Judge sides with environmentalists on timber project in Pend Oreille County

A long-term timber project in northeast Washington is on hold after a federal judge sided with environmentalists who sued to block the project.

In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Rebecca L. Pennell wrote that the U.S. Forest Service’s maps of commercial logging involved in the Sxwutn-Kaniksu Connections Trail Project were “too vague to ensure a hard look at the impact of harvesting,” and therefore violated the National Environmental Policy Act.

The ruling delivered a win for Alliance for the Wild Rockies, which sued over the project in May 2024.

Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance, cheered the ruling in a news release, characterizing the vague maps as an attempt to hide the project’s impacts from the public.

“The information the Forest Service tried to hide included leaving burned and barren stump fields in its wake while destroying critical habitat for species listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, including lynx, wolverines and grizzly bears,” Garrity said.

Officials with the Colville National Forest did not respond to requests for comment before deadline Friday.

The trail project was approved by the Forest Service in 2021. It’s a 20-year project involving logging and burning across more than 36,000 acres in the Selkirk Mountains north of Newport.

As of last May, the Forest Service had offered three timber sales that were part of the contract.

Attorneys for both sides filed dueling motions for summary judgment. Oral arguments on those motions were held in Spokane in May.

The ruling this week grants parts of both motions. Pennell wrote that the court agreed with several arguments made by the Forest Service, including that it had adequately analyzed the impact of the project’s roadbuilding and the overall impacts on lynx. She also found that the project complied with the Colville National Forest’s forest plan.

But the agency’s project maps wound up sinking the entire project. Pennell wrote that the maps failed to identify the specific locations for commercial and noncommercial timber work.

The Forest Service was planning to use something called “conditions-based management,” according to the ruling. That would allow officials to delay final decisions about the type of work to be done in an area until they get into the field and see the conditions.

Forest Service projects have used that technique before, and federal courts have approved it. But Pennell wrote that in this case, it was going to be applied across a much broader area, and that the agency’s maps failed to show the “maximum effects of each treatment type” for all of the units covered by the project.

The ruling vacates the Forest Service’s approval of the project and sends it back for further review.