Berkey Williams LLP has been privileged to assist the Mattaponi Tribe in Virginia in its successful fight to stop the construction of a reservoir dam on the Mattaponi River. You can read more about this here. For millennia, the Tribe has depended on the River for shad fishing, cultural ceremonies and spiritual meaning. It is one of the last free-flowing rivers in the East. A water storage reservoir threatened to destroy the Tribe’s connection to the River and deplete its fishery. Following several years of federal and state court litigation, on May 1, 2009, the City of Newport News, which had developed the plans to build the reservoir, announced that it was suspending work on the project. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also withdrew the federal permit for the project. These actions are the culmination of the Tribe’s 15-year legal and political effort to preserve the Mattaponi River from destruction by the reservoir. Curtis Berkey of ABWW represented the Tribe on the unique federal Indian law issues in the case, which involved efforts to enforce a 1677 Treaty between the Tribe and Great Britain and related issues of environmental law and cultural resource protection.
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