Alaska, feds fight over Arctic National Wildlife Refuge border in court
(CN) — A federal court in Alaska must decide what river marks the border of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, as the state accuses the U.S. government of improperly seizing more than 20,000 acres of land.
The land dispute has taken on new significance in recent months, as President Donald Trump has called for resource extraction in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A federal court this week ordered the reinstatement of an Alaskan agency’s oil and gas leases there.
The crux of the dispute "boils down to the meaning of the phrase ‘extreme west bank of the Canning River,’” Kathleen Schroder, an attorney with the Denver-based Davis Graham & Stubbs firm representing the state, said at a hearing on Friday.
Located in the far northeast of the state, the Canning River flows north from the Franklin Mountains to Camden Bay in the Arctic Ocean.
In 1960, then-Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton issued an order describing the boundary of the Arctic National Wildlife Range, which was later renamed a refuge. In the order, he described the boundary as moving in a southwesterly direction from Brownlow Point approximately three miles to the “mean high water mark of the extreme west bank of the Canning River.”
Alaska says Seaton intended for the Canning River to mark the boundary. The feds argue Seaton was instead referring to the Staines River, a more westerly channel of the Canning River.
Alaska cries foul. "Reading the public land order, the reference to the Canning River is not ambiguous,” Schroder argued. “The ‘extreme west bank’ just means the westernmost bank; it doesn’t mean a whole other river.”
https://www.courthousenews.com/alaska-feds-fight-over-arctic-national-wildlife-refuge-border-in-court/