Opinion ID: 3005368
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Implementation of the ITS as Federal Action

Text: An ITS, as explained above, is a set of terms and conditions that the Service provides under Section 7 of the ESA to other federal agencies planning actions likely to affect listed species. In this case, Section 7 required the Corps and the Bureau—action agencies—to consult with the Service and the Service to render a Biological Opinion regarding the Corps’s anticipated Clean Water Act verifications and the Corps and the Bureau’s grants of easements. See 16 U.S.C. § 1536; 50 C.F.R. § 402.14. The Biological Opinion examined the entire Flanagan South project and set forth in the ITS measures to mitigate, monitor, and report take of endangered species incident to the project. The Corps implemented the ITS in its Clean Water Act verifications, although only to a limited geographic extent. Compliance with the ITS, insofar as action agencies made it binding and enforceable, provided Enbridge with a safe harbor from ESA liability. 25 The Service’s development and issuance of the Section 7 ITS, standing alone, was not federal action. But, as explained below, the Corps’s implementation of the ITS was federal action, albeit of confined scope. An agency’s advice to another agency on how that agency should proceed with its permitting actions does not amount to federal action under NEPA. The Service could, in a different context, be held to be an “action agency” for NEPA purposes. See San Luis, 747 F.3d at 644 (explaining that, in Ramsey v. Kantor, 96 F.3d 434 (9th Cir. 1996), the National Marine Fisheries Service, a consulting agency, also was an action agency when its conduct was, in substance, identical to the process for issuing a permit). But the record in this case makes clear that the Fish and Wildlife Service acted only in its consultative role, “merely offering its opinions and suggestions to [the Corps], which, as the action agency, ultimately decides whether to adopt or approve the [ITS].” Id. at 642. In that respect, the Service and the Corps’s relationship here is analogous to that between the Service and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in San Luis, in which the Service had issued an ITS to Reclamation regarding the effect of a major water works project on the endangered Delta Smelt. See id. at 592. The Service’s role in San Luis was to consult, and Reclamation was the action agency implementing the ITS. Here, similarly, it was the Corps’s action, by way of adopting and incorporating the ITS in the verifications of Flanagan South’s water crossings under the Clean Water Act, that qualified as federal action under NEPA. See 40 C.F.R. § 1508.18(b). The Service was not obligated in San Luis or in this case to complete a NEPA analysis, because an agency need not complete such analysis “where another agency will authorize or implement the action that triggers NEPA.” 747 F.3d at 644; accord Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Fla. v. United States, 430 F. Supp. 2d 1328, 1335 (S.D. Fla. 2006). This 26 case is thus unlike Ramsey, in which the National Marine Fisheries Service issued a Biological Opinion and ITS and was, under the particular circumstances of that case, also the agency that authorized the species-taking action, thus making the Service’s Section 7 ITS, standing alone, “functionally equivalent to a permit.” 96 F.3d at 444; see also San Luis, 747 F.3d at 643-45 (distinguishing Ramsey on that basis). The defendants are only partly correct that the ITS in this case was not the functional equivalent of a permit. Agency Br. 44; Enbridge Br. 37, 39; see also Sierra Club, 64 F. Supp. 3d at 149-50 (drawing that conclusion). The Service’s issuance of the ITS was not the functional equivalent of a permit, but the Corps’s incorporation of the ITS was. When the Service issues an ITS in its consultative role, Enbridge correctly notes, it “do[es] not allow or authorize (formally permit) incidental take under section 7.” Enbridge Br. 38 (quoting Section 7 Handbook, supra, at x). When the Service issues a Section 10 permit directly to a private party, it functions as an action agency. Before it began construction, Enbridge considered applying to the Service for a private Section 10 permit. Once the Service estimated that the Section 10 process could “take years to complete,” Enbridge decided against the Section 10 route. Enbridge instead opted only to participate in the speedier Section 7 process and settled for a much more limited authorization of anticipated take. It was only when the Corps formally incorporated the ITS into its Clean Water Act verifications that it gave Enbridge permission to take species free from the threat of ESA liability. The Corps-implemented ITS is the functional equivalent of a permit and thus constitutes federal action subject to NEPA. See 40 C.F.R. § 1508.18(b)(4). But because its permission is limited to the areas subject to the verifications, it is federal action of much more limited scope 27 than Sierra Club contends; contrary to Sierra Club’s claim, it does not require NEPA review of the whole pipeline. The district court concluded that the Corps’s incorporation of the ITS in its verifications did not trigger NEPA because, the court reasoned, a verification is “not a major federal action in and of itself” and thus cannot be “transformed” into cognizable action on account of incorporating an ITS. Sierra Club, 64 F. Supp. 3d at 149. The court’s conclusion was based in part on the assumption that the Corps had already made a “fully-informed decision to authorize certain activities . . . ex ante under the nationwide permitting system.” Id. at 147. That assumption is unfounded in this context, however: Nationwide Permit 12 and Corps regulations make clear that the Corps did not assess effects on specific listed species when it authorized categories of actions through promulgation of the general permit; rather, it deferred any consideration of species impacts and authorization of species take until the verification stage, in the context of specific projects. See 33 C.F.R. § 330.4(f); 77 Fed. Reg. at 10,187; App. 327 (Decision Document for Nationwide Permit 12). The defendants contend that the ITS, even as implemented by the Corps, did not constitute action triggering NEPA because its requirements are “modest” and “limited to monitoring.” Agency Br. 46. They note that, under the regulations, “reasonable and prudent measures” that an ITS requires “cannot significantly modify the proposed action.” Id.; see 50 C.F.R. § 402.14(i)(2). The defendants thereby seek to distinguish this case from those in which NEPA analysis is triggered by ITS conditions that “substantially modify” the action, Agency Br. 48, or “substantially alter the status quo,” Enbridge Br. 43. 28 The defendants fail their own test. The “status quo” is not, as their argument assumes, a fully approved and constructed Flanagan South pipeline; rather, the baseline against which the significance of the federal action must be measured is no pipeline approved and no species killed or habitat disturbed. Authorizing take of endangered species in connection with pipeline construction and operation across jurisdictional waters, and doing so only on the conditions that Enbridge take mitigating conservation measures and monitor species impact for the anticipated useful life of the pipeline, was regulatory approval amounting to significant federal action requiring environmental review under NEPA. See 40 C.F.R. § 1508.18(b)(4); see also San Luis, 747 F.3d at 64245; cf. Tenn. Valley, 437 U.S. at 172-73 (reflecting that, although “[i]t may seem curious to some that the survival of a relatively small number of three-inch fish . . . would require the permanent halting of a virtually completed dam for which Congress has expended more than $100 million,” the plain language of the ESA “require[d] precisely that result”).