Category: Environment

Categories
Environment Government Legal, Laws, and Regs

Sackett vs EPA

I received a CD with Administrative Record documents I requested via FOIA from the EPA. These documents were submitted by the EPA based on a request from the Sacketts in the Sackett et al vs. Johnson et al court case, otherwise known as the Sackett vs. the EPA. This case received a very narrow decision in the Supreme Court last year. I’ve retrieved most of the PACER court documents and am planning on posting these this week.

Thankfully, the Administrative Record documents came with a spreadsheet index, which I converted to a basic HTML table (Sacketts vs. the EPA Administrative Record Documents). Much simpler to post online when you don’t have to individually link the large titled PDFs.

An interesting thing about the Administrative Record documents is the photos. I’m not a geologist, but I found the photos of the Sacketts’ lot to be rather convincing that yes, they were filling in a wetlands. In addition, the Sacketts’ neighbors were the ones to file a complaint because, evidently, the work the Sacketts were doing was causing water to back up into the neighbor’s place.

The Sacketts claimed ignorance of the need to see if they required a Clear Water Act permit before filling in their property. I find this less than credible when you consider that the Sacketts run an excavation and construction business. In addition, there’s also the fact that the previous owners were aware the land was designated a wetlands.

Interesting what you can find with a simple FOIA request. Which, by the way, the EPA responded to quickly and efficiently.

I’ll have more on this case at a different web site (since this one is about document access) when I have all the pieces (and I have the extra time). In the mean time, feel free to explore the Admin Record documents, and the court documents later in the week. You can definitely find out more about the case just by searching on “Sackett vs EPA” online.

Categories
Critters Documents

Have Trunk Will Travel Captive Bred Wildlife Permit

I made a request to Fish & Wildlife for a copy of the Have Trunk Will Travel CBW permit.

Access the supplied documents, including material from past requests, too.

The US Fish & Wildlife Service is responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act. As part of this Act, an individual or organization that wants to use captive bred endangered species must apply for a CBW permit.

The Service provides a fact sheet that goes into more details on the ESA and the permit process. One aspect of it is that public notice has to be made of the permit application, and people must be allowed to comment on the permit.

Our management of wildlife in this country is more than a little fractured. For instance, Fish & Wildlife enforces the Endangered Species Act, but delegates the welfare of captive bred wildlife to the USDA via the Animal Welfare Act (AWA). To make things more complicated, a citizen can file suit related to enforcement of the ESA, but not the AWA. So a citizen can comment on and sue about a circus elephant permit, but not necessarily how the elephant is treated in the circus.

Makes for interesting lawsuits.

Categories
Critters Documents

Feld vs PETA Motion to Compel

Publishing single court documents is easy: just incorporate a link into a post.

However, I wanted a better approach for those cases where I had several court documents. I decided to take a copy of the PACER docket, and then replace the links with those for a local document. People can then access the documents in context. For those documents I don’t have, I leave the links off. Most of the time the documents aren’t all that useful—a howdy doody to a new lawyer, an order allowing a schedule delay, and so on. Other times I felt the document wasn’t essential to understanding what was happening, or it was available in another case.

The first case I’ve ported to this online format is one of the cases associated with ASCPA et al vs. Feld Entertainment, Inc: Feld vs. PETA, where Feld was compelling compliance to a document subpoena. You can get a feel for the antagonism between the animal welfare groups and Feld’s lawyers from some of the filings. It only gets better with the primary case.

I followed the Motion to Compel case in order to get a more comprehensive view of the overall set of cases (yes cases). I also had a suspicion about why Feld subpoenaed PETA. It seemed to me that Feld’s lawyers were fishing for anything that, no matter how thinly, Feld could use to pull PETA into the Feld vs. ASPCA et al RICO (Racketeering) case. If so, they didn’t find it.

Access the local docket page for 08-mc-00004

The ASPCA et al vs. Feld document docket page is going to be a long time coming. It has over 620 docket entries, with over a 1000 document links. It’s going to take some time to prepare.

