Opinion ID: 185323
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Scope of S 4(e) authority

Text: 18 Slightly more complicated than whether FERC has authority under S 4(e) to impose license conditions, is the extent of that authority. The parties dispute whether the FPA--under which FERC must attach license conditions to projects located within any reservation of the United States, 16 U.S.C. S 797(e) (1994) (emphasis added)--permits FERC to prescribe conditions with respect to the entire Lac Vieux Desert project, or only as to those portions of the project that actually occupy reservation lands. The agencies propose that the government's section 4(e) conditioning authority applies to the license, and therefore to all of the project works covered by that license, so long as ... part of the licensed project is within the reservation. Intervenors' brief at 18 (emphasis added). WVIC responds with what it supposes is a reductio ad absurdum, and points out that the agencies' interpretation would permit FERC to impose project-wide license conditions if any portion of the project touches a reservation (even if the overlap is the size of a postage stamp). 19 We need not, however, decide the precise scope of the government's power to prescribe conditions for projects located within reservations. Rather, we resolve this issue on the narrow ground that on the facts of this case it would be impossible to attach a condition as to the reservation lands without simultaneously imposing it with respect to the entire project. As FERC points out, there simply is no way to require WVIC to reduce the water level of Lac Vieux Desert only over federal lands. A lake can have only one level. See Respondent's brief at 32 n.8 (As the condition imposes maximum water levels on the entire project reservoir, it is unclear how WVIC could be required to limit the maximum water level on only those portions of the project reservoir occupying the reservations, without affecting the water level throughout the project reservoir.). WVIC does not dispute that FERC could not reduce the level of the water that overflows the reservation lands without lowering the entire reservoir, and we therefore find that its order requiring WVIC to do so was not arbitrary and capricious. 20 Besides requiring WVIC to reduce the water level at Lac Vieux Desert, FERC's wild rice enhancement plan further calls for the company to fund the agencies' efforts to plant wild rice. Unlike changes in water level, it is possible to confine rice-planting to the federally owned reservations. Hence the rationale that permits the reduction of the reservoir's water level over non-reservation lands--that the government cannot lower the water over reservation lands without doing so as to the entire reservoir--would not justify a requirement that rice be planted on non-reservation lands. But it appears that the agencies have imposed no such condition. FERC's order calls for rice to be planted, not throughout the Lac Vieux Desert reservoir, but only on reservation lands--for example at Misery Bay and the suitably-named Rice Bay, both of which are on Forest Service or Indian Reservation land. See Final Environmental Impact Statement at 4-76 to 4-77 (June 1996). In any event, FERC explains, it is clear that the planned wild rice seeding is to occur on both the Indian and Forest Service reservations, and FERC has given no indication that it will require the planting of rice on non-reservation lands. Wisconsin Valley Improvement Co., 76 FERC p 61,050, 61,227 (1996).