Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-alsd-1_07-cv-00216/USCOURTS-alsd-1_07-cv-00216-1/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 893
Nature of Suit: Environmental Matters
Cause of Action: 16:1538 Endangered Species Act

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IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF ALABAMA

SOUTHERN DIVISION

SIERRA CLUB, et al., )

 )

Plaintiffs, )

 )

v. ) CIVIL ACTION 07-0216-WS-M

 )

DICK KEMPTHORNE, etc., et al., )

 )

Defendants. )

ORDER 

This matter is before the Court on the plaintiffs’ motion to require completion of

the administrative record. (Doc. 51). The parties have filed briefs in support of their

respective positions, (Docs. 51, 71, 79), and the motion is ripe for resolution. After

carefully considering the foregoing materials and conducting an in camera review of the

disputed documents, the Court concludes that the motion is due to be granted in part and

denied in part.

BACKGROUND

Defendant United States Fish and Wildlife Service (“FWS”) produced a list of

documents in the administrative record totaling some 1,558 documents. (Doc. 51 at 8). 

Initially, FWS withheld over 200 of these documents on the grounds of privilege. (Id.). 

The parties, through their own efforts (and with some encouragement from the Court),

commendably reduced the range of challenged, withheld documents to 40. (Doc. 71 at 4-

5). All of these are withheld based on the “deliberative process” privilege, with a single

document also withheld on the grounds of attorney-client privilege. (Id.). The plaintiffs

encouraged the Court to review these documents in camera to determine if the invocation

of privilege should be upheld, while FWS argued that no such review was necessary in

light of the description of the documents provided by the declaration of its director. 

DISCUSSION

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Most of the cases cited by the parties were decided under the Freedom of

Information Act (“FOIA”). Because the parties claim no distinction between the

privilege under FOIA and that applicable to civil litigation, the Court treats the two as

identical. See also Klamath Water Users, 532 U.S. at 8 (the FOIA exception from which

derives its deliberative process privilege is restricted to documents “‘which would not be

available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency’”) (quoting 5

U.S.C. § 552(b)(5)). 

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The deliberative process privilege “covers documents reflecting advisory opinions,

recommendations and deliberations comprising part of a process by which governmental

decisions and policies are formulated ....” Department of Interior v. Klamath Water

Users Protective Association, 532 U.S. 1, 8 (2001) (internal quotes omitted).1

 “The

deliberative process privilege rests on the obvious realization that officials will not

communicate candidly among themselves if each remark is a potential item of discovery

and front page news, and its object is to enhance the quality of agency decisions ... by

protecting open and frank discussion among those who make them within the

Government ....” Id. at 8-9 (internal quotes omitted). 

 “A document is ‘deliberative’ if the disclosure of the materials would expose an

agency’s decision-making process in such a way as to discourage candid discussion

within the agency and, thereby, undermine the agency’s ability to perform its functions.” 

Moye, O’Brien, O-Rourke, Hogan, & Pickert v. National Railroad Passenger Corp., 376

F.3d 1270, 1278 (11th Cir. 2004). “Therefore, courts must focus on the effect of the

material’s release ... and conclude that predecisional materials are privileged to the extent

that they reveal the mental processes of decisionmakers.” Id. (internal quotes omitted). 

Moreover, “the Supreme Court has held that if, looking at the deliberative process as a

whole, data can be deemed advice or opinion, it is necessarily deliberative. ... The only

inquiry that should be made in deciding whether something should be denoted opinion,

and hence deliberative, is: Does the information reflect the give-and-take of the

consultive process?” Florida House of Representatives v. United States Department of

Commerce, 961 F.2d 941, 948 (11th Cir. 1992).

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Assuming without deciding that the privilege must be invoked by the head of the

agency, as the plaintiffs assert, (Doc. 51 at 7, 9), the director’s declaration invokes the

privilege and so satisfies any such requirement. The plaintiffs do not argue otherwise.

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The privilege is not without limits. Importantly, “the Supreme Court has held that

factual information generally must be disclosed ....” Moye, 376 F.3d at 1278. “Factual

material may be withheld, however, when that material is so inextricably connected to the

deliberative material that its disclosure would reveal the agency’s decision making

processes ... or when it is impossible to segregate in a meaningful way portions of the

factual information from the deliberative information.” Nadler v. United States

Department of Justice, 955 F.2d 1479, 1491 (11th Cir. 1992). 

