Case Law Details
Protect Our Parks v. Buttigieg
Project Description:
The case involved a challenge to the Obama Presidential Center, which would be located on a 20-acre site in Jackson Park on the South Side of Chicago. The center (including a presidential library and museum) would be paid for entirely with private funding by the Barack Obama Foundation. The foundation selected the location in Jackson Park in part because it was in the community where President Obama had lived and worked. Because construction of the project would require closing portions of a few roads within Jackson Park, the City of Chicago planned to widen other roads and make bicycle and pedestrian improvements in the park, and sought federal highway funding for this work.
The city’s actions to support the project required multiple approvals from federal agencies. Because the city had received federal grants to benefit Jackson Park under the Urban Park and Recreation Recovery Program in the 1980s, the National Park Service (NPS) had to approve the conversion of land in the park to non-recreational uses. NPS accepted the city’s proposal to construct new recreation areas adjacent to the park to compensate for this conversion. The project was also subject to Section 4(f) of the Department of Transportation Act because it would use public parkland for a federally funded transportation project. In addition, the project required permits from the Army Corps of Engineers under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act and Section 14 of the Rivers and Harbors Act because it would temporarily dewater and place fill in jurisdictional waters of the U.S. and would impact an ecological restoration project administered by the Corps. These federal approvals and funding for the transportation improvements also required compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act.
To comply with Section 106, the federal agencies prepared an Assessment of Effects report and signed a memorandum of agreement with consulting parties. The NPS, Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), and Illinois Department of Transportation published an Environmental Assessment (EA) in September 2020. The EA analyzed three alternatives: building the center without transportation improvements, building the center with transportation improvements, and the no-action alternative. FHWA issued a Section 4(f) Evaluation in December 2020. NPS and FHWA issued a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) in January 2021. The Corps issued the Section 14 permit and approved reliance on a Regional Permit under Section 404 later that month.
21-2449
21-2449
U.S. Court of Appeals – 7th Circuit
08/19/2021
Obama Presidential Center
Highway
Case Summary
In a prior case filed in 2018, the plaintiffs unsuccessfully raised constitutional and state law claims to challenge the City of Chicago’s decision to approve construction of the presidential center in Jackson Park. The plaintiffs filed this case in 2021 to challenge the approvals and decisions of NPS, FHWA, and the Corps. The plaintiffs sought a preliminary injunction to prevent construction of the presidential center until the lawsuit was resolved. The district court denied the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction, holding that the plaintiffs were not likely to succeed on the merits of their claims that the federal agencies violated NEPA, Section 4(f), Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, Section 404 of the Clean Water Act, Section 14 of the Rivers and Harbors Act, and the Urban Park and Recreation Recovery Act. The plaintiffs then appealed. In this ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit denied the plaintiffs’ request for an injunction while their appeal was pending, holding that the plaintiffs were not likely to succeed on the merits of their appeal. As of March 2021, the appeal of the district court’s refusal to enter a preliminary injunction was still pending.
Key Holdings
NEPA
Range of Alternatives
The plaintiffs claimed that the agencies should have considered alternative sites for the presidential center. The court explained that the agencies did not need to consider alternative locations for the presidential center because they had no authority over that decision: “The Center is a local project, and the federal government has no authority to fix its location. . . . Environmental harm that federal agencies do not cause is irrelevant. The agencies must take the objectives they are given and consider alternative means of achieving those objectives, not alternative objectives. The City’s objective was to build the Center in Jackson Park, so from the Park Service’s perspective, building elsewhere was not an alternative, feasible or otherwise.”
Adequacy of EA/FONSI
The plaintiffs asserted that the agencies should have prepared an EIS because the project would have significant environmental effects.
- Tree Removal. The court held that the agencies adequately analyzed the impacts of removing around 800 trees and mitigation for those effects. The court noted that the agencies prepared a “meticulous” tree survey and reasonably determined that replacement with new trees would be sufficient mitigation. “Protect Our Parks argues that current trees and future saplings are not equivalent, but it is not [the court’s] role to decide the relative value of the long- and short-term.”
- Migratory Birds. The plaintiffs argued that the city’s decision to restrict tree removal during migratory birds’ breeding season was an admission that removing the trees would significantly harm birds. “The City’s efforts to mitigate harm, though, do not imply that the harm, once mitigated, remains significant; they do not even necessarily imply it was significant to begin with. The agencies reasonably determined that the unaffected 500-plus acres of Jackson Park will provide the birds a comfortable environment during construction.”
- Historic Resources. The court held that the EA adequately evaluated impacts on historic resources in Jackson Park, noting that the project was designed to integrate with the existing landscape.
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