Suit Seeks To Open Land Exchange Spurred By The Trade Of Federal Property For Parcels Owned By Micron Co-Founder

An environmental watchdog group is counting on a lawsuit it filed Thursday in U.S. District Court to help pry open documents used in the exchange of Forest Service lands.

The Western Land Exchange Project filed suit over appraisal documents for a proposed land exchange in the Boise National Forest.

“If someone decides that they’re going to enter into a real estate transaction with the American public, they can’t expect to keep the financial information away from the public,” said Janine Blaeloch of the Project. “How can the public trust the Forest Service to get a good deal when we aren’t even able to scrutinize the information?”

The specific exchange that launched the suit involved a trade of approximately 5,000 acres of federal land for about 500 acres of land scattered within the national forest belonging to Tom Nicholson, one of the founders of Micron Technology.

The watchdog group requested appraisal documentation in February 1998, hoping to study the methods used to come up with the property values of the lands. The request was denied on the grounds that the appraisal information was proprietary and its release would be an invasion of privacy.

The group exhausted its administrative appeals and, in the meantime, the controversial land trade was dropped.

But the group still wants the documents.

“You have to go through such a protracted administrative process to even get to court, we have to take advantage of this opportunity,” Blaeloch said. She believes that a favorable ruling would force the Forest Service to conduct its land trades in the open.

Now, the Forest Service generally won’t release appraisal documentation until after an exchange is complete. The Bureau of Land Management, on the other hand, releases appraisal information when a decision on a trade is made, but before it’s finalized. In those cases, opponents still have some time to review the documentation and protest the trade, Blaeloch said.

If the Forest Service were forced to make all appraisal documents public before a trade is complete, it might keep some landowners away from the negotiating table, said Jim Cochrane of Clearwater Land Exchange, a broker of federal and private land deals.

“It kind of depends on the project,” Cochrane said. “Some people don’t care and some people do. We typically don’t have much of a problem with them giving out the appraisals, as long as it’s OK with everybody else.”

Attorneys in the U.S. Attorneys offices in Boise and Seattle had not seen the complaint Thursday and declined to comment.

The Western Land Exchange Project recently won a case against the U.S. Forest Service in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals over a large land trade in Western Washington with Weyerhaeuser Co.

In that case, the Project argued that environmental impacts weren’t taken into account in the trade. The appraisal documents from that trade were only made available through the lawsuit, Blaeloch said.

“The whole picture we’ve gained of the appraisal process made it imperative that we try to open up this process,” Blaeloch said. “It’s been found time and again that these exchanges are not benefitting the public.”