Even material that is “deliberative” as defined above is unprotected unless it is also

“pre-decisional,” that is, “prepared in order to assist an agency decisionmaker in arriving

at his decision.” Florida House, 961 F.2d at 945 (internal quotes omitted). Thus,

“[m]aterial which predates a decision chronologically, but did not contribute to that

decision, is not predecisional in any meaningful sense.” Moye, 376 F.3d at 1278.2

 

The burden generally rests with the party resisting disclosure to establish the

applicability of the privilege. See, e.g., United States v. Singleton, 260 F.3d 1295, 1301

(11th Cir. 2002) (marital privilege); United States v. Schaltenbrand, 930 F.2d 1554, 1562

(11th Cir. 1991) (attorney-client privilege); Ely v. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 781

F.2d 1487, 1489-90 (11th Cir. 1986) (exemptions under FOIA). Thus, the burden is on the

agency fighting civil discovery to establish the deliberative process privilege. E.g.,

Redland Soccer Club, Inc. v. Department of the Army, 55 F.3d 827, 854 (3rd Cir. 1995). 

The parties cite a single case addressing the deliberative process privilege in the

context of a biological opinion (“BO”). In Greenpeace v. National Marine Fisheries

Service, 198 F.R.D. 540 (W.D. Wash. 2000), the Court ruled that “a determination of

jeopardy ... under the ESA [i]s not a process that implicate[s] [the agency’s] policyoriented judgment.” Id. at 544. “Section 7 of the ESA does not require, nor permit,

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Thus — to draw an example from this case — the actual population of ABM may

be a factual determination, but the decision on how to proceed if trapping results and

ABM characteristics prevent the accumulation of reliable population data is not.

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discretionary policy-making. A determination of jeopardy ... is limited to objective, factbased scientific conclusions.” Id. Thus, the “analysis of jeopardy ... is essentially a

factual rather than a legal or policy determination,” and the deliberative process privilege

does not apply. Id. at 545. 

Although the plaintiffs have barely mentioned Greenpeace and FWS has ignored it

altogether, the Court notes that the opinion depends on the assumptions that the privilege

extends only to policy determinations and that neither the jeopardy determination nor any

antecedent decision represents policy. Both premises are doubtful.

The Eleventh Circuit has on occasion intimated that the privilege applies only to a

document that is “a direct part of the deliberative process in that it makes

recommendations or expresses opinions on legal or policy matters.” Florida House, 961

F.2d at 945 (emphasis added). This, however, appears too crabbed a view, since the

Supreme Court described the privilege as extending to documents “comprising part of a

process by which governmental decisions and policies are formulated ....” Klamath

Water Users, 532 U.S. at 8 (emphasis added). Restricting the privilege to “policies”

would render the “decisions” portion of Klamath superfluous. See also Environmental

Protection Agency v. Mink, 410 U.S. 73, 89 (1973) (“Virtually all of the courts that have

thus far applied Exemption 5 [of FOIA] have recognized that it requires different

treatment for materials reflecting deliberative or policy-making processes on the one

hand, and purely factual, investigative matters on the other.”) (emphasis added).

While a jeopardy determination may sound purely factual, it is a decision based on

a welter of subsidiary decisions that cannot easily be so characterized, involving such

things as what factors to consider, how to weigh them, how to address gaps in the

evidence, and how to reconcile inconsistencies in the evidence.3

 Based on similar

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considerations, the Eleventh Circuit ruled that the Census Bureau’s final adjusted block

level data constituted protected recommendations/opinions rather than unprotected facts,

even though they were expressed as numbers, because “they derive from a complex set of

judgments.” Florida House, 961 F.2d at 949 (internal quotes omitted).

Given these concerns about Greenpeace, and the parties’ failure to assist in

assessing its import, the Court concludes that it does not does not provide the plaintiffs a

short-cut through the traditional deliberative process privilege. 

The plaintiffs complain that, gauged by the Vaughn index and the director’s

declaration, FWS is attempting to shield certain materials that are similar to documents it

has already released to the plaintiffs. (Doc. 79 at 2-3). They do not invoke the doctrine

of waiver, and it appears that any such effort would be futile. See Florida House, 961

F.2d at 947 (refusing to find a waiver as to undisclosed documents based on the

disclosure of related documents); see also Army Times Publishing Co. v. Department of

the Air Force, 998 F.2d 1067, 1071 (D.C. Cir. 1993) (“[I]t is true that the Air Force has

not ‘waived’ its right to claim [a deliberative process] exemption from disclosure simply

because it has released information similar to that requested ....”); Blue Lake Forest

Products, Inc. v. United States, 75 Fed. Cl. 779, 791 n.21 (Ct. Cl. 2007) (“[R]elease of the

document waives [the deliberative process] privilege only for the documents specifically

released and not for related materials.”) (internal quotes omitted).

