By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
A Bonner County couple’s appeal of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decision classifying a portion of their property as wetlands is moving forward after a decision Dec. 2 that found part of their dispute had merit.
Rebecca and Caleb Linck pushed back with an administrative appeal of the wetlands finding in July, after the Corps claimed authority under the Clean Water Act over more than an acre of their 4.7-acre property in Kootenai, arguing several areas were functioning as a single wetland and had a connection to “navigable waters,” such as an unnamed tributary of Boyer Slough.
However, according to the Pacific Legal Foundation, “Army Corps staffers ignored major physical barriers — including a decades-old road — to allege that areas of the Lincks’ property could be combined with land on a separate property to qualify as a unified wetland subject to federal control.”
The appeal cited a pair of landmark U.S. Supreme Court rulings that centered on a Priest Lake area couple’s challenge that the Clean Water Act did not apply to portions of their property that had been classified as wetlands, but which they had backfilled.
In 2012, justices ruled in Sackett vs. Environmental Protection Agency that the EPA’s application of the Clean Water Act could be appealed in federal court under the Administrative Procedure Act. In 2023, following an appeal from the Sacketts, the Supreme Court decided that the Clean Water Act applies to “only those relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water ‘forming geographic[al] features’ that are described in ordinary parlance as ‘streams, oceans, rivers and lakes.’”
In addition, the court ruled in 2023 that wetlands can only be defined as being “waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act when they have “‘a continuous surface connection to bodies that are ‘waters of the United States’ in their own right, so that there is no clear demarcation between ‘waters’ and wetlands.”
Using the Sackett rulings as precedent, the Lincks argued that the “alleged wetlands” were unconnected both to each other and any other “navigable waters,” therefore lacking a “continuous surface connection.”
In the conclusion to the Dec. 2 appeal decision document, the Corps determined that based on the “Sackett test,” the Lincks’ appeal would be remanded to the Walla Walla District engineer for more analysis. While the Lincks’ appeal is allowed to go forward, four other claims in the challenge were found to be lacking merit. When the appeal will be taken up again remains unspecified.
“The Supreme Court definitively ruled in Sackett that the EPA and U.S. Army Corps have limited power to regulate wetlands — not broad authority over any property in sight of a puddle,” stated Charles Yates, an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, which represented the Sacketts and currently represents the Lincks.
“This ruling demonstrates that U.S. Army Corps leadership recognizes the need to abide by the court’s ruling,” Yates added.
Applauded by the Pacific Legal Foundation as a rejection of the Corps’ “overreach,” others have criticized the rationale expressed by the court in the Sackett cases, which “dramatically narrowed the scope of the Clean Water Act, leaving nearly half of the country’s surface waters and wetlands without federal protection,” according to the organization Lawyers for Good Government.
The National Resource Defense Council described the 2023 Sackett ruling as a “catastrophic loss of federal protections for wetlands across the United States,” and in a March 2025 report found that “in the worst case, 70 million acres — 84% of the acreage of wetlands previously eligible for protection — could lose safeguards.”
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas represented the majority opinion in the 2023 Sackett decision; and, though, Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh and Sonia Sotomayor concurred that the Sacketts’ property was not subject to the Clean Water Act, they argued against the definitions in the ruling as overly broad.
“Natural barriers such as berms and dunes do not block all water flow and are in fact evidence of a regular connection between a water and a wetland,” Kavanaugh wrote.
“The scientific evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that wetlands separated from covered waters by those kinds of berms or barriers, for example, still play an important role in protecting neighboring and downstream waters, including by filtering pollutants, storing water and providing flood control,” he added. “In short, those adjacent wetlands may affect downstream water quality and flood control in many of the same ways that adjoining wetlands can.”
