Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

> Ain't that the truth.  Probably the first thing a judge is going to look
> at  is if you jumped properly through all the hoops to get to court.
> It's  supposedly so that people have tried every other option first,
> before tying  up the court system.  But I think the USFS in particular
> likes to wear  people down with administrative hoops.
I doubt that the judges even look at them until some clerk ascertains that
you've exhausted your administrative hearing options.  The entire
procedure is detailed out when you ask how you can protest the action of a
federal agency.  It tells you right in black and white that you have to
complain in an administrative hearing at the level of the particular
agency, and if they don't find for you (gee, that's a duh), you have to
appeal it to a district level.  (In most cases, that's another duh.)  And
of course, those letters of denying one's appeal are what show up on the
public links.  But one has to have those to even ask for a judicial
review--if you don't have them, they just send you back to the
administrative hearing level.  What they don't tell you is how many months
(or years) this process can grind on.  By the time you get to a judge,
your case is ancient history.

Another thing that utterly amazed me going through the process is how many
people from the agency they would send to EVERY session--we had two or
three rounds with the judge, and each time, the agency sent half a dozen
people, most of whom never said a word, and some of whom were not even
connected with the case.  I think they sent anyone that any of the ride
managers involved had ever so much as said hello to in the hallway. 
Invariably they came in separate vehicles (or at most two to a
vehicle)--it was a round trip of well over 300 miles, so all of those
vehicles went at taxpayer expense, and all of those people were drawing
salaries at taxpayer expense to go warm chairs in a conference room or a
courtroom.  The entire process was appalling from the perspective of
federal waste--I can only imagine it magnified several times over for more
major cases.  (I'll bet they didn't get lunch at McDonald's like we did,
either.)  We poor folks had to carpool--we didn't have a direct pipeline
into the taxpayers' pockets with which to orchestrate a show of force.

Heidi


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It is how we "feel" deep inside that matters, cause each of us knows the
truth, regardless of how we try make it complicated.  It just isn't.
~ Frank Solano

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