Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a dozen Colorado local governments and a group of high-ranking congressional Democrats are among the parties urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold a lower court decision vacating the approval of a controversial oil-by-rail project in eastern Utah.
Colorado’s Eagle County and five environmental groups have sued to block the 88-mile Uinta Basin Railway, a multibillion-dollar proposal to connect Utah’s largest oil field to the national rail network. The plaintiffs alleged that federal regulators conducted an insufficient review of the project’s environmental risks, and in a ruling last year the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed, finding that the railway’s approval contained “numerous” and “significant” violations of federal law.
The decision remanded the case back to the federal Surface Transportation Board for a fuller analysis of the project’s risks. But the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a group of Utah county governments backing the rail project, instead appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court and have asked it to impose strict limits on what kinds of risks can be studied in the reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act.
In an amicus, or friend-of-the-court, brief filed on behalf of the state of Colorado and a dozen other state governments, Weiser wrote that the petitioners’ interpretation of NEPA’s requirements “would allow federal agencies to turn a blind eye” to environmental harms caused by projects like the Uinta Basin Railway.
At an estimated capacity of up to 350,000 barrels of oil per day, the Uinta Basin Railway would rank among the largest sustained efforts to transport oil by rail ever undertaken in the U.S., singlehandedly more than doubling the nationwide total in 2022, and causing a tenfold increase in hazmat rail traffic through environmentally sensitive and densely populated areas in Colorado.
“The risk of harm to our state and mountain communities and others affected by this rail line is simply too great to ignore,” Weiser said in a press release Friday. “The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals was correct to throw out this project’s approval for not having fully grasped the magnitude of its impacts to the environment. The Supreme Court should apply the letter of our federal laws and uphold the appellate court’s decision.”
A group of Colorado local governments led by Glenwood Springs, Grand Junction and Grand County also filed a brief in support of Eagle County’s position, writing that the law clearly required the STB “to alert western Colorado communities to the foreseeable effects of its decision coming down the line.”
“The (STB’s) failure to adequately analyze these indisputably foreseeable impacts is a run-of-the-mill violation of NEPA,” the local governments’ brief states.
Other briefs in support of Eagle County were filed by a group of 30 congressional Democrats led by U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona and Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts; a group of former members of the Council on Environmental Quality; and a group of former senior federal officials led by former U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell.
More than a dozen parties — including the State of Utah, the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Association of American Railroads — have filed amicus briefs in support of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition’s argument. Also among them is a brief filed by Anschutz Exploration Corporation, the oil and gas company owned by conservative Colorado billionaire Phil Anschutz, whose ties to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch have repeatedly come under scrutiny. Gorsuch is part of the court’s 6-3 conservative majority.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse of Lafayette and a long list of state and local elected officials expressed support for Eagle County’s case in a press release Friday.
“Anyone who has spent time along the Colorado River understands what the risks really are for our environment, our local economies, and our state,” Bennet said in a statement.
“This train has no business increasing the transport of hazardous oil from Utah through our state, and I’ll continue to stand with a broad coalition of local leaders and community members to oppose this dangerous project,” he continued. “I hope the Supreme Court seriously considers Eagle County’s arguments, the concerns raised by Colorado’s Attorney General and numerous local governments in their amicus briefs, and the implications for those most deeply affected by a potential derailment in the headwaters of the Colorado River.”
Oral arguments in the case, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, are scheduled to be heard on Dec. 10.
This story first appeared at Colorado Newsline. Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization. Colorado Newsline is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, independent source of online news.