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Forest Service accused of “unlawful and piecemeal” review in lawsuit seeking to block village at Wolf Creek

A group of Southern Colorado conservationist and environmental groups on Friday fired the first volley in a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Forest Service’s approval of road access to a developer who has spent more than 30 years trying to develop a village atop Wolf Creek Pass.

The coalition’s 159-page brief argued the Forest Service’s “unlawful and piecemeal approach to addressing the impacts of the proposed village” failed to follow federal environmental guidelines when the agency approved a land exchange with Texas businessman B.J. “Red” McCombs that allowed access to an island of private land where McCombs has planned a mountaintop resort of more than 1,700 homes.

Rocky Mountain Wild, the San Luis Valley Ecosystem Council, the San Juan Citizens Alliance and Wilderness Workshop have battled for decades to block McCombs. The Forest Service rejected McCombs’ plan in the late 1980s but McCombs persisted. Opponents who consider the proposed Village at Wolf Creek one of southern Colorado’s greatest environmental threats, successfully sued to overturn a 2006 Environmental Impact Statement review and sued in U.S. District Court to overturn a third environmental review in 2015. McCombs agreed to delay construction while that lawsuit wound through federal court.

The opening brief in that lawsuit argues that the Forest Service was too narrowly focused when it reviewed the proposed land swap that enabled McCombs to connect his roughly 300 acres of land with U.S. Highway 160 on Wolf Creek Pass. The brief claims the agency was influenced by McCombs and the Forest Service was not transparent in its five-year review of the land exchange that traded 205 federal acres on the pass for 177 acres McCombs had gathered within the Rio Grande National Forest.

The opponents scoured 60,000 pages of correspondence between Forest Service officials discussing the review and the proposed village — most of those documents received through still-pending open-records lawsuits. Those e-mails and exchanges, the group argues, prove the agency did not conduct an objective and unbiased review of the proposal.

The group argues that widespread public opposition to the proposed village supports overturning the Forest Service’s land-exchange approval.

“Moreover, as evidenced by the considerable public outcry against the development — the overwhelming majority of the thousands of comments … opposed the development — this clearly is not merely a theoretical public interest, but rather, a substantial, vocal and united public interest in outspoken opposition to the Forest Service’s unlawful piecemeal approach to addressing the impacts of the proposed Village at Wolf Creek and associated federal actions” reads the filing.

McCombs’ team now has two months to file a response, followed by another 60-day period for village opponents to file a reply. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Matsch should have all the documents and arguments in early February next year.