A lawsuit holding up a 39 million-board-foot logging project in the Kootenai National Forest was rejected Tuesday by a federal judge, but Alliance for the Wild Rockies Executive Director Mike Garrity says he plans to appeal the decision.

The Helena-based environmental group sued the U.S. Forest Service, along with the Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in May 2015. The federal lawsuit alleged that the 92,407-acre project to the east of Lake Koocanusa failed to consider impacts to grizzly bears, lynx and bull trout — all of which are considered threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Tuesday’s ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Dana Christensen in Missoula granted the defendants’ summary judgment motion, along with that of the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, which had joined the case as a co-defendant.

“The East Reservoir Project represents one of the larger forest resource management projects to be considered by this court, and this record reflects that the Forest Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service engaged in a review of potential impacts commensurate with the project’s scope,” Christensen wrote.

Over 30,000 acres within the project area are within designated critical habitat for lynx and more than 18,000 acres overlaps with a zone developed by the Forest Service to analyze grizzly bear activity outside the established recovery zone.

The East Reservoir Project has been in the works for more than four years, and got its official green light from the Kootenai National Forest in October 2014.

In an interview Wednesday, Garrity said his organization will continue pursuing the lawsuit, arguing that Christensen’s ruling on lynx protections went against court precedent.

“The Ninth [U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals] has ruled that you can’t log lynx critical habitat until they re-consult on lynx management plans with the Fish and Wildlife Service,” Garrity said. “The District Court in the past has ruled in our favor and here they went the opposite way, so this court is being inconsistent.”

In his decision, Christensen wrote that a previous court case siding with the plaintiff’s lynx arguments had not addressed the merits of the critical habitat review itself, and that one of the decisions had been vacated pending a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Garrity said he believes the Kootenai National Forest’s failure to reconsult with the federal wildlife agency on lynx habitat is the organization’s strongest argument, but he plans to appeal the entire ruling, particularly given the long-struggling population of grizzly bears in the adjacent recovery zone.

“There’s definitely a way the Forest Service can cut trees for forestry, but this isn’t the way to do it, clear-cutting lynx critical habitat,” he said. “Grizzly bears in Northwest Montana are the most endangered grizzly bears in the country, in the Cabinet-Yaak” Ecosystem.

The decision, and Garrity’s likely appeal, come amid heightened attention on the logging industry and the availability of locally sourced timber in Western Montana.

Following the announcement that two large lumber mills in Columbia Falls would close by the fall, state leaders across the political spectrum denounced environmental litigation as a primary obstacle to keeping mills open.

U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., has long blamed litigious environmental interests for holding up timber sales that could otherwise augment the dwindling supply of cheap logs to the state’s lumber yards. In the past year he has worked to pass still-pending legislation that would keep many of those groups from collecting legal reimbursement under the Equal Access to Justice Act unless they take an active role in developing the projects.

Zinke has promoted the legislative amendment to the decades-old law as a way to create a disincentive for “frivolous lawsuits” intended to simply delay timber sales and drain resources from the Forest Service, but Garrity said it would deny the public its right to pursue legitimate objections to environmentally damaging decisions.

“You’re going to have to take time off your work and drive to these meetings that could be hours away,” Garrity said. “The only people that can go are the people that either work for the timber industry, the government or these big environmental groups.”

Zinke has responded to similar criticism by referring to the “intentionally vague” language in his bill that he says amounts to more of a good-faith requirement that environmental groups come to the bargaining table before resorting to the courtroom.

Earlier this year, he applauded a measure passed as part of Congress’ comprehensive energy bill that creates a public database of federal reimbursement paid out to groups under the Equal Access to Justice Act.

“We’ve got to question how much taxpayer dollars are spent and just tracking that, I think we should be able to do that,” Zinke told the Inter Lake in April after the bill’s passage. “That will give us some data on scale — how much which groups get and adequately determine whether it is being abused or not.”

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.