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The Oahu residents fighting to halt Honolulu’s planned rail line are largely relying on the to help them do it. Federal records show that the act has successfully stopped a wide range of projects in recent years.

In April, a group of Honolulu residents sued the city, state and federal officials in an attempt to stop the $5.3 billion project from being built.

The landmark act widely known as NEPA was established in the late 1960s to outline specific environmental guidelines for government projects. For any project receiving federal monies, the act requires agencies to assess the environmental impact of the work they plan to do.

In litigation over a recent nine-year period, NEPA was used to stop nearly 100 projects. In 2009, the most recent year for which is available, federal records show that 97 NEPA-related cases were filed, with hundreds more pending from previous years. Fifteen projects were permanently halted in 2009, with two others temporarily stopped.

That same year, dozens of environmental assessments and environmental impact statements were determined to have been inadequate.

Those who aim to stop the long-planned Honolulu rail line argue that the environmental assessment related to that project was flawed, and they deliberately found a NEPA expert — an attorney who actually helped craft NEPA statutes— to back them up.

“The degree to which the Federal Transit Administration abdicated its responsibilities to the city and county, those are what we see as major vulnerabilities,” said Nicholas Yost, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, in a phone interview from San Francisco, where he is . “Where they appear to us to be particularly vulnerable is failure to pursue in detail alternatives other than heavy rail on a elevated concrete passageway. And, secondly, not looking at the whole of the project, while at the same time saying that it’s going to get extended at both ends.”

Honolulu rail officials have repeatedly said they expected to be sued given the scope of the project, and have expressed confidence that they have acted in accordance with the law throughout the planning process. Federal Transit Administration officials who are defendants in the case declined to comment on this or any other rail-related lawsuits against the FTA.

Earlier this year, a Circuit Court judge dismissed another lawsuit aimed at stopping the project.

While NEPA was invoked in more than 1,100 new cases between 2001 and 2009, few of the lawsuits had to do with rail projects. The Federal Transit Administration was the defendant in just one lawsuit out of 97 filed in 2009. Most years, the FTA faced just one or two NEPA related lawsuits, with a peak of 13 in 2001.

“Very little of what you see (has to do with rail),” Yost said. “You look at the cases filed in 2009. There’s only one case against the FTA. So it’s a small number, unlike for instance the Federal Highway Administration, which is one of the larger numbers.”

The agencies that were most frequently challenged in NEPA-related litigation in the past decade included the Federal Highway Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service and the Army Corps of Engineers.

Across a wide variety of agencies and projects, NEPA has strong teeth when it’s invoked. That’s especially true in the environmentally minded Ninth Circuit, which includes Hawaii, Yost says. Starting in the mid-90s, Yost’s office conducted its own survey of how NEPA cases were decided.

“We did our own count of what the disposition of NEPA cases was over a 10-year period in the ninth-circuit,” Yost said. “And in the ninth circuit, which is regarded as the most environmentally friendly of all the circuits, two out of every three environmental assessments were invalidated. One out of three environmental impact statements was invalidated. Those are high numbers.”

He attributes those numbers to the relative ease in convincing a judge that there are uncertainties worth resolving. At the very least, he says such doubt might spur a temporary injunction.

“It’s easy for a judge to say, ‘You know, I’m not sure I’m really on top of this but it seems to me that enough questions have been raised,'” Yost said.

It remains to be seen how judges will handle the Honolulu lawsuit, which also alleges violations of the Department of Transportation Act and the National Historic Preservation Act. Lawyers for the city formally responded to the lawsuit earlier this month, calling the allegations against the city “based on mischaracterizations of facts and/or law.”

“The city just listed possible defenses that any creative lawyer could imagine,” Yost said.

Now, all parties are waiting for the federal government’s response, which is due within weeks.

“At that point,” Yost said, “We’ll try to see what they’re admitting, what they’re denying, and just what their defenses are.”