Izembek Road Project

Congressional legislation passed in 2009, P.L. 111-11, the Omnibus Public Land Management Act Legislation, directed the FWS to analyze a proposal for a new road through the heart of the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge and for the Secretary of the Interior to determine whether or not the proposed road is in the “public interest.” In order to fulfill the terms of the legislation, a proper benefit-cost analysis (BCA) is necessary, as it is crucial for determining whether or not the proposed action is in the public interest and represents a good balance between competing resource values (i.e. benefits exceed costs), creates demonstrable rather than speculative socio-economic benefits, and rests on a solid economic foundation.

CSE and The Wilderness Society have partnered to monitor the environmental impact statement process as it evolves and have provided three sets of comments thus far including comments on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) released in the spring of 2012. In our DEIS comments, we conclude that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) failure to conduct and incorporate a BCA into the DEIS has led the agency to erroneously conclude that the project is beneficial from an economic standpoint. A cursory examination of benefits and costs indicate that costs are likely to exceed benefits by a huge margin – a factor of 7 in the most optimistic scenario, a factor of 13 more likely. Read:

• DEIS Comments and benefit-cost analysis
• CSE-TWS Scoping Comments
• Pre-Scoping Comments

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