Case Detail
| Case Title | Black Hills Clean Water Alliance v. United States Forest Service et al | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| District | District of South Dakota | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| City | Western Division | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Case Number | 5:2020cv05034 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Date Filed | 2020-05-15 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Date Closed | 2023-06-28 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Judge | U.S. District Judge Lawrence L. Piersol | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Plaintiff | Black Hills Clean Water Alliance | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Case Description | The Black Hills Clean Water Alliance submitted a FOIA request to U.S. Forest Service for records concerning mineral mining operations of operation submitted for the Mystic Ranger District. The agency acknowledged receipt of the request. The agency withheld the records under Exemption 4 (confidential business information). The Black Hills Clean Water Alliance filed an administrative appeal. After hearing nothing further from the agency, the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance filed suit. Complaint issues: Failure to respond within statutory time limit, Adequacy - Search, Litigation - Attorney's fees | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Defendant | United States Forest Service | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Defendant | United States Department of Agriculture | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Documents | Docket Complaint Opinion/Order [48] FOIA Project Annotation: A federal court in South Dakota has accepted the Magistrate Judge's recommendation for resolving a FOIA request submitted by the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance to the U.S. Forest Service pertaining to mining proposals. After Magistrate Judge Veronica Duffy issued her Report and Recommendation for resolving the case, BHCWA filed its objections to the report, many of which challenged aspects of the agency's searches for responsive records. Judge Lawrence Piersol first reviewed BHCWA's challenge to the agency's 2019 search for records. He noted that Duffy had agreed with the agency that BHCWA's claims related to the 2019 search were moot. BHCWA argued that the 2019 searches were not moot because the agency would continue to withhold submitters' proposals that contained allegedly confidential business information and the agency would continue to routinely violate the 20-day time limit for responding to requests. Piersol indicated that USFS's performance in processing submitters' proposals had improved in recent responses to later BHCWA requests, noting that "these facts do not evince an ongoing policy or practice by the agency that will impermissibly impair BHCWA's access to information in the future." As to whether USFS would continue to routinely violate the time limits for responding to requests, Piersol observed that BHCWA's policy or practice claim was based only on two requests and that "once again, while not condoning that conduct, they do not show a 'persistent' pattern of 'prolonged delay.'" He explained that he agreed "with the Magistrate Judge's legal analysis of this issue and finds her recommendation is an appropriate resolution of BHCWA's claims pertaining to the agency's 2019 search," finding that the 2019 search was moot. Next up was whether the agency's 2020 search was adequate. The Magistrate Judge made several findings about the 2020 search. First, she found that the agency's limitation of the search to 21 custodians was unreasonable because the evidence showed that three other individuals appeared likely to have responsive records. She also faulted the agency for limiting its search to electronic records and ignoring paper records entirely. However, she found that the agency's search terms were reasonable. BHCWA argued that the agency should have searched the records of 78 custodians, that it should have searched in other electronic record locations, and the search terms were not reasonable. BHCWA also advocated for an entirely new search. Rejecting that notion, Piersol indicated that "ordering an entirely new search would be an unnecessarily resource-intensive approach when any inadequacies are curable through specifically tailored additional searches." BHCWA claimed that the Supreme Court's ruling in Dept of Justice v. Tax Analysts, 492 U.S. 136 (1989), required the agency to search any relevant records it created and maintained. Piersol, however, noted that "BHCWA misapprehends Tax Analysts, which holds that a requested record must have been created or obtained by the agency for it to qualify as an agency record subject to FOIA disclosure requirements. The case does not espouse the standard BHCWA suggests it does â€" that, based on the two-pronged definition of agency records which are subject to FOIA disclosure requirements, the records of every person within the agency who created or obtained any material responsive to a FOIA request must be searched in order for the search to be reasonable. It is plausible that records or agency personnel who create or possess responsive material may be reasonably excluded from the agency's search if the search is nevertheless designed to capture that information in some other way. That is the case here. Records of many of the 78 individuals identified by BHCWA were reasonably excluded from the search because the agency determined that any responsive records in those individuals' possession would otherwise be identified in its search of the records of its named records