Was probably some politician pi55ed off at a surveyor
This lawsuit probably explains the impetus behind the
Wyoming trespass bill.
On Friday 13 June fifteen Wyoming landowners from two counties filed a lawsuit for trespass against Western Watersheds Project (an Idaho-based environmental group) and some affiliated individuals. The action was brought in Wyoming District Court.
The alleged trespass was to collect water samples (for submission to the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality) as well as range-monitoring data.
The mission statement on the Western Watersheds Project's web site includes the following sentence:
"The group works to influence and improve public lands management throughout the West with a primary focus on the negative impacts of livestock grazing on 250,000,000 acres of western public lands, including harm to ecological, biological, cultural, historic, archeological, scenic resources, wilderness values, roadless areas, Wilderness Study Areas and designated Wilderness."
That nice language pretty much distills to their Policy Memo #2 -
They bring many actions against Federal land-management agencies such as the BLM and the Forest Service in which they claim the agencies are not following applicable law.
When groups such as Western Watersheds Project prevail against the Federal agencies (which is often the case) their legal expenses are reimbursed under the Equal Access to Justice Act, which really rankles many folks. The business plans of some of these groups seem to be based on Federal reimbursement under EAJA - who needs an actual paying client?
It appears the plaintiffs' attorney is asserting that anyone with any sort of GPS receiver knows or should know prezactly whose land they are on. That's interesting.
GB
