PORTLAND — The Oregon Court of Appeals has decided to reconsider a lawsuit against the state that was dismissed a couple months ago over its decision last year to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list.
It means environmentalists will have another chance to argue for an independent, judicial review of the delisting decision — as well as challenge the validity of House Bill 4040, one of the Legislature’s most controversial new laws this year that ultimately led to the case’s dismissal in late April.
“The issues presented by this judicial review and by HB 4040 are complex matters of public importance,” Judge Erika Hadlock wrote in the court’s decision Tuesday. “Without deciding what, if any, effect HB 4040 has on this judicial review, the court determines that the issues of possible mootness and the validity of HB 4040 are more appropriately decided by a department of the court following full briefing.”
The controversy stems from the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission’s November decision to delist the gray wolf as endangered, a move aimed at managing the species’ replenishing population that environmentalists say was premature and based on questionable science.
As environmentalists were asking the court for a review of the delisting decision, some Republican lawmakers crafted HB 4040 as a means to block the case. The idea was that, with the Legislature’s stamp of approval that the decision was air-tight according to law, reviewing that decision was a moot point and the case itself, therefore, would be too.
The bill was blasted by many residents, conservationists and Democratic leaders, including Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio, as an overreach by the Legislature into judicial branch matters and therefore potentially unconstitutional — an argument environmentalists reiterated in court this week.