A federal judge in Washington on Monday ruled that the U.S. Interior Department was wrong when it removed the site of the Blair Mountain labor battle from the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.
U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton granted a motion for summary judgment sought by a coalition of environmental and historic preservation groups that challenged a decision by state officials and the Interior Department's Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places that Blair Mountain should be delisted.
Walton said that the determination to delist Blair Mountain - made at the urging of a lawyer for coal companies that own potential mining sites in the area - violated federal law, in part because it was based on "very little, if any, indicia of reasoned decision making."
In a 47-page opinion, Walton said that federal officials had simply rubber stamped a state recommendation, did not independently verify the accuracy of a list of objecting landowners, and failed to act in a transparent manner. Walton sent the matter back to the Interior Department for the "exercised of reasoned decision making."
Walton ruled following a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that overturned an earlier ruling by Walton that citizen groups could not bring their court challenge.
Among the judges who issued that appeals court ruling that sent the case back to Walton was Merrick Garland, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit and also President Barack Obama's recent nominee to fill the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
Groups filing the court action included the Sierra Club, the Friends of Blair Mountain, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, the West Virginia Labor History Association and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Walton explained in his ruling that the legal fight traces its roots to the late August and early September 1921 "armed conflict between coal miners and strikebreakers" during the United Mine Workers efforts to unionize West Virginia's southern coalfields.
Reach Ken Ward Jr.
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