A federal judge has ordered $265,000 in attorney fees to be paid to an environmental group that successfully challenged several aspects of a 31,470-acre forest project in Oregon.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management approved the N126 Project in 2020, aiming to improve forest structure complexity in “single-story timber plantations” in the Coast Range west of Eugene, Oregon, through logging, thinning, and fuel reduction efforts.
Cascadia Wildlands, a nonprofit organization, filed a federal lawsuit against the BLM in 2022, arguing that the project allowed logging in older forests that should remain protected, in violation of environmental and land management laws.
Last year, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled in favor of the environmental group, finding that the BLM failed to properly analyze how road construction sediment could affect stream health and marbled murrelets. The judge also determined the agency did not sufficiently evaluate the project’s cumulative impacts on aquatic species and spotted owls.
Following that ruling, the BLM reached an agreement with Cascadia Wildlands that permitted certain timber sales while halting others as the agency revisited its environmental review of the project to address the legal violations identified by the judge.
However, the BLM opposed paying the $265,991 in attorney fees requested by the nonprofit under the Equal Access to Justice Act, which provides compensation to parties who prevail in litigation against the federal government under specific conditions.
The agency argued that Cascadia Wildlands did not succeed on all of its claims and maintained that the government’s stance on the remaining issues was “substantially justified,” but the judge rejected these arguments.
She noted that while the BLM accurately calculated the amount of sediment released into streams from road construction, it failed to adequately explain the impacts on stream health and aquatic species.
The judge also found that the BLM was not substantially justified in its “failure to analyze cumulative impacts,” or to “provide a convincing statement of reasons” explaining why the project would not significantly affect marbled murrelets.
“In sum, BLM’s positions as to the three claims it lost were not substantially justified because those positions had no reasonable basis in law or in fact,” she said.
The judge also declined to reduce the award by 50%, as requested by the BLM, which argued that such a cut was justified because Cascadia Wildlands had “achieved only limited success, obtaining just a fraction of the relief it sought in its complaint.”
Although the settlement between the nonprofit and the government allowed 16 timber sales to move forward, the agreement ultimately reduced commercial logging within the project area by about 75%, the judge said.
“The Court is satisfied that Plaintiff obtained significant relief and declines to reduce the fee award on the ground that Plaintiff chose to enter into a Stipulated Remedy allowing BLM to proceed with ‘largely unobjectionable’ commercial logging while protecting high-priority, old growth forest,” she said.
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