[PUBLISH]

In the

United States Court of Appeals For the Eleventh Circuit

____________________

No. 22-11079 ____________________

CENTER FOR A SUSTAINABLE COAST, KAREN GRAINEY, Plaintiffs-Appellants, versus

U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS, DISTRICT COMMANDER AND DISTRICT ENGINEER, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Savannah District,

Defendants-Appellees.

____________________ USCA11 Case: 22-11079 Document: 42-1 Date Filed: 05/02/2024 Page: 2 of 26

2 Opinion of the Court 22-11079

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia D.C. Docket No. 2:19-cv-00058-LGW-BWC ____________________

Before GRANT, TJOFLAT, Circuit Judges, and HUFFAKER,∗ District Judge. GRANT, Circuit Judge: This is a classic procedural rights case. The Center for a Sustainable Coast, along with its member, Karen Grainey, sued the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, upset that the Corps had issued a dock permit without full environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act. The Center established injury by showing that several of its members regularly visit Cumberland Island, where the dock is sited, and suffer an ongoing aesthetic injury on those visits. The Center also showed that the environmental review the Corps skipped could have protected that interest, at least in theory. That should have been enough. For procedural rights cases, though injury in fact remains a firm requirement, standards for both causation and redressability are relaxed. So long as a plaintiff alleges that the challenged (or omitted) procedure protects a concrete interest, causation and redressability typically follow—

∗ The Honorable R. Austin Huffaker, Jr., United States District Judge for the

Middle District of Alabama, sitting by designation. USCA11 Case: 22-11079 Document: 42-1 Date Filed: 05/02/2024 Page: 3 of 26

22-11079 Opinion of the Court 3

even though we can’t know whether that procedure, correctly performed, would have resulted in the substantive outcome that the plaintiff desires. Here, though, the district court dismissed the lawsuit, concluding that the Center did not have standing because its harm was not redressable. The dock, it said, had already been built, so the court’s ability to provide relief had ended along with construction. We disagree. To start, the allegations here mirror those in other cases where this Court has found standing. The Center has identified a concrete aesthetic interest and pