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Officials from the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians are suing the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management over its decision to greenlight two areas off the Oregon Coast for potential floating wind energy projects.

The southern Oregon tribe – which passed a resolution against floating offshore wind energy in those areas last November – filed its suit Friday in U.S. District Court in Eugene against the ocean energy bureau, accusing it of violating two federal laws meant to protect the environment and culturally significant areas. 

“The decision to file this legal action was not taken lightly,” Brad Kneaper, chair of the tribal council, said in a news release. “We would much rather work collaboratively with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to determine where the best places are to develop wind energy, minimizing the impacts to the coast and our people.”

The suit comes two weeks after federal officials announced they would hold an auction for companies interested in surveying and proposing floating offshore wind energy farms in two lease areas. One area, a 61,000-acre site, is located 30 miles off the coast of Coos Bay, while the other, spanning nearly 134,000 acres, is located 20 miles off the coast of Brookings. If fully developed, wind farms on the two sites could generate more than 3.1 gigawatts of renewable energy, enough to power 1 million homes, federal officials said. 

Tribal officials say the two proposed offshore areas are in the tribes’ ancestral territory and that the areas are home to fish and other marine species and have views of significant cultural, historic and economic significance to the tribe. 

Kneaper said in the release that the tribe is willing to withdraw the lawsuit if the October lease sale is delayed and the bureau commits to assessing the cumulative and future impacts of wind energy development not just along the Oregon Coast, but also across all development areas being auctioned off along the West Coast. 

“BOEM does not discuss pending litigation through the media,” John Romero, a spokesperson for the ocean energy bureau, said in an email. 

The lawsuit

In the suit, the tribe, represented by attorney Rick Eichstaedt of the Spokane-based law firm Rey-Bear McLaughlin, accused the ocean energy bureau of violating the federal National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, as well as the National Historic Preservation Act, which requires federal agencies to protect culturally significant sites. 

The tribe claims the agency failed in an environmental assessment to consider not just the current impacts of surveying and potentially developing the areas for wind energy, but also future impacts as well as the cumulative effect of wind power generation along the entire West Coast, not just off the coast of Oregon. 

The bureau has auctioned five areas off the California coast for floating wind energy projects. In July, it released an environmental assessment of the two Oregon lease areas, and said there would be no significant impact to people or the environment as companies survey, study and plan proposals. 

Any projects proposed by developers would need to go through another environmental impact analysis, and the public and interested parties would also be able to comment before it could be approved and built.

Kneaper said the July assessment ignored the cumulative and future impacts of wind development, and failed to identify alternative areas that did not have the same cultural and historic importance for the tribe and marine species.

“The tribe has consistently urged that BOEM delay moving forward with wind energy development until a better understanding is made of the impacts to fish, wildlife, the marine environment and cultural resources important to the tribe,” he said. “No one, including BOEM, has an understanding of how wind development will impact the fragile marine environment.”

Kneaper accused the bureau of being driven by politics and ignoring concerns among coastal residents. In November, Coos County residents will vote on a ballot initiative to oppose offshore wind development, and a coalition of independent fishing boat operators, seafood companies and industry groups have also asked Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek to intervene to stop floating offshore wind development from moving forward. 

Wider picture

Under Oregon’s climate change policies, the state needs to curb its greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century. The Climate Protection Program, which is currently being redone by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, has set a target of reducing emissions from fossil fuels in Oregon by 50% by 2035 and by 90% by 2050. 

Wind energy will be needed to help achieve those goals, officials say, and offshore wind is slated to be part of the solution. The Oregon Department of Energy’s latest energy report said the state needs about 20,000 megawatts of energy to come from offshore wind by 2050 to meet that target. 

The Biden administration also has wind energy plans. It is planning for up to a dozen offshore wind energy auctions through 2028, with the hope of developing a total of 30 gigawatts of wind energy – enough to power more than 10 million homes – on the East and West coasts to be deployed by 2030. The Oregon sites would account for about 10% of that, according to the bureau.

Toward the end of her life, Sara Gelser Blouin’s grandmother told stories about what it was like when she was young.

A woman wearing pants instead of a dress was frowned upon. People counted the days between a marriage and the date a baby was born to calculate when the child had been conceived. And her grandmother suffered for years with debilitatingly painful reproductive health issues, unable to access a medically necessary hysterectomy. 

“I would come away struck by how restricted her freedoms were compared to mine,” said Gelser Blouin, a state Democratic senator from Corvallis since 2015. “And then to recognize that my daughters face a future under the Trump plan that could provide them with fewer freedoms than my grandmother had.” 

That plan, known as Project 2025, is a key  issue in this year’s presidential election.

For many Democrats, the presidential transition plan crafted by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation represents the threat posed by a second Donald Trump presidency. Its proposed restrictions on abortion, strict immigration enforcement, and rejection of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans, among other measures, are alarming Democrats and motivating them to fight to win. 

Trump has distanced himself from the initiative, which diverges from the Republican party platform. But CNN found at least 140 Trump administration staffers worked on the plan.

