OCEAN CITY, MD - The federal government has asked a U.S. District Court Judge to partially dismiss a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), citing a similar offshore wind lawsuit in Rhode Island.
Ocean City and numerous co-plaintiffs first filed their lawsuit against the federal government in October of 2024 over the approval of offshore wind company U.S. Wind’s plans for wind turbines off of Delmarva’s coast. The lawsuit claimed U.S. Wind’s plans and the government’s approval, issued under the Biden Administration, were not in compliance with numerous federal agency rules and regulations.
On January 17, 2025, the federal government filed a motion of partial dismissal in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, according to court records. Specifically, the government argued that two of Ocean City’s claims against them were null. First was the allegation that BOEM violated the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) and the second that BOEM violated the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA) in its approval of U.S. Wind’s proposed project.
Granting approval for a third-party project (like U.S. Wind’s) that could hypothetically violate those acts in the future did not constitute actual or present violations by the government, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) argued.
After the transition to the Trump Administration, the government continued asking the court for the partial dismissal. On March 31, the federal defendants filed a reply in support of the Motion for Partial Dismissal, according to court records.
On April 8, the DOJ sent a notice to the District Court in Maryland to bring their attention to a separate lawsuit against BOEM challenging the government’s approval of another project off the coast of Rhode Island. That separate suit argued BOEM violated the same two acts in its approval of the Rhode Island project- the MBTA and the CZMA.
The government sought dismissal of those two counts in that case as well. On Monday, a District Court judge in Washington D.C. sided with the federal government in the Rhode Island case. If that federal judge ruled in favor of the partial dismissal, so too should the judge in the U.S. WInd case, the DOJ argued in their April 8 filing.
“Due to the substantial similarity of the Revolution Wind case…and Judge Lamberth’s order dismissing those MBTA and CZMA claims provides further support for dismissing the MBTA and CZMA claims here,” the DOJ’s filing concludes.
Should the U.S. District Court judge rule in favor of dismissing the two complaints, six allegations would still remain in Ocean City’s suit against the Department of the Interior.