Until the late Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem decided to join the counties in 2012, a succession of North Dakota attorneys general apparently decided it was best to leave the land grassland tracts in question undisturbed, Triplett said.
Forest Service issued transportation plans for the grasslands restricting traffic to existing roads. Under the 1972 law, a 12-year legal window was provided for states and counties to assert claims on the lands, a period of time that judges have ruled started running in the late 1970s, when the U.S. The right was embraced by the Dakota Territory in 1871, later becoming enshrined in law when North Dakota became a state in 1889.įlash forward to 1972, when Congress passed a law giving up federal sovereign immunity in civil lawsuits to decide ownership of disputed land in which the federal government has an interest. The legal issue raised by the state and four western counties has its origins in a federal law passed in 1866 to encourage settlement by granting rights-of-way for public road construction. “It’s all about the long-term integrity of some wide-open spaces.” She cited maintaining large tracts of undisturbed land for use as wildlife habitat as a prime example. “There are all kinds of reasons not to build roads in some places,” Triplett said. Department of Justice, which successfully argued against North Dakota and the counties in the case. The alliance filed a brief in support of the U.S. “We’re very happy with the result,” Connie Triplett, a Grand Forks lawyer and member of the Badlands Conservation Alliance, said Monday. Court of Appeals in a decision filed Thursday, April 14. District Judge Daniel Hovland ruled in 2020 that the counties and state had failed to assert their claim before a statutory clock ran out years earlier, a decision upheld by the Eighth Circuit U.S. Seeking to assert their right to build roads, a move environmental opponents feared would open the way to oil and gas development. The four western counties - Billings, Golden Valley, McKenzie and Slope -įiled a lawsuit in U.S. That could have changed if four counties and the state of North Dakota had prevailed in a lawsuit asserting that the counties had the right to establish a grid of section-line roads in areas the U.S. A small portion - almost 40,000 acres - are eligible to be designated as wilderness. BISMARCK - The Dakota Prairie Grasslands in North Dakota sprawl over 1.2 million acres, most of them in the Little Missouri Badlands.