High court won’t hear developer’s appeal

BOISE – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear an appeal by an eastern Idaho developer who ignored federal government warnings to stop bulldozing a streambed, clearing the way for him to serve an 18-month prison sentence.

In 2005, Charles Lynn Moses was found guilty in U.S. District Court of felony violations of the federal Clean Water Act. It was the first time in Idaho that a person was convicted of criminal charges under the 1972 law.

Prosecutors alleged that as early as 1982, Moses began a pattern of ignoring U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials who told him he needed a permit to reshape Teton Creek where it ran through his Aspens subdivision on the outskirts of Driggs in Teton County.

The Environmental Protection Agency accused Moses of polluting a spawning area for Yellowstone cutthroat trout and exacerbating flooding danger by turning Teton Creek into a huge drainage ditch.

“Mr. Moses chose knowingly to destroy a major natural resource, and did it with the full knowledge that it was illegal,” said Jim Werntz, director of the EPA office in Idaho. His conviction “helps people understand how important it is to protect streams and the wetlands associated with them.”

In August, Moses lost an appeal of his conviction before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Judges didn’t accept his arguments that Teton Creek wasn’t under the jurisdiction of the United States.

In the next step, the federal Bureau of Prisons will notify Moses to surrender within 30 days at the facility where he’ll be incarcerated for the next year and a half, said George Breitsameter, an assistant U.S. attorney in Boise.

Moses didn’t return a phone message left at his home.

Moses had several attorneys in his criminal case, sentencing and appeal. His latest, Blake Atkin, of Salt Lake City, called it “a travesty of justice,” after learning of the Supreme Court’s decision from a reporter. Atkin had planned to draw parallels with a 2006 Supreme Court ruling in Michigan on a wetlands condominium development to argue the government didn’t have jurisdiction, in part because he said Teton Creek flows only in the spring.

“I would have thought the fair thing for the government to do was to say, ‘Fix this, before an innocent man serves jail time,’ ” Atkin said.

In the 1980s, Moses began developing the Aspens subdivision, a project that involved altering Teton Creek. Starting in 1982, Army Corps of Engineers officials told Moses on several occasions that his work required a permit under the Clean Water Act.

Federal officials issued the first notice of violation against Moses in 1997. He failed to submit a permit application for stream bed work done in 2002, 2003 and 2004. He most recently violated an April 2004 administrative order to stop discharging into the creek dredge and fill material, considered pollutants under the Clean Water Act.