The plaintiffs’ motion targets disclosure of “disagreements about factual issues

within the agency” and evidence that “questions or demonstrates weaknesses in the

factual underpinnings of the decision.” (Doc. 51 at 3, 5). But disagreement over factual

issues and the strength or weakness of factual underpinnings is not itself “factual

information” but instead “reflects the give-and-take of the consultive process,” especially

when the “facts” at issue “derive from a complex set of judgments.” Such disagreement

is the statement of opinion, and “[t]he fact/opinion distinction continues to be an efficient

and workable standard for separating out what is, and what is not, deliberative.” Florida

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The director’s declaration asserts that each withheld document is pre-decisional

“in that it was generated prior to the Service’s issuance of the incidental take permits.” 

(Hall Declaration, ¶ 6). That statement satisfies the temporal aspect of “pre-decisional,”

but it ignores the necessary relationship to the agency decision. Because FWS bears the

burden of showing the protected status of the challenged documents, those that do not

reflect they were prepared or used to assist in developing the agency decision are not

rescued by the director’s statement.

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House, 961 F.2d at 949. 

Applying these legal principles to the disputed documents, the Court concludes

that the privilege is due to be upheld with respect to the large majority of them. With

respect to the remainder, the Court concludes that these documents do not contain

“deliberative” material and/or are not “pre-decisional” as defined above.4

 The following

documents fall within this category:

• GH-BCW-E-06-2002-12-04 (discussion of an attached letter from counsel

for the developers requesting that the developer’s representatives be

allowed to meet with Dr. Wilcox when he meets with FWS);

• GH-BCW-E-06-2005-05-06-A (Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper article

concerning the development and ABM issues, a proposed rebuttal of points

made in the article, and criticisms of the proposed rebuttal);

• GH-BCW-E-06-2006-08-21-A (proposed timeline for release of FEIS,

NOA, and ROD);

• GH-BCW-E-06-2006-09-06 (e-mail string concerning interest by Senator

Lott in the progress of the Service’s development of an EIS).

The plaintiffs’ final argument is that, even if the documents are protected by the

deliberative process privilege, their need for the documents outweighs FWS’s interest in

protecting them from disclosure. The plaintiffs bear the burden of making this showing.

Redland Soccer Club, 55 F.3d at 854. The parties agree that this balancing of interests is

to be made based on a consideration of the following factors: “(1) the relevance of the

evidence; (2) the availability of other evidence; (3) the Government’s role in the

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As noted, FWS has produced approximately 1,518 documents and withheld 40. 

This is scarcely the “indiscriminate” invocation of privilege the plaintiffs condemn. 

(Doc. 51 at 12). 

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litigation; and (4) the extent to which disclosure would hinder frank and independent

discussion regarding contemplated policies and decisions.” Federal Trade Commission v.

Warner Communications, Inc., 742 F.2d 1156, 1161 (9th Cir. 1984) (quoted in Doc. 51 at

12; Doc. 71 at 11). 

With respect to the first factor, the plaintiffs assert that any documents revealing

disagreement with the jeopardy determination or any of the many decisions contributing

to that determination are relevant to whether the determination was arbitrary and

capricious, on the theory that the agency’s expertise is due no deference if the agency

ignored the analysis of its experts (on whom its expertise depends). (Doc. 51 at 13). 

Many of the withheld documents reflect internal discussions concerning various aspects

of what would become the BO, EIS and CIA, but it is not clear that they reflect

disagreements among persons with fixed opinions (as opposed to the normal exploration

and refinement of ideas typical of groups), much less that they show FWS’s rejection of

its own experts’ analyses.

Assuming that some or all of the withheld documents are relevant on the grounds

urged by the plaintiffs, their unexplained claim that there is no similar evidence already

available rings hollow, particularly in light of their repeated insistence that most of the

withheld documents are similar to those that FWS has produced. (Doc. 79 at 4-9).5

 

FWS’s role in this litigation as a defendant whose action is the focal point

presumably weighs in the plaintiffs’ favor. However, they invoke the fourth factor only

with respect to those few documents discussing inputs on the PVA analysis, arguing

weakly that the expenditure of public funds to develop the analysis, and the public

interest in the ABM, stripped the agency of any reasonable expectation that such

information would be protected from disclosure. (Doc. 51 at 13). This is too slender a

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reed to support the conclusion that disclosure would not meaningfully hinder frank and

independent discussion within the agency, particularly in light of the director’s contrary

declaration. 

In short, application of the Warner factors to the plaintiffs’ arguments

demonstrates that they have not carried their burden of showing that their need for the

withheld documents outweighs the agency’s interest in withholding them.

CONCLUSION

For the reasons set forth above, the plaintiffs’ motion to require completion of the

administrative record is granted with respect to the four documents listed above. FWS is

ordered to produce these documents to the plaintiffs on or before June 13, 2007. In all

other respects, the motion is denied.

DONE and ORDERED this 7th day of June, 2007.

s/ WILLIAM H. STEELE

UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE

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