602 F.2d 876 - Aluli v. Brown — 602 F.2d 876

How this case has been cited

Cited by 16 later decisions — most recently April 2012

9 federal appellate · 5 district · 1 state decisions

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

¶1Thomas A. Morrison, Sp. Asst. U. S. Atty., Honolulu, Hawaii, for defendants-appellants.

¶2Joel E. August, Legal Aid Society of Hawaii, Wailuku, Maui, Hawaii, for plaintiffsappellees.

¶3Before BROWNING, CHOY and HUG, Circuit Judges.

¶4PER CURIAM:

¶5In this action environmentalists challenged the Navy’s use of the Hawaiian island of Kahoolawe for military operations. The district court issued broad injunctive relief against the Government designed to protect the Kahoolawe environment. The Government has appealed as to that portion of the injunctive order requiring it “to file an environmental impact statement annually so long as [it] shall continue to bomb Kahoolawe.” 437 F.Supp. 602, 612 (D.Hawaii 1977). The District court concluded that this relief was warranted because each yearly appropriation request for money to conduct Kahoolawe operations constituted a “proposal for major Federal action” requiring preparation of an environmental impact statement under § 102(2)(C) of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, 42 U.S.C. § 4332(2XC).1437 F.Supp. at 607. In so holding the district court erred.

¶6 *877In Andrus v. Sierra Club, - U.S. -, 99 S.Ct. 2335, 60 L.Ed.2d 943 (1979), the Supreme Court considered “whether § 102(2)(C) of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 . . . requires federal agencies to prepare environmental impact statements ... to accompany appropriation requests.” Id.at -, 99 S.Ct. at 2336. The Court concluded “that appropriation requests constitute neither ‘proposals for legislation’ nor ‘proposals for major Federal actions,’ and that therefore the procedural requirements of § 102(2)(C) have no application to such requests.” Id.at -, 99 S.Ct. at 2345.

¶7Therefore, the district court’s judgment is reversed and its order vacated insofar as it requires the Government to prepare yearly environmental impact statements to accompany appropriation requests.

¶8REVERSED.