Opinion ID: 223638
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: analysis of alternatives

Text: NEPA requires federal agencies to `study, develop, and describe appropriate alternatives to recommended courses of action in any proposal which involves unresolved conflicts concerning alternative uses of available resources.' Native Ecosys. Council, 428 F.3d at 1245 (quoting 42 U.S.C. § 4332(E)). Although an EA need only include a brief discussion of alternatives, that discussion must follow full and meaningful consideration of the alternatives by the agency. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). Nevertheless, an agency's obligation to consider alternatives under an EA [remains] a lesser one than under an EIS. Id. at 1246. Reclamation's EA discusses two alternatives  the proposed drawdown and a no action alternative. CELP challenges this selection of alternatives as overly constrained. Insofar as CELP simply argues that two alternatives is too few, its challenge must be rejected. As we have previously recognized, there is no numerical floor on alternatives to be considered. Id. CELP's argument also rests on the more precise premise that Reclamation did not consider the alternatives CELP prefers, such as conservation and water rights marketing. Albeit colorable, this argument is not persuasive. In the FONSI, Reclamation twice states that it developed the proposed action alternative with reference to a wider range of alternatives considered in the Department of Ecology's SEIS. The SEIS, meanwhile, considered and rejected five other alternatives, including an all-conservation approach and water marketing. Ecology decided not to proceed with conservation alone because most potential conservation projects would have benefits that were too limited in time and geographic area. It rejected water marketing on the basis of concerns about the impact to local economies from the transfer of the needed volumes of water. CELP does not argue that these explanations, if contained in the EA, would violate NEPA. But under the circumstances presented here, the fact that the discussions instead appear in Ecology's SEIS is of no moment. We have previously held that the absence of a more thorough discussion in [an] EIS of alternatives that were discussed in and rejected as a result of prior state studies does not violate NEPA. Laguna Greenbelt, Inc. v. U.S. Dep't of Transp., 42 F.3d 517, 524 n. 6 (9th Cir.1994). Laguna Greenbelt, like this appeal, involved alternatives rejected by prior state environmental impact reviews of the same joint project that was subject to later federal review. [7] See id. at 522. Reclamation thus discharged its duty to consider the discarded alternatives by explaining in the FONSI that it rejected them because of Ecology's SEIS. See id.; cf. N. Idaho Cmty. Action Network v. U.S. Dep't of Transp., 545 F.3d 1147, 1153-54 (9th Cir.2008) (approving an EA that discussed only two alternatives because a prior EIS had evaluated the project's environmental effects in depth). We accordingly reject CELP's challenge to the analysis of alternatives in the EA. See Native Ecosys. Council, 428 F.3d at 1249 (holding that an EA that discussed only the agency's preferred alternative and a no-action alternative satisfied NEPA). AFFIRMED.