Laub, two other farmers, United States, and the California Farm Bureau Federation (collectively Plaintiffs) sued the Department of the Interior, other federal agencies and individuals in their capacities as officers of federal agencies (collectively federal defendants), and California state agencies and individuals in their capacities as officers of California state agencies (collectively state defendants) under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA),[1] challenging an environmental impact statement (EIS) for water use in the California Bay-Delta area. The Ninth Circuit held that, even though the site in question had not yet been developed, plaintiffs' claim was ripe, and that further discovery was necessary on the issue of whether the state's participation was independent of federal control and therefore not governed by NEPA.

The CALFED Bay-Delta program (CALFED), operated by multiple state and federal governmental entities, oversaw management and regulation of the San Francisco Bay/Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta estuary. In 1995 and 1996, the agencies agreed that CALFED would prepare an assessment of environmental impact that would satisfy both the EIS requirement of NEPA and the environmental impacts report (EIR) requirement of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).[2] In July 2000, CALFED issued an EIS/EIR which offered a "Preferred Program Alternative which, among other actions, would convert agricultural lands to other uses, including habitat, levee improvements, and water storage."[3] A Record of Decision (ROD), issued in August 2000, certified the EIS/EIR. The ROD included agreements entered into by the state and federal governments in order to manage water in the California Bay-Delta.

Plaintiffs alleged that defendants violated NEPA and CEQA in three ways: first, by not considering any reasonable alternatives to the project; second, by not considering the direct, indirect and cumulative impacts of the project; and finally, by not fully analyzing mitigation options. The district court dismissed plaintiffs' CEQA claims based on the Eleventh Amendment; plaintiffs did not appeal this decision. The district court then dismissed without prejudice plaintiffs' NEPA complaint on three bases: 1) plaintiffs' claim was not ripe against the federal agencies because they were not challenging a final agency action, 2) the court did not have subject matter jurisdiction over the NEPA claim against the state defendants because it was not a federal action, and 3) further discovery or briefing was not necessary to determine the amount of federal involvement. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit addressed these three issues as well as plaintiffs' standing, which the federal defendants had raised for the first time. The Ninth Circuit properly considered standing on appeal because standing implicates jurisdiction.

In order to have standing under Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (Lujan),[4] plaintiffs must have a concrete, particularized, and actual or imminent injury-in-fact that is causally connected to the action, and must be redressable. The Ninth Circuit determined that Plaintiffs in this case had standing because they fulfilled the injury requirement of Lujan and the relaxed causation and redressability requirements of procedural standing cases. Plaintiffs satisfied the injury requirement by alleging individualized injury in their complaint. Plaintiffs satisfied the relaxed causation requirement by alleging injury (water shortage on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley leading to west-side users considering east-side water sources such as those belonging to the individual plaintiffs) that was a direct result of the implementation of CALFED. Plaintiffs did not have to show redressability or immediacy because plaintiffs alleged a procedural injury which, if unremedied, would affect a separate interest of the plaintiffs--a challenge which invoked procedural standing and its more relaxed requirements.

The Ninth Circuit next determined that plaintiffs' claims were ripe because, even though the agency action had not yet occurred, "the question of whether an agency has complied with NEPA's procedural requirements in formulating a programmatic EIS is immediately ripe for review before any site-specific action is taken."[5] The Ninth Circuit referred to Idaho Conservation League v. Mumma,[6] in which the Ninth Circuit found that a challenge to an EIS was ripe before the agency action was final because if the federal agency action was not challenged until after its completion there would be very few, if any, remedies available to the plaintiffs. In Mumma, the process of the environmental impact analysis was tiered, meaning that once an issue was addressed it would not be fully analyzed in subsequent analyses--instead subsequent analyses referred back to the original document addressing the issue. Therefore, one site-specific statement, such as the Preferred Program Alternative in this case, would "determine the scope of future site-specific proposals."[7]

The Ninth Circuit also referred to Salmon River Concerned Citizens v. Robertson (Salmon River),[8] in which it held that an agency action was reviewable before it had commenced, in support of the finding that plaintiffs' claim was ripe. The Ninth Circuit rejected the district court's reliance on Ohio Forestry Ass'n v. Sierra Club (Ohio Forestry)[9] because, after the decision in Ohio Forestry, the Ninth Circuit distinguished substantive challenges from procedural challenges, and determined that procedural challenges under NEPA are ripe once a programmatic EIS has been issued. Similarly, the Ninth Circuit rejected the federal defendants' reliance on Rapid Transit Advocates, Inc. v. Southern California Rapid Transit District (Rapid Transit)[10] because "in Rapid Transit there was no tiering between the two stages of the program. Thus, funding approval at stage one did not commit the agency to design approval at stage two."[11] In contrast, tiering occurred between the multiple stages of the program in Laub, and the ROD was the agency's final decision with respect to NEPA and CEQA. This closer relationship between the stages made Laub distinguishable from Rapid Transit and allowed the claim in Laub to be ripe as opposed to the unripe claim in Rapid Transit. The Ninth Circuit reversed the district court and found that plaintiffs' claims were ripe.

Finally, the court addressed plaintiffs' challenge to state land and water acquisitions under NEPA. In a related challenge, plaintiffs also argued that the district court wrongly decided to disallow discovery on the issue of whether the state defendants were subject to NEPA. To enjoin the state defendants for a claim under NEPA, plaintiffs had to show that the state and federal projects were so intertwined as to be considered a single federal action. The Ninth Circuit analyzed whether a claim constituted a federal action on a case-by-case, fact-specific basis.[12] However, the Ninth Circuit found the district court dismissed the claim once it determined that the federal government had an advisory role without analyzing the facts and determining whether CALFED constituted a federal action, the Ninth Circuit remanded this issue to the district court. The state defendants claimed that their actions were independent of CALFED, and so they were not subject to NEPA. The standard of review for challenges to denial of discovery is actual and substantial prejudice. To succeed, the party challenging the discovery ruling must show that there would be a reasonable probability that, with discovery, the outcome of the case would have been different. The Ninth Circuit found that there was a reasonable probability that, had more discovery been allowed, the outcome on this issue would have been different. The Ninth Circuit therefore reversed the district court on the discovery issue.

The Ninth Circuit reversed the district court on the issues of ripeness and remanded the case to the district court for further discovery regarding the level of federal involvement in CALFED.