Oral Arguments Heard in Roadless Appeal DENVER, CO (KUNC) - The nearly decade-long court battle over a road-building ban in national forests took its latest twists and turns in Denver yesterday. That's where the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the appeal of a lawsuit filed by the state of Wyoming that seeks to overturn the 2001 Clinton-era roadless ban.

That ban provided blanket protections for some 58 million acres of rugged, forest lands - including more than four million in Colorado.

But since 2001, the ban has gone through a half dozen court rulings and injunctions from Idaho to California that have either upheld, tossed out, reinstated, or generally put things in limbo.

Most recently in 2008, a federal judge in Wyoming issued an injunction throwing out the roadless rule, saying the Clinton Administration rammed it through in the late hour, overstepping Congress and establishing "de-facto" wilderness protections for millions of acres of forests.

"There was nothing backdoor about this at all," counters Jim Angell, an Earth Justice attorney who defended the Clinton rule and process leading up to it yesterday before the 10th Circuit.

Environmentalists joined by the current Obama Administration are appealing the Wyoming ruling.

"In fact there was more public involvement for the roadless rule than any regulation in the nation's history," Angell added, during an interview after the hearing.

During the roughly 45 minute proceeding, Angel and an attorney with the US Department of Agriculture also noted that two million people weighed in during a year-long comment period leading up to the ban. They tried to draw a clear line between the ban and actual wilderness protections.

Attorneys from the Colorado Mining Association and the state of Wyoming have spent years disputing such claims.

"It took one year to complete the national environmental policy act process which is, in the view of the state of Wyoming, remarkably insufficient for this kind of action by the federal government," said James Kaste, assistant attorney general of Wyoming.

The road building ban is no being enforced by the federal government, but Kaste says most development projects and proposed mine expansions in the region are on hold, if not in all out limbo.

"And I think we're likely to see, if the roadless rule ends up passing judicial review in this court, considerably less use allowed in the national forest, and certainly a lot less management by the Forest Service," he says.

But while the original ban barred new road building, there are some exceptions, such as for wildfire mitigation.

Jim Angell, the Denver-based Earth Justice attorney, says that's why it's too simplistic to liken roadless protections to those of full-blown wilderness designations - which take an act of Congress.

"And it didn't bar things like oil and gas, which often takes place without the building of roads by angling the drilling from elsewhere; it didn't apply to ORV use which can continue without any stop," Angell says.

A decision is expected by summer. But everyone knows that will hardly be the last ruling in the matter. Consider the neighboring 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California, which has upheld the Clinton roadless ban, reinstating it in that circuit, as well as New Mexico.
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