Pintler commercial timber sales can continue, noncommercial work must stop, judge says

Bonner Industrial Park in 2019. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Commercial timber sales that are part of the Pintler Face Project in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest can continue, but all non-commercial activities must stop for the time being, a federal judge ruled Friday.

Deer Lodge and Powell County are “timber dependent communities,” said U.S. District Court Judge Dana Christensen in the order. As such, the order said moving ahead with the commercial sales avoids layoffs at Iron Pine Co. and supports mill operations at Sun Mountain Lumber, the largest private employer in the area.

The project is on 73,624 acres in the Anaconda-Pintler Mountains, and it includes commercial thinning and clearcutting, along with non-commercial thinning, understory burn, and cutting and burning grasses and shrubs.

Although the judge greenlighted the commercial work, mostly already underway, the order also said government agencies need to follow the law, and the non-commercial work must stop for now. That’s because conservation groups raised “serious questions” about whether the U.S. Forest Service violated the National Environmental Protection Act.

Alliance for the Wild Rockies

Alliance for the Wild Rockies’ Michael Garrity said the following:

“I am happy that the government will be held accountable for violating the law and happy that over 7,000 acres of lynx habitat in the Pintler Face project area will be protected while the case is decided.

“The decision will also impact and require additional analysis on any other timber sales planned on this forest which will protect a lot more habitat for lynx.

In the lawsuit filed in February 2024, conservation groups Yellowstone to Uintas Connection, Native Ecosystems Council, and Alliance for the Wild Rockies allege the U.S. Forest Service illegally failed to prepare an environmental analysis as it proposed the elimination of 1.1 million acres of lynx habitat after a forest remapping in 2020.

The 1.1 million acres lost represent a 60% decrease in mapped lynx habitat, the order said. Canada lynx are a threatened species.

The conservation groups also allege the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service isn’t using the best science for cumulative effects on grizzly bears.

The federal government argued the conservation groups should have raised their concerns earlier and in the administrative process. The conservation groups, however, said they received the new maps too late and weren’t given the chance to do so.

Private companies Sun Mountain Lumber and Iron Pine, along with Powell and Anaconda-Deer Lodge counties, also joined the lawsuit, arguing a stop to the work would economically devastate them.

One of the four sales is already complete and closed in January 2024, the order said. Two are nearly 30% complete, and one is set to start in November.

“All project activities are currently suspended and set to restart July 16, 2024, following the close of spring bear season,” the order said.

In the order, the judge denied the government’s request to dismiss the case. He partly granted and partly dismissed the conservation groups’ request to halt the Pintler Face Project, made up of commercial sales and noncommercial “treatment.”

Pointing to testimony from the company owner, Christensen said stopping the planned sales this late in the game would force Iron Pine Co., awarded two of the four sales, to immediately lay off half its staff and possibly close altogether.

“Pyramid Mountain Lumber in Seeley Lake and Roseburg Forest Products in Missoula announced closures this year, causing Iron Pine a significant loss,” the order said.

It also would hurt Sun Mountain, which already made “significant investments” in the other two sales, including more than $170,000 in bid guarantees and $280,000 in road improvements, the judge said.

“Because dead and dying timber loses its commercial value rapidly, even a short-term injunction would jeopardize the local economy,” the judge said.

However, the judge said the noncommercial work doesn’t have the same effect on the local economy, and the plaintiffs “raised serious questions” on the merits of the case and “established a likelihood of irreparable injury.”

Quoting other cases, the order said “the preservation of our environment, as required by NEPA and the NFMA (National Forest Management Act), is clearly in the public interest,” and “ensuring that government agencies comply with the law is a public interest of the highest order.”

Other courts previously have found the Forest Service violated NEPA when the agency didn’t “take a hard look” at environmental effects of changes that affect mapped lynx habitat, the order said.

Although the government argued the conservation groups had at least five separate opportunities to make their objections, the judge found they didn’t have all the pertinent information to weigh in.

The conservation groups said they only received the remapped document in July 2021, one year after the decision in 2020. They argued other analyses had taken place before the 2020 remapping as well.

“However robust this chronology of public outreach may have been, there is one glaring issue: All the opportunities to comment preceded the 2020 remapping decision at the crux of claims one and two (NEPA violation allegations),” the order said.

“Plaintiffs — specifically Yellowstone to Uintas — cannot be expected to comment on an issue that the Forest Service has not disclosed to the public.”

In the order, the judge said the Forest Service started taking another look at impacts to grizzly bear habitat in April 2024 in response to the lawsuit and other opinions from the Montana District Court.

The government also argued the conservation groups waited too long to file their lawsuit, 19 months after operations began on the project, and then tried to argue that stopping it was an emergency.

The conservation groups, on the other hand, said environmental lawyers who win difficult federal cases aren’t easy to come by, so they were forced to wait.

The judge said the court “would be remiss to overlook the significant delay” in filing the lawsuit, but it was only part of the equation.

“While the court is sympathetic to the difficulties associated with balancing a large caseload, these difficulties do not negate the impression that if the need for a preliminary injunction had been deemed essential prior to implementation of the project, counsel would have made time,” the order said.

“Delay alone, however, is not enough to deny plaintiffs’ motion.”

A decision on the noncommercial work will be made on the merits.

Quoting from a separate case, the order said NEPA doesn’t mandate a certain or specific environmental result, but it does require people have all the necessary information:

It “guarantees that the relevant information will be made available to the larger audience that may also play a role in both the decision[-]making process and the implementation of that decision,” the order said.

Noncommercial work

The order described noncommercial work of the Pintler Face Project as 564 acres of noncommercial thinning, 293 acres of understory burn, 559 acres of noncommercial cutting and burning of grasses, 3,099 acres of noncommercial cut and burn of shrubs, and 1,718 acres of noncommercial cut and burn in riparian areas. That work is temporarily stopped until the court reaches a decision on the merits of the case.

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