custodians and, therefore, searching the records of those additional individuals would be needlessly cumulative and time consuming. This general approach does not undermine that the agency's search â€" albeit not an exhaustive one â€" was reasonably calculated to uncover all relevant material." Piersol ruled that the search was unreasonable only to the extent that it did not include the additional three individuals who Duffy had found would also have responsive records. Piersol agreed with Duffy that USFS failed to explain why it did not search paper records as well as electronic records, noting that "absent facts showing otherwise, a reasonable search should have included electronic and non-electronic records." He also found that the agency's search of electronic records should have included archived emails as well. Here, he indicated that "the Court agrees with BHCWA that the agency's records custodians may reasonably be expected to have responsive materials in both archived and non-archived email locations, as well as in other communications programs used by the agency in addition to Microsoft Outlook, unless otherwise shown." He also faulted USFS's limited range of search terms. He pointed out that "here, where the agency generally deferred to each individual records custodian to choose their own search terms, the resulting search failed to consistently employ synonyms and logical variations, such as abbreviations, of even the most basic and obvious search terms and phrases found in or suggested by the text of BHCWA's FOIA request." He indicated that "the result is that any given records custodian may not have captured responsive documents in their possession that were perhaps created by other individuals who used common synonyms or variations of terms the custodians searched, potentially even those synonyms and variations commonly used and searched by their fellow records custodians. The individual searches were often narrow and at the same time, uncoordinated between searchers. The searches in general were not well calculated to uncover all relevant documents as they could have been." The agency withheld records under Exemption 3 (other statutes), Exemption 5 (privileges), and Exemption 6 (invasion of privacy). The agency withheld records under the Federal Cave Resources Protection Act, citing it as an Exemption 3 statute. FCRPA allows agencies to withhold specific site locations of significant caves unless the agency determines disclosure would not create a significant risk of harm, theft, or destruction. Under FCRPA, the agency withheld a wildlife map showing significant caves/abandoned mines, while the other withholding was of GIS data which includes specific locations of significant caves/abandoned mines. Piersol found that the agency's use of the FCRPA fell short in several respects. He pointed out that the FCRPA "requires the U.S. Department of the Interior to maintain a list of significant caves, but the agency's Vaughn index does not indicate how the agency determined the caves at issue here are significant â€" i.e., the agency does not state in the Vaughn index or its declarations the criteria for the caves on this list. The FCRPA protects the confidentiality of information concerning the nature and location of significant caves. It defines 'cave' as 'any naturally occurring void, cavity, recess, or system of interconnected passages which occurs beneath the surface of the earth. . .' Although not beyond the realm of possibility, the Court is skeptical that the abandoned mines noted by the agency are naturally occurring and thus subject to FCRPA. Neither the Vaughn index nor the agency's declarations show any mines to also be significant caves. The Court holds that on the basis of this record, any abandoned mines on maps in question are not significant cases under the FCRPA." The agency withheld records under the attorney-client privilege and the attorney work product privilege. Duffy found that the agency had upheld the application of the attorney-client privilege but had not shown the attorney work product privilege applied because the agency did not show that likely litigation existed. After reviewing the records himself, Piersol rejected the attorney-client privilege because the agency had not explained how disclosure would cause any foreseeable harm. He pointed out that "the agency's allegation that the redacted information, if disclosed, would reveal confidential, privileged material does nothing more than bring the information within the gambit of the attorney-client privilege. It does not, on its own, specifically identify any harm the agency foresees would result to its interest in keeping confidential information protected." Rather than require the agency to disclose the records it claimed were privileged, Piersol told the agency to provide supplemental affidavits to explain its position more thoroughly. The agency redacted private email addresses, phone numbers and addresses from some of the records it disclosed to BHCWA, arguing that they were protected by Exemption 6. Piersol agreed, noting that "the privacy interest here is more than de minimis. By comparison, the general claim by BHCWA that such disclosure would benefit the interests of citizen oversight of government does not warrant balancing of interests in favor of disclosing the personal information in question. That is not to say that personal information can never be disclosed. Such a disclosure overriding the privacy interest of an individual would have to be more than applicant has claimed here."
Opinion/Order [70]Issues: Adequacy - Search Opinion/Order [78] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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