Oct. 20, 2002: Court upholds Reach designation

Court upholds Reach designation

This story was published Oct. 20, 2002

By The Associated Press and Herald staff

WASHINGTON - A federal appeals court upheld former President Clinton's orders protecting the Hanford Reach and other federal land in five Western states through creation of national monuments.

In a ruling Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia affirmed lower-court rulings that dismissed challenges to Clinton's designation of the monuments under the 1906 Antiquities Act. The law allows presidents to act without congressional approval to safeguard objects of historic and scientific interest.

"I'm certainly happy about it," said Rich Steele, who represents outdoor recreation interests on the Reach citizen advisory board. "It's a wonderful thing (Clinton) did. It's what the majority of the people in the Tri-Cities wanted."

The Hanford Reach National Monument, created in 2000, includes about 200,000 acres of shrub-steppe land and a 51-mile stretch of the Columbia River upstream of Richland. The river is critical for salmon spawning, and the land provides habitat for many dwindling or rare species.

The monuments affected by the ruling cover 2 million acres and include the Grand Canyon-Parashant, Ironwood Forest and Sonoran Desert national monuments in Arizona; Giant Sequoia National Monument in California; the Canyons of the Ancients in Colorado and the Cascades-Siskiyou National Monument in Oregon.

Timber interests, recreation groups and Tulare County, Calif., challenged the Giant Sequoia National Monument. The Mountain States Legal Foundation of Denver, a conservative public interest law firm, led the legal fight against the monuments in the other states.

Both lawsuits argued Clinton exceeded his authority in creating the monuments.

Clinton used the century-old law to create 19 monuments and expand three others, protecting 5.9 million acres. State and local officials, ranchers, off-road vehicle users, oil and gas companies and others complained that Clinton abused his authority and locked up too much land.

Congress passed the law to give the president the power to protect land threatened by development. President Theodore Roosevelt was the first to use it to establish Devil's Tower in Wyoming as a national monument.

Since then, presidents have used the power to establish about 120 monuments protecting more than 70 million acres.