A broad coalition of energy, mining, ranching and farming groups are challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s sweeping new public lands rule.
The lawsuit filed Friday focuses, among other things, on the rule’s establishment of a mitigation and restoration leasing system that is “flatly inconsistent” with federal statutes governing BLM management of public lands, according to the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming.
BLM has said the leases are meant to be purchased by state and local government agencies, conservation groups and nonprofit groups for up to 10 years to restore degraded rangelands. They are also designed to be used by energy developers and mining companies as part of mitigation to offset project impacts on other lands.
But the lawsuit says the rule violates the Federal Land Policy and Management Act — the 1976 law that governs how BLM manages the 245 million acres under its care — by altering it from “a statute for managing the productive use of lands into one of non-use, prioritizing conservation values above, and to the exclusion of, the exclusively productive activities that FLPMA has governed for nearly half a century.”
