Two local Citizen Groups challenge a wetlands permit allowing New England Wind, LLC to install twenty wind turbines and a four mile access road on the Hoosac Mountain Range in northwestern Massachusetts.

Development plans called for culverts to be built over a number of intermittent streams. An administrative magistrate at the Division of Administrative Law Appeals recommended that the Department of Environmental Protection revoke the wetlands permit, because the plans would unlawfully interfere with protected wetland assets and the buffer zones around them. The acting commissioner of the DEP rejected the magistrate’s recommended rulings, finding that the project would affect only the buffer zones, and that the regulations allegedly violated did not apply to buffer zones.

The acting commissioner’s decision was approved by a Superior Court judge. The Citizen Groups appealed, and both sides requested direct appellate review by the SJC.

1. Environmental protection law: Whether the acting commissioner was correct, as a matter of law, that culvert construction work in the buffer zones around wetland assets is not subject to the same regulations as the wetlands themselves.

2. Administrative law: Whether the acting commissioner offered a sufficiently detailed basis for rejecting the magistrate’s conclusion that the proposed work would impact the wetland assets themselves.