The Coalition for Idaho Water announced today that the environmental groups who threatened suit for water in the Snake River system are backing off of their demands.
The Coalition said they are cautiously optimistic by the 30-day withdrawal of the lawsuit threat. They point out that the decision to back away from their strategy of legal coercion amounts to a clear victory for the people of Idaho.
The environmental groups included the Idaho Conservation League, Idaho Rivers United, American Rivers, and the National Wildlife Federation. What they did has been called eco-extortion.
The Coalition called for the environmentalists to withdraw the lawsuit threat before it seriously compromised other important environmental issues such as the Boulder White Clouds Wilderness Initiative and the Owyhee Canyonlands issue.
"We believe this decision clearly marks the death of badly misguided legal strategy of using the 60-day lawsuit notice as a weapon of environmental extortion. The decision to threaten a lawsuit that jeopardized the economic well being of an entire state was a horrible misjudgment by these groups. The lawsuit threat was dead on arrival and needs to stay that way," Norm Semanko of the Coalition for Idaho Water Inc., said.