Wyoming
Montana judge to consider Wyoming sage grouse litigation
Monique Merrill
(CN) — A federal judge in Montana must determine whether or not to split up two cases challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s reduction of protections to the greater sage grouse across millions of acres in the West and transfer the claims to Wyoming.
Seven conservation groups — the Center for Biological Diversity, Gallatin Wildlife Association, Great Old Broads for Wilderness, Rocky Mountain Wild, the Sierra Club, the Western Watersheds Project and WildEarth Guardians — sued the agency in March, challenging its approval of resource management plan amendments for greater sage grouse across nine Western states spanning from California to North Dakota.
Later that month, another three conservation groups — The Montana Wildlife Federation, the Wilderness Society and Defenders of Wildlife — also sued the agency, challenging specifically the Wyoming and Montana plan amendments.
In both cases, the plaintiffs accuse the Bureau of Land Management of weakening prior protections for sage grouse habitat by removing key restrictions and expanding oil and gas leasing. The bird is considered threatened, with populations in sharp decline due primarily to habitat loss.
Both cases were filed in Montana federal court and have not been consolidated, and on Monday, the state of Wyoming argued they should be dismissed or at least severed and have the case transferred to Wyoming.
“Wyoming is a sage grouse stronghold,” Ethan Paddison of the Wyoming Attorney General’s Office argued. “The group’s challenge to the 2025 Wyoming [Resource Management Plan Amendment] strikes at the heart of this longstanding cooperative conservation framework between the state of Wyoming and the federal government.”
According to Wyoming, its resource management plan is different than the other states because it took account of different underlying facts and local plans in its development.
But U.S. District Judge Brian Morris, a Barack Obama appointee, noted his concern at severing the cases in the event that the courts return conflicting decisions. Wyoming appeals go to the Tenth Circuit and Montana appeals go to the Ninth Circuit.
Wyoming argued there was more tying the cases to Wyoming than any other venue.
“The state has spent close to three decades and upwards of $100 million developing and implementing the sage grouse core area strategy,” Paddison said.
The federal government agreed and asked the court to move all claims raised by the seven conservation group plaintiffs to the District of Wyoming.
“What we’re asking here is to do something different, to keep the case together, but to put it in a place, at least one of these places, where there’s a higher concentration of sage grouse habitat,” Justice Department attorney Luther Hajek said.
Wyoming has 24% of Bureau of Land Management-managed surface lands designated as sage grouse habitats, roughly 17 million acres.
Michael Freeman, Earthjustice attorney representing the trio of conservation groups, implored the court to consider the case as a continuation of a recently decided sage grouse case in which Morris tossed oil leases on sage grouse habitat.
“Rather than conserving sage grouse by complying with prioritization, BLM has responded to this court’s decisions by attempting to just eliminate prioritization from its plans altogether,” Freeman said. “And just as this court found in the leasing litigation that national decisions need to be properly adjudicated together in a single court, and this court represents a proper venue for doing so.”
Transferring the case to Wyoming would reward a “rush to courthouse,” Freeman argued. Plus, it would be inefficient to have two courts deciding the same issues based on essentially the same administrative record, he said.
Morris questioned why there were even two lawsuits to begin with.
Freeman clarified that the trio of conservation groups are focused specifically on oil and gas prioritization issues, though admitted there were overlapping issues.
Andrew Missel, attorney with Advocates For The West representing the larger coalition of conservation groups, agreed with Freeman.
“I think transferring part or all of this case to Wyoming would not be in the interest of justice because it would effectively reward what I think is a pretty naked display of gamesmanship,” Missel said.
Morris again questioned why both sets of conservation groups filed separate suits.
“And you just happened to file both in the District of Montana,” Morris said.
Wyoming and the Western Energy Alliance filed suit against the Department of Interior in the District of Wyoming, seeking a declaration from the court that the state’s amended plan complies with the law. Missel characterized the suit as a sham.
Wyoming argued the lawsuit is further reason why Morris should move the claims to Wyoming, so the Montana court doesn’t run the risk of issuing a conflicting judgment with the Wyoming court.
Morris said he would return an order in the next couple of weeks.
Carl McDaniel, 65, from Washington state suffered broken bones after he was charged by a 2,000lb (900kg) bull during a visit to Yellowstone with his grandson on Friday. The encounter was recorded by Mike MacLeod, a professional photographer, who said the animal was ‘agitated, pissed off and charging anything and everything’
Wyoming
Wyoming authorities call on Rocky Mountain Power to explain role in massive November power outage
by Dustin Bleizeffer, WyoFile
The massive, multiple-utility power outage last fall that left some 250,000 customers across parts of Wyoming, South Dakota and Montana without electricity was the result of miscommunication and inadequate procedures during planned maintenance that required de-energizing a power line in southcentral Wyoming, according to a report.
The Nov. 13 incident left thousands of homes and businesses without power for 9.5 hours — longer, in some cases — and knocked out a coal-powered generator outside Glenrock. The unit at the Dave Johnston Power Plant remains offline, leaving Rocky Mountain Power to backfill some 300 megawatts of electricity — enough to power about 225,000 homes.
Without expressly assigning blame to any one party, the report — conducted by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation — indicates a series of communication breakdowns between PacifiCorp (parent company of Rocky Mountain Power), the Western Area Power Administration and, to some degree, electrical grid coordinating teams.
While it’s unclear whether authorities such as the North American Electric Reliability Corporation might pinpoint fault and assess penalties, the Wyoming Public Service Commission has called on Rocky Mountain Power to appear at a hearing scheduled for 2:30 p.m. Wednesday. The commission wants to hear from the utility about “the specifics and details of the event and report,” a public notice announced, and it “may consider and take any action that is in the public interest.”
The hearing at the Public Service Commission’s office located at 2515 Warren Avenue, Suite 300, in Cheyenne, will also be livestreamed at this link.
What happened
According to the 49-page report published in June, PacifiCorp and the Western Area Power Administration were coordinating maintenance on their respective systems that, together, required temporarily de-energizing PacifiCorp’s Aeolus–Clover 500 kilovolt line, which runs east-west and is anchored, in part, by a substation near Medicine Bow.
The effort also required curtailing some local wind energy from feeding the grid, according to the report. But on the day of the planned maintenance, Nov. 13, there was confusion about whether the Western Area Power Administration would scrap its work, so wind energy wasn’t curtailed as originally planned.
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Wind turbines near Cheyenne poke into a colorful sunrise in January 2025. (Tennessee Watson/WyoFile)
The report indicates that modeling tools might have failed to accurately measure local grid conditions, so when the power line was de-energized, “power flow rapidly redistributed throughout the northeast portion” of the local grid. “Within six seconds,” according to the report, “an electrical island formed and collapsed, causing widespread effects across that portion of the interconnection.
“The disturbance,” the report continues, “culminated in the loss of more than 4,800 [megawatts] of generation from coal, natural gas, photovoltaic and wind resources.”
The cascading power failure began at about 12:45 p.m. on a Thursday, dragging down portions of service territories operated by Rocky Mountain Power, Black Hills Energy, Montana-Dakota Utilities and some rural electric co-ops.
The report points to failures in communication, process deficiencies and inadequate modeling tools. Wind energy was not “identified as a contributing factor,” according to the report. It credits both battery storage and wind energy throughout the impacted area for supporting “a faster frequency recovery across the interconnection” and for providing “readily available capacity during system restoration.”
This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
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