Every reopening of the comment period, traced against the substation that went down to cause it. The pattern is easier to see laid end to end.
The docket opened on March 3 with a standard sixty-day comment window. Under ordinary circumstances it would have closed on May 2 and the rescission would have moved to final rule sometime in July.
It has now been open for one hundred and seventy-one days.
What follows is every extension on the record, paired with the outage that triggered it. The Fish and Wildlife Service has not disputed any of these dates. It has also not commented on them.
March 3
Comment period opens
Sixty days. Scheduled to close May 2. Fourteen comments filed in the first week, all from ranching associations.
Extension 1 · April 29
Sweetwater County, Wyo.
Substation fire takes the eastern portal node offline for six days. Close date moves to May 23.
Extension 2 · May 20
Rio Blanco County, Colo.
Four days down. Close date moves to June 11. The first outage to occur inside the final week of a window.
Extension 3 · June 9
Mesa County, Colo.
Two transformer banks lost outside Grand Junction. Nine days. Close date moves to July 5.
Extensions 4 through 9 · June 24 to August 2
Six outages across four states
Each within seventy-two hours of a scheduled close. Combined downtime of thirty-one days. Combined extension of one hundred and twenty-one.
Extension 10 · August 8
Carbon County, Mont.
Five days. The Service's notice of extension does not name a cause, listing only "circumstances outside agency control."
Extension 11 · August 19
Sublette County, Wyo.
Seven days. Close date moves to September 25. As of publication, the docket remains open.
What the pattern actually shows
Eleven outages. Eleven extensions. In nine of the eleven, the fire began inside the last seventy-two hours of the comment window, and in four it began on the final scheduled day.
Days the docket has stayed open
171
Against a statutory window of sixty. The rescission cannot proceed to final rule until it closes.
A career attorney at another agency, who reviewed the timeline at our request and asked not to be named because they are not authorized to discuss another agency's docket, said the sequence was "the most efficient use of the Administrative Procedure Act" they had encountered.
Asked whether they meant that as praise, they said they were still deciding.
The Service has declined to say whether it intends to seek a waiver of the reopening requirement, a step that would require it to state on the record that the interruptions were foreseeable.