Court Blocks Expansion of Mount Ashland Ski Area
By Robert Plain, Ashland Daily Tidings
September 24, 2007

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against the U.S. Forest Service in a lawsuit that challenged the merits of an expansion project to the Mt. Ashland Ski Area.

The three-judge panel federal appeals court for the western United States ruled that the Forest Service “failed to properly evaluate” the impact the project would have on the Pacific fisher, a rare mink-like animal that lives in the Siskiyou Mountains, and didn’t “appropriately designate” riparian reserves in the expansion area.

“The MASA (Mount Ashland Ski Area) expansion would result in eliminating habitat that may be vital to preservation of the fisher population in the project area,” the court wrote in its decision filed Monday morning. “Similarly, until the Riparian Reserves and Restricted Watershed lands are properly classified and subjected to additional scrutiny required by these classifications, the possibility of environmental harm to the ecological health of the region’s waterways remains.”

The Mt. Ashland Association sent out a press release this afternoon that stated members of the board of directors and staff “will review the court decision with its legal counsel to determine its next course of action.”

It also said this ruling “remains subject to appeal.”

Several members of the MAA board of directors either declined to comment on the ruling or didn’t return phone calls.

Several Forest Service employees also didn’t return calls seeking a comment on the ruling.

Ashland City Councilor Eric Navickas, who was a party to the lawsuit as an individual before the case was appealed to the Ninth Circuit, said, “I’m pretty ecstatic. We expected this after sitting through the court hearing but it feels a lot better to have a decision from the court. It really shows what a waste of time that whole process has been. Hopefully Mt. Ashland will accept that it lost and stop dumping money into this.”

He said if the expansion plans are, in fact, over, he will end his ten-year boycott of the Mt. Ashland slopes and go skiing this winter.

Ashland City Administrator Martha Bennett said the ruling from the Ninth takes the pressure off the city from a lawsuit the MAA filed against Ashland earlier this year.

“Their lawsuit against us claiming we delayed them is probably not really relevant right now,” she said. “I think the question of whether we delayed them is kind of moot now.”

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