Categories
Environment Government

EPA’s report on Keystone XL Pipeline

Today the EPA released a comment on the State Department’s draft report on the Keystone XL Pipeline. The conclusion states:

Based on our review, we have rated the DSEIS as E0-2 (“Environmental Objections-Insufficient Information”) (see enclosed “Summary of Rating Defmitions and Follow-up Actions”).

Environmental Objections is defined as:

The EPA reyiew has identified significant environmental impacts that must be avoided in order to provide adequate protection for the environment. Corrective measures may require substantial changes to the preferred alternative or consideration of some other project alternative (including the no action alternative or a new alternative). EPA intends to work with the lead agency to reduce these impacts.

The Category 2 insufficiency is further identified as:

The draft EIS does not contain sufficient information for EPA to fully assess environmental impacts that should be avoided in order to fully protect the environment, or the EPA reviewer has identified new reasonably available alternative that are within tbe spectrum of alternatives analyzed in the draft EIS, which could reduce the environmental impacts ofthe action. The identified additional information, data, analyses, or discussion should be included in the final EIS,

This all translates to, “Busted!”

Access the report directly.

Categories
Critters Documents Legal, Laws, and Regs

The Dollarhite Rabbitry FOIA Results

A few years back I came across an article about the Dollarhites in Missouri and their little bunny business. According to the article, the Dollarhites only started raising bunnies to teach their son responsibility. It was, at most, a small, casual business.

In 2011, the Dollarhites were outraged to receive a notice of violation from the USDA, with a fine of $90,643. There was a lot of huffing and puffing about government overreach in the article, but I had enough experience with the USDA APHIS to know there had to be more to the story than was being told. I decided to file a FOIA request for all documents related to the case.

The USDA informed me that the investigation was still ongoing and they couldn’t provide me most of the documentation. They did, however, provide me a few documents, one of which I had already discovered for myself: that the Wayback machine had archives of the Dollarhite bunny selling operation as far back as 2006, not 2008, as the Dollarhites claimed.

Eventually the Dollarhites got Missouri politicians, including Claire McCaskill, to intervene on their behalf—something I wish politicians would not do, because this just leads to inconsistent applications of the law (a law created by Congress, I want to note). Especially when a little research on McCaskill’s part would have demonstrated other interesting documents associated with the case:

  • Rather than a casual operation, the Dollarhites were selling bunnies to a petting zoo in Branson, as well as a pet store. In one year, they sold over 4000.
  • An early investigative report notes Dollarhite was aware of AWA licensing, and gave the investigator the impression he was going to continue breeding and selling pet rabbits without a license (doc)
  • An investigator noted Dollarhite’s seeming hostility to regulation, as well as her safety concerns (doc)
  • An internal USDA memo expressing concern about enforcement in the case, considering the circumstances, in this case, most likely the publicity and Congressional interference (doc)
  • Another frank, interesting look at the USDA’s view of discussions with Dollarhite’s attorney, who seemed to be less than aware of how the government operates (doc)
  • A disturbing note sent by Dollarhite to the USDA (doc)
  • A very disturbing note sent to the USDA with an implicit threat (doc)

Among all of the more colorful documents are investigative reports, documented proof, as well as several settlement offers extended to Dollarhite that would have let him off without a fine as long as he agreed to stop selling bunnies as pets without a license—something Dollarhite didn’t note as frequently as he noted that $90,000 fine.

When the Dollarhites settled with the USDA, the USDA was free to fulfill my FOIA request, and I’m listing the documents here for others to access.

As I said earlier: there’s always more to these stories than what you see on the surface. Thankfully, the FOIA allows us to discover the missing pieces.

I wrote three articles on the Dollarhites:

John Dollarhite and his $90,000 fine

The Dollarhite Saga

Dollarhites: A saga that should end

Access a listing of the Dollarhite FOIA documents, individually, or as one document.