Albany County Conservancy complaint against the Bureau of Land Management

1. This case challenges the Bureau of Land Management’s (“BLM’s”) authorization of a right of way (“ROW”) to construct, operate, maintain, and eventually decommission a proposed electric transmission line (“Rock Creek Line” or “Project”) on BLM-administered public lands in Albany and Carbon counties, Wyoming. In support of its authorization, BLM prepared an Environmental Assessment (“EA”) pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”), 42 U.S.C. §§ 4321-4347, which finds that no significant environmental effects are likely to result from the Project. That EA, however, is fatally flawed for numerous reasons. As a result, BLM’s Finding of No Significant Impact (“FONSI”) and Decision Record effectuating the challenged ROW are arbitrary and capricious, and undertaken without the procedure required by law.

2. At its core, NEPA endeavors to foster environmentally conscious decisionmaking. It does this in large part by encouraging those who will be most affected by a particular federal decision to identify and inform federal officials about the likely impacts of their decision—effects that local stakeholders know and understand best. Here, however, BLM decided that those stakeholders’ views do not matter. BLM chose instead to conduct its review of the Project in secret—without any public notice or input whatsoever—despite explicit and repeated requests from the public to participate in the NEPA process.

3. The federal government’s decision to ignore the concerns and views of Wyoming residents who will bear the action’s impacts unsurprisingly renders its analysis deficient. Even though the Project is explicitly meant to connect to the grid only one industrial-scale wind farm comprised of more than 100 turbines (the Rock Creek Wind Facility), BLM evaded any consideration of how that facility will impact the local environment and economy by alleging— without any explanation or support—that the Project could be built elsewhere. This is concerning because the Rock Creek Wind Facility is just one of many large-scale, commercial wind farms the federal government has foisted on Albany and Carbon County residents without even attempting to examine the magnitude of harm that such an unprecedented concentration of turbines will have on Wyoming in either the short or long term.

4. At the very minimum, BLM’s decisions here merit careful scrutiny by federal officials in an Environmental Impact Statement (“EIS”) that considers and incorporates the views of those local stakeholders who will bear the brunt of federal energy policy for decades to come. By instead relying on a mere EA that does none of these things, BLM’s Decision Record flouts the basic purposes of NEPA and the agency’s own guidance implementing the Act.

5. For these reasons, and those alleged below, BLM’s authorization of the Rock Creek Line violates NEPA, the policies and regulations implementing NEPA, and the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”), 5 U.S.C. § 706. The decisions challenged here must be set aside.