The Supreme Court on Monday seemed unwilling to block a planned natural gas pipeline that will run from West Virginia under the Appalachian Trail to the Eastern Seaboard.
The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a federal agency did not have the authority to issue a special-use permit for pipeline construction under the Appalachian Trail. The government and energy companies responsible for the project warn that the ruling effectively turns the trail into a barrier that walls off the East Coast from resource-rich lands in the interior of the country. The legal question in Monday's case is highly technical, asking which agency is in charge of the trail. The U.S. Forest Service issued a special-use permit to construct the pipeline under the trail pursuant to its jurisdiction over the GWNF.
The Fourth Circuit said that permit is invalid, citing a 1968 law that gives the National Park Service (NPS) administrative authority over the trail. Pipelines cannot be built across national parklands without an act of Congress.
Now before the High Court, the Trump administration and the energy companies say the 1968 law did not transform the entire trail—which runs from Maine to Georgia across federal, state, and private property—into national parklands. The trail, they say, is merely a right-of-way across lands owned by different parties. Paul Clement, a lawyer representing the energy companies, told the justices that the NPS also administers a trail in Alabama commemorating a 1965 voting rights march called the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail. If the Fourth Circuit decision is right, Clement said, then parts of both cities are actually in the national park system.
"If that trail is [considered] land in the Park Service because we just can't get our head around the idea that trails are different from land, then parts of downtown Selma [and] downtown Montgomery are lands of the National Park Service," Clement said...
MORE
No comments:
Post a Comment