A coalition of environmental groups sued the Trump administration in federal court Wednesday for signing a land swap deal to allow a tiny Alaska village to build a road through the federally protected Izembek National Wildlife Refuge.
“The Trump administration’s backroom deal for a land exchange ignores Interior’s previous science-based decisions against the proposed road,” said Nicole Whittington-Evans, the Alaska regional director for the Wilderness Society. “This illegal deal is just another step toward the administration’s goal of turning over America’s public lands to development interests.”
In the suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska, nine environmental and conservation groups say that building the road would violate multiple laws including the Wilderness Act, National Environmental Policy Act, National Wildlife Refuge Improvement Act and Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke this month signed a land swap deal to allow the village of King Cove to build a road through the refuge, which residents say will provide a route for medical evacuations to the closest regional airport.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, and all but 15,000 of its 315,000 acres have been designated as wilderness since 1980, prohibiting motorized vehicles.
King Cove, a village with roughly 925 residents, has lobbied the Interior Department for decades to build a 12-mile, single-lane gravel road to connect to the neighboring town of Cold Bay.
King Cove is in the Aleutian Islands between two massive volcanic mountains on the edge of a bay off the Pacific Ocean. There are no roads connecting King Cove to any other Alaskan city, and the nearest medical facilities are in Anchorage, about 625 miles northeast.
That means King Cove residents with medical emergencies must fly to Cold Bay and then to Anchorage for treatment. Flights can be delayed hours or even days by bad weather.
Under the terms of the deal, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will transfer up to 500 acres to King Cove.
The road will have to be “primarily” used for non-commercial purposes.
In 2013, then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announced that the road would harm birds and animals in the refuge.
She rejected a land swap that would have sent 61,000 acres of state and native lands to the federal government in exchange for 207 acres of the refuge to be made available for the road.
