A federal judge has dismissed a Bureau of Land Management off-highway vehicle plan for Southern California’s Mojave Desert that has been hounded for decades by lawsuits challenging the impacts to protected plants and wildlife.
Senior Judge Susan Illston in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued an order late Tuesday mostly siding with environmental groups that in 2021 filed a lawsuit over the latest version of the plan that covers a section of the California Desert Conservation Area.
Illston agreed that BLM and the Fish and Wildlife Service violated the Federal Land Policy and Management Act and parts of the Endangered Species Act by not including in the off-highway vehicle plan measures to “minimize” impacts to the threatened Mojave Desert tortoise and endangered Lane Mountain milk-vetch.
Illston, in siding with a coalition of environmental groups led by the Center for Biological Diversity, acknowledged “the complexity of the issues in this case.” She also wrote that the court “has no doubt that the agencies expended considerable effort” to get the latest version of the plan, approved in 2019, to balance recreation and conservation.
