A U.S. District Court judge in Anchorage has ruled against the state of Alaska in an 11-year-old legal dispute that has significant implications for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and state finances.
On Wednesday, Judge Sharon Gleason ruled that laws and regulations setting the western border of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are “ambiguous,” but federal regulators made a reasonable decision when they declared the border to be the western bank of the North Slope’s Staines River, rather than on the western bank of the Canning River.
There are 20,000 acres of potentially oil-rich land between the two waterways, and the state of Alaska had sought ownership of the area — sited just to the east of the Prudhoe Bay oil field — for oil and gas drilling.
While the federal government is now advancing plans for oil and gas leasing in the disputed area, the decision to keep it under federal control means that if oil and gas are discovered there, the state of Alaska would receive far less revenue than it would if it were state-owned land.
“The state of Alaska is disappointed that the court failed to recognize the state’s ownership of this disputed area on the border of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” said Patty Sullivan, communications director for the Alaska Department of Law, which brought the case against the federal government.
“This land may hold significant resource potential for the future of energy for Alaska and the United States and would likely be thoroughly explored and developed under state management. We will evaluate our options and are glad to, at least, have a federal administration currently in place that recognizes the importance of responsible resource development in this area,” she said.
Attorneys for the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Department of Justice did not return messages seeking comment.
The state’s dispute with the federal government revolves around whether federal mapmakers viewed the Staines River as a separate river from the Canning, or simply a “distributary,” a different channel of the same river, in 1957.
The Bureau of Land Management used the boundary drawn that year to create the Arctic National Wildlife Range in 1960, and it became the refuge in 1980. Maps published at that time show the border running along the Staines River.
As Gleason explained in her 74-page order, “If the Staines River was considered to be part of the Canning, then the extreme west bank would follow the west bank of the Staines distributary of the Canning River. But if the Staines and the Canning were considered to be two separate rivers, then the boundary would follow the west bank of western-most channel of the main Canning River.”
The dispute also included a marker designating the northwest, seaward boundary of the refuge, but the main issue was about the river-defined border.
In 2014, the Alaska Department of Natural Resources requested ownership “of certain lands west of” the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The Alaska Statehood Act, which remains partially unfulfilled more than 65 years after statehood, allows the state to select more than 100 million acres of federal land for state ownership.
In 2016, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management responded to the state’s request, saying the state had already selected all available land in the area. The state protested, saying that federal officials were drawing ANWR’s border west of where it should have been because they were relying on the Staines River, not the Canning.
The state appealed to the U.S. Interior Board of Land Appeals, which ruled in favor of the BLM. The state sued over the issue in 2022 and won an early victory when Judge Gleason ruled the following year that the land appeals board failed to consider a 1951 map that showed the Staines as a separate river from the Canning.
But in 2024, the land appeals board again ruled against the state, which promptly renewed its case in the U.S. District Court and requested summary judgment, a request that was answered Wednesday.
Explaining her order, Gleason noted a 1906 U.S. Geological Survey dictionary that labeled the Staines and the Canning as the same river, but “on the other hand, some contemporaneous maps label the two rivers separately, indicating that the Staines and the Canning may have been considered to be two separate rivers. And yet other contemporaneous maps do not label the Staines or do not separately label the Canning River at the mouth,” she wrote.
While that might have favored the state’s position, Gleason concluded that the land appeals board’s interpretation of the border was reasonable, not arbitrary, was supported by substantial evidence and wasn’t contrary to law, meaning that the state doesn’t have grounds to overturn it.
Gleason concluded, “the court upholds the IBLA’s finding that the northwest boundary of the refuge follows the Staines River, a distributary of the Canning River.”
If the state chooses to appeal Gleason’s decision, it will have 30 days after final judgment.