Judge rejects request to fiddle with Rocky Flats hiking trail decision

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has refused a request by Physicians for Social Responsibility and other groups to fix what they deem a mistake in an earlier ruling concerning a public hiking trail near where the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado once stood.

Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and other plaintiffs asked U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly to modify part of his September ruling that  declined to block public access to the Greenway Trail Project. PSR and the other plaintiffs asked Kelly to change a portion of the ruling that discussed the possibility of plutonium contamination in soil near the trail.

But the plaintiffs misunderstood the September memorandum opinion, which made no “determination of safety,” Kelly said in a Dec. 2 order.  “Rather, the Court decided whether Plaintiffs had carried their burden of establishing, among other things, that they were likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that Defendants violated the National Environmental Policy Act.”

The court “made no definitive ruling on the merits of this case, and nothing prevents them from litigating the merits in any way should they choose to do so,” Kelly said. The judge also said the plaintiffs waited about two months after the September decision, before requesting that a fix be made to the document.

PSR, the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center and other plaintiffs had argued the Department of Transportation and other agencies did insufficient environmental reviews before giving a green light to the walking trail. But Judge Kelly said the plaintiffs had not made their case that a highly-contaminated soil sample from 2019, which the agencies said was an outlier, was grounds for blocking the project.

Rocky Flats, now demolished, churned out plutonium pits for nuclear weapons from the 1950s through the 1980s. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency raided Rocky Flats in 1989 after a lengthy probe on alleged mismanagement and misconduct. The Department of Energy’s contractor for Rocky Flats, Rockwell International, would eventually plead guilty to environmental law violations at the site.