Anchorage Daily News

JUNEAU -- The widow of a federal biologist who sued the U.S. Forest Service and won now wants to look at the records concerning her husband's firing.

Marketa Ith is suing the federal agency for Glen Ith's records. The agency has refused to release them.

Glen Ith died in his sleep in March two weeks after being fired. He was 48.

Ith sued the Forest Service in federal court in 2006 for illegally building roads in the Tongass National Forest. He discovered that the agency was building bridges and repairing logging roads for timber sales that had not been approved.

He accused the Forest Service of trying to promote logging by avoiding the required study and public process.

Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics in Eugene, Oregon, said Ith is the "only Forest Service employee in history to sue his employer and win an environmental case."

"For his efforts, Glen was reassigned, investigated, suspended, and had his job terminated," he said.

The Forest Service denied Marketa Ith the documents on the basis of attorney-client and deliberative process privileges, which are exempt under public records law.

However, she maintains that those privileges don't apply to documents created in the course of government misconduct.

Glen Ith's lawsuit resulted in a judge ordering the government to stop work on two logging roads in the Tongass because the agency had not done the proper studies on how the construction would affect the environment.

A lawyer for the Forest Service argued that the road work was routine maintenance that didn't require an environmental study.

The roads went through stands of old-growth timber.

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