Monroe County Board of Commissioners v. U.S. Forest Service

The federal district court for the Southern District of Indiana ruled for a third time that the U.S. Forest Service failed to take a hard look at the environmental impacts of the Houston South Vegetation Management and Restoration Project in Hoosier National Forest. The court found that the agency failed to adequately consider water quality impacts to the adjacent Lake Monroe, which serves as the sole source of drinking water for more than 145,000 people. The court’s decision did not address the complaint’s allegations regarding failures to address impacts on old-growth forest. The court enjoined the project pending briefing on the appropriate remedy.

The Monroe County Board of Commissioners and three environmental organizations filed a third lawsuit challenging the U.S. Forest Service’s Houston South Vegetation Management and Restoration Project, which the plaintiffs alleged would entail “thousands of acres of commercial logging, road building and trail improvements, herbicide application, and prescribed burning over the next 15-20 years in the Hoosier National Forest” in the Lake Monroe watershed. The federal district court for the Southern District of Indiana concluded in both of the earlier cases (filed in <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/case/monroe-county-board-of-commissioners-v-us-forest-service/">2020</a> and <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/case/monroe-county-board-of-commissioners-v-us-forest-service-2/">2023</a>) that the Forest Service failed to take a hard look at the project’s environmental consequences. In this third challenge, the plaintiffs again asserted that the Forest Service violated NEPA and the Administrative Procedure Act, including by using an “inapplicable” definition of “old-growth” to avoid the need for compliance with President Biden’s Executive Order 14,072, which required identification of old-growth and mature forests on federal lands and analysis of threats to their existence. The plaintiffs alleged that the reliance on the inapplicable definition resulted in an arbitrary predetermination of the outcome of the Forest Service’s analysis.