The Capital Chronicle sought comment about the document from more than a dozen women in the Legislature, both Democrats and Republicans, as part of a series on women in politics. No Republicans agreed to be interviewed. 

The Democrats, including Gelser Blouin, said Project 2025 represents a grave threat to Oregonians. Among its most drastic proposals, the project’s 922-page policy agenda calls for closing the Department of Education, establishing a “pro-life task force” in the Department of Health and Human Services and taking employment protections away from certain civil employees. 

Women are among the groups with the most at stake in the blueprint, which calls for curtailing reproductive health care options. 

A spokesperson for The Heritage Foundation declined to comment. 

Gelser Blouin and her Democratic colleagues called some of the agenda’s key policy areas “dangerous,” “terrifying” and “dystopian.”

Here’s a look at some of those proposals.

Abortion rights

Two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with a decision that did away with the constitutional right to abortion. Since then, states across the country have adopted abortion bans or restrictions. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that tracks reproductive access, 41 states now ban abortions with limited exceptions.

Oregon has no abortion restrictions. 

Project 2025 does not call for an outright ban but proposes that the federal Food and Drug Administration reverse its approval of abortion pills, arguing the drugs are unsafe. In the U.S. last year, 63% of abortions were medication-induced, according to the Guttmacher Institute. 

The policy document also aims to stop abortions by mail.

State Sen. Elizabeth Steiner, a physician at Oregon Health & Science University, said medication abortions are “the best practice” for people seeking to end their pregnancy. In most cases, she said, drug-induced abortions are safer and allow for more privacy than a surgical procedure. 

The idea of the FDA revoking approval for the drugs is “kind of like them saying, ‘we’re going to take away penicillin,’” she said. 

State Rep. Lisa Reynolds, who is a pediatrician, said the proposed restrictions left her “a little speechless.” 

However, she noted, “Oregon’s going to be fine.” 

Under the current governor and state Legislature, she said, Oregon’s strong protections for reproductive health care will stay in place.  

Having “a patchwork across the country of who has access to this care and who doesn’t” is “unethical,” Reynolds said. 

“We’re fortunate, though, to be here in Oregon,” she added, “to provide not only for citizens here, but certainly for people who will come from states where maybe they’re not able to get that care.” 

LGBTQ+ rights

Project 2025 is clear in its rejection of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. 

The head of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department “should proudly state that men and women are biological realities” and “that married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them,” the policy book reads. 

For Gelser Blouin, that worldview reduces people’s potential down to reproduction. 

The next generation of Oregonians would feel the greatest impact if those values were to become embedded in federal programs, she said. 

If those ideas get passed on to “a boy who recognizes that he is gay early on, what type of sense of desperation does that cause within him?” she asked. 

Under the project’s agenda, the federal Office of Civil Rights would not enforce the Affordable Care Act’s anti-discrimination provisions based on sexual orientation and gender identity. 

In medicine, Steiner said respecting patients’ identity is “critical to providing good health care.” 

Otherwise, patients could feel they cannot speak openly with their doctor about their relationships, she noted. 

People also might receive inadequate care, she said. For example, a provider might fail to prescribe an HIV prevention medication to a man at risk because he has multiple male sexual partners.

“Anything that gets in between a health care provider and their patient,” Steiner said, “and anything that reduces the likelihood that that patient will get the most appropriate, evidence-based care, is not something government should be doing.”   

Immigration

The Heritage Foundation’s policy plan introduces a host of measures designed to restrict immigration. 

Of particular relevance to Oregon, the document proposes that the federal attorney general help the U.S. Department of Homeland Security get “information about criminal aliens in jurisdictions across the United States, particularly those inside ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions.”

The plan would require states and local governments to turn over information to federal law and immigration enforcement to qualify for federal funding. 

If a Trump administration were to try to enforce that, it would likely meet resistance from the Democrats who lead the state. Oregon is a sanctuary state, which means that public agencies in the state are largely forbidden from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. 

Project 2025 would also allow the Department of Homeland Security to bypass typical deportation procedures if it were to determine there were a “mass migration event.”

For state Sen. Janeen Sollman, the project’s immigration policy demonizes people who come to the U.S. illegally. 

“A lot of the time, it is about fleeing a place that is causing their family harm,” she said, “that their families are hungry, that their families no longer have a home.” 

Sollman said those coming to the state to work help support Oregon’s economy. 

Immigrants represent 13% of the workforce in Oregon, according to the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration research and advocacy nonprofit. 

State Sen. WInsvey Campos said the state could fight a federal immigration crackdown, among other scenarios in the Project 2025 agenda, by passing laws to expand protections for Oregonians and leveling court challenges against these new policies. 

“One would hope that justice in these cases would prevail,” she said. 

She added, however, that many of the project’s policies would “devastate communities.” 

The way Gelser Blouin sees it, rhetoric she’s hearing from Trump and from the right about mass deportations show a “moral conscience receding.” 

“That’s what’s terrifying. It’s not just a plan that is written down,” she said. “It is a plan that is unifying a base that is going to expect Donald Trump to deliver.”