WASHINGTON— The federal court in the District of Columbia today found that the U.S. Forest Service violated the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to provide a crucial appraisal for the proposed Oak Flat land exchange to the Center for Biological Diversity.

The land exchange’s purpose is to facilitate a massive copper mine at Oak Flat in eastern Arizona. The mine would completely destroy a sacred site of tremendous spiritual importance to the San Carlos Apache Tribe and other Tribes in the region.

“This ruling makes clear that it’s time for the Forest Service to stop stonewalling and produce the appraisal so the public can determine the fairness of exchanging critically important national forest lands with an international mining company for relatively worthless private properties,” said Marc Fink, a senior attorney at the Center. “The appraisal has been complete since January 2023 but the agency has refused to hand it over. Its scheme to shield the appraisal from the public has failed. This is an important step to expose a process that will lay waste to a sacred and extraordinarily beautiful landscape.”

In ruling for the Center, the court held that the appraisal is an agency record subject to the Freedom of Information Act. The Forest Service had attempted to shield the document from the public disclosure statute by using secretive means to enable the agency’s staff to access and rely on the appraisal in preparing its own related reports.

The case also involves two Forest Service appraisal reports, which the agency heavily redacted. While the court agreed with redactions that contained financial information that originated with the mining company, the court disagreed that the remaining redactions were proper.

Significantly, the court rejected the Forest Service’s bogus arguments that release of the appraisal information would somehow confuse the public or impair ongoing Tribal consultation over the land exchange and proposed mine. The concerned public and the Tribes have been requesting this information for years, and the agency’s failure to provide this basic information concerning the land exchange is why the Center submitted the FOIA requests in the first place. After the agency failed to respond, the Center filed suit.

An independent appraisal commissioned by the Center in 2020 concluded that the lands offered by the mining company are worth approximately $7.135 million, dramatically less than the $111 billion worth of copper alone, not to mention the priceless loss of an irreplaceable Oak Flat.

Sacred to Western Apache and other Indigenous people, the beautiful lands of Oak Flat, Arizona, are also home to species like ocelots and endangered Arizona hedgehog cacti.

Multinational mining conglomerate Rio Tinto intends to carve a massive copper mine into its rolling hills. The mine would use a special new technique to excavate the ore body 7,000 feet underground. Material removed from the mine would spread toxic waste across thousands of acres of public land, and when ultimately closed, it would leave behind a crater up to two miles wide and 1,000 feet deep.