribed burning, temporary road construction and maintenance and excavated skid trail construction next to a recovery zone for the protected Selkirk grizzly bear.

In 2021, Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Ronald E. Bush found the Forest Service violated the Healthy Forests Restoration Act by excluding the project from an environmental assessment under the National Environmental Policy Act and blocked the project from proceeding. The federal government filed two appeals in response, and a Ninth Circuit panel reversed in 2023.

On remand, the lower court ruled in the Forest Service’s favor, finding the environmental group’s claims were barred under the administrative waiver doctrine. Also known as issue exhaustion, the doctrine prevents a party from challenging a federal agency action in court if the party had not raised its specific objections first during the agency’s administrative proceedings.

The Alliance for Wild Rockies appealed and the majority of a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit sided with the environmental group Thursday.

“In this case, the governing statute and regulations do not impose issue exhaustion,” wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Danielle Forrest, a Donald Trump appointee. Forrest was joined in the majority by U.S. Circuit Judge Jennifer Sung, a Joe Biden appointee.

While there is an administrative review process and issue exhaustion for most projects developed under the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, Congress specifically exempted “collaborative restoration projects,” Forrest noted.

The panel still considered whether to impose issue exhaustion to the agency’s scoping. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act requires scoping — soliciting feedback from the public on the scope and components of a project — for projects excluded from formal National Environmental Policy Act review, which requires notice-and-comment rulemaking.

Scoping doesn’t require publication in the Federal Register, compliance with specific procedural guardrails or that interested parties comment and the agency consider those comments.

The panel also considered whether the administrative process lacked an “adversarial component,” which could require issue exhaustion. Again, the majority concluded it did not.

“All sources suggest that scoping is informal and is used at a stage where the agency has not yet fully committed to a position. And the Forest Service’s support for a project is immaterial to whether the review process is adversarial when the process is statutorily described as ‘collaborative,’” Forrest wrote. “The Scoping Notice for the Hanna Flats Project and the letter sent to Alliance do not suggest anything different.”

The panel sent the case back to Idaho federal court, with instructions for the court to consider whether the Forest Service can establish that the categorical exclusion applies.

The Alliance for the Wild Rockies celebrated the court’s decision.

“This is a big win for endangered grizzly bears, but in addition to protecting the grizzly bears, this decision also protects the rights of the homeowners in this area — who strongly opposed massive clearcutting operations that would destroy the forest around their homes and trails, and lead to harmful sedimentation of waterways,” Garrity said.

However, U.S. Circuit Judge Ryan Nelson, a Trump appointee, disagreed with his colleagues in a 30-page dissent.

According to Nelson, the lower court properly sided with the Forest Service and the majority of the Ninth Circuit panel ignored every principle of administrative law to allow the environmental group to raise a new issue in a late stage.

“But the majority only reaches this conclusion by inventing its own ad hoc approach,” Nelson wrote. “The novel approach announced today rejects administrative waiver primarily by grafting adjudicatory rules into informal rulemaking.”

This is not the only challenge to the Hanna Flats project the Alliance for Wild Rockies has raised.

The environmental group sued the agency again in 2021, accusing the agency of violating a forest plan restricting motorized access management within grizzly recovery zones and violating multiple federal environmental laws through its approval of the project. U.S. Magistrate Judge Raymond Patricco ruled largely in the environmental group’s favor in 2025, blocking the project until the agency complied with the law, and a separate appeal is pending before the Ninth Circuit

Neither the Alliance for Wild Rockies nor the federal government responded to a request for comment before press time.