MARQUETTE — The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month denied the Marquette County Road Commission’s request to review the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to veto the construction of County Road 595, a proposed 21-mile road that would run between Marquette County Road AAA in Michigamme Township and U.S. 41 in Humboldt Township.

With this decision, the lengthy and complex battle about CR 595 in court is essentially over, officials said.

“There’s nothing else to do at this point,” said Mike Harrington, director of operations and maintenance at the road commission.

The Supreme Court denial follows a long dispute about permits for the proposed road, which the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality approved, but the EPA filed objections against, citing wetland mitigation concerns based on the proposed road’s placement.

“That local and state officials recognized the value of the road, and that the road commissioners had taken appropriate precautions to protect wetlands in Marquette County, was lost on the officials in the EPA — based in Chicago and Washington, D.C. — who vetoed the road project,” said Mark Miller, the Pacific Legal Foundation attorney who is representing the road commission pro bono in the matter.

The permitting authority was eventually transferred to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which the road commission objected to, bringing a five-count declaratory judgment action in 2015 against the EPA and the corps in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan. However, this was fully dismissed at the request of the EPA and the corps under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, according to court documents.

The road commission filed an appeal in February 2017 with the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, but the court ruled in favor of the EPA in March 2018. An en banc hearing in the appellate court was requested but denied.

Then, in October a petition regarding the case was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, which was denied for review March 4, marking the end of the legal battle regarding the road.

“We applaud the Supreme Court’s dismissal of a petition for certiorari. This is a just decision, and a win for the local environment. From the beginning, the wetland impacts of building CR-595 through the wild interior of Marquette County were too substantial to be lawfully permitted,” said Kathleen Heideman of the UPEC Mining Action Group. “Yet the EPA did not ‘veto’ the project; ‘veto’ was simply a hyperbolic term invented by lawyers representing the Road Commission. The decision of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals makes it clear that the Road Commission and Eagle Mine walked away from CR-595 rather than pursue federal permitting, under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. We urge concerned citizens to read the court’s actual decision.”

While Miller did not have any insights into the rationale behind the court declining to review the case, he believes the construction of CR 595 would have benefited the area and that the road commission “recognized that building County Road 595 would serve the community.”

The construction of the road, Miller said, would have made “the streets of Marquette County safer, since CR 595 would bypass busy city streets in favor of a rural, less-dangerous route.”

The road would also have been “better for the environment, since it would have drastically cut down on the mileage these trucks would have had to traverse going back and forth between the mine and the mill, which would have reduced the air pollution and energy usage required to otherwise mine the nickel that is found at the Eagle Mine,” Miller said.

However, the proposed road would have crossed 22 rivers and streams, “destroying approximately 25 acres of wetlands, directly impacting 122 wetland complexes, and bisecting a major wildlife corridor, fragmenting both habitat and hydrology,” according to the Upper Peninsula Environmental Coalition Mining Action Group, formerly known as Save the Wild UP.

“Clearly designed to start at Eagle Mine and end at the Humboldt Mill, the road would serve a single foreign corporation,” the group’s website states. “It was not designed to benefit the public.”

Due to this, CR 595 was “strongly opposed by a coalition of concerned citizens, local residents, tribal members, watersheds and regional environmental organizations,” according to statements from the Mining Action Group.

“The Upper Peninsula Environmental Coalition (UPEC) is satisfied the EPA decision on the denial of a permit to build CR-595 was upheld by the Supreme Court through its refusal to hear the case,” Horst Schmidt, president of the Upper Peninsula Environmental Coalition, said in an email.