The environmental groups in 2020 sued a private company behind a logging project in the Gualala River watershed in Northern California, claiming it was harming endangered species.
By Michael Gennaro, Courthouse News Service
A logging project in Northern California continues to threaten endangered species in the Gualala River watershed, environmental groups told a Ninth Circuit panel on Friday.
A lower federal court erred when it threw out a 2020 lawsuit over the project from the Center for Biological Diversity, those groups further argued.
The underlying case dates back to 2016, when Friends of Gualala River sued Cal Fire in state court, claiming the agency did not adequately review environmental impacts related to a logging project by the company Gualala Redwood Timber.
The issue was settled in state court after California’s First Appellate District sided with a Sonoma County trial court’s decision to greenlight the project in February 2021. That came after multiple revisions to the project, which ultimately narrowed its range from 402 to 342 acres.
Meanwhile, FOGR joined with the Center for Biological Diversity in 2020 to launch a fresh legal challenge against the project in federal court in San Francisco.
This time, conservationists directly sued Gualala Redwood Timber. They claimed the company’s tree harvesting plan would threaten four endangered species: the California red-legged frog, the northern spotted owl, the Central California Coast Coho salmon and the Northern California steelhead.
U.S. District Judge James Donato, a Barack Obama appointee, threw out that lawsuit in 2021. In his decision, he said he was “extremely concerned about a United States District Court becoming effectively a court of appeals for decisions that one side or the other doesn’t like at the state level.”
At the Ninth Circuit Friday morning, Stuart Gross, counsel for the environmental groups, argued the case is about basic due process. The Center for Biological Diversity was not a party to the state action, he said, and Donato therefore erred by blocking its suit in federal court.
“Can the Center for Biological Diversity lose forever its right to bring a de novo Endangered Species Act claim in federal court based solely on a finding that it shares the same interests as another party — and that party lost a state administrative law proceeding in state court?” Gross said.
But U.S. Circuit Judge Salvador Mendoza Jr., a Joe Biden appointee, pushed back on this legal argument.
“Weren’t you identifying the same injury and seeking the same relief?” he asked.
Gross replied that because the state court proceedings were against Cal Fire — not Gualala Redwood Timber — the two cases sought different relief.
“The relief that was sought in this case was very straightforward: It was to prevent the take of species that were listed as threatened and that were listed as endangered,” Gross said. “That is a different right and is a different duty of a different defendant.”
Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Carlos Bea, a George W. Bush appointee, asked how there could still be any harm if the trees have already been cut down. He openly wondered if the case was moot.
“As we allege in the complaint, the effect of those removals of the trees is ongoing and continuing,” Gross said. He specified that the removal of cut trees was further harassing and modifying the habitat of protected species.
But Navi Dhillon, counsel for Gualala Redwood Timber, seized on the Ninth Circuit’s skepticism — arguing “the federal case and the state case involve the same injury, the same relief, the same species, the same parties.”
Dhillon also said a similar case was already dismissed in 2022, after the judge in that case visited the Gualala River watershed.
“Those two cases are indistinguishable,” Dhillon said. “There have been promises that until our client chooses to sell this private land, we can expect further lawsuits. And there’s been many of them, which is why we’ve been fighting so hard about res judicata,”
The panel took the matter under submission. Bea and Mendoza were joined by Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Jay Bybee, a George W. Bush appointee.
