## Facts

- Federal, state, and regional agencies approved the Central Corridor Light Rail Transit project (CCLRT), an approximately 11-mile line with multiple stations connecting downtown Minneapolis and downtown Saint Paul.
- The alignment ran through the Rondo/University Avenue corridor in Saint Paul, an area with substantial minority and low-income populations and a history of prior transportation-related disruption.
- The Federal Transit Administration and the Metropolitan Council completed NEPA review documents, including a Draft EIS, a Supplemental Draft EIS, a Final EIS (FEIS), and an August 2009 Record of Decision authorizing the project.
- The FEIS concluded the project would not impose disproportionate adverse effects on minority populations and that overall benefits outweighed potential adverse impacts.
- Community organizations, businesses, and residents sued, alleging the FEIS failed to (a) adequately evaluate cumulative impacts and environmental justice effects in light of earlier major infrastructure harm in the corridor and (b) analyze construction-related business interruption, including lost business revenues.
- The parties filed cross-motions for summary judgment.

## Issues

1. Whether the FEIS’s cumulative-impacts and environmental justice analysis satisfied NEPA’s requirement to evaluate cumulative effects on minority and low-income communities given prior transportation actions in the same corridor.
2. Whether NEPA required the FEIS to analyze construction-related business disruption, including lost business revenues, as an adverse impact where the losses were tied to physical construction effects.
3. Whether any NEPA violation warranted an injunction halting construction or could be remedied by supplemental NEPA analysis while the project proceeded.

## Decision

- The court granted in part and denied in part the cross-motions for summary judgment.
- The court upheld the FEIS’s cumulative-impacts and environmental justice analysis as adequate under NEPA.
- The court held the FEIS was inadequate for failing to address lost business revenues resulting from construction-related disruption.
- The court ordered defendants to supplement the FEIS to address business-revenue impacts and related mitigation.
- The court denied plaintiffs’ request to enjoin the project.

## Legal Principles

- NEPA requires agencies to take a “hard look” at reasonably foreseeable direct, indirect, and cumulative effects.
- For cumulative impacts, an agency may evaluate the current aggregate effects of past actions, rather than produce an exhaustive historical reconstruction, so long as the present condition and combined effects are adequately analyzed.
- Purely economic effects are not, by themselves, environmental effects under NEPA, but economic harms that are directly linked to physical environmental change and construction disruption must be analyzed in an EIS.
- When a NEPA deficiency is identified, courts may order supplementation rather than halt a project, depending on the nature of the error and equitable considerations.

## Conclusion

The court sustained the agencies’ cumulative-impacts and environmental justice analysis for the light-rail project, but required supplemental NEPA analysis because the FEIS did not evaluate construction-related lost business revenues as an adverse impact, and it allowed construction to continue while the deficiency was addressed.


Saint Paul Branch of Nat’l Ass’n for the Advancement of Colored People v. U.S. Dep’t of Transp., 764 F. Supp. 2d 1092 (D. Minn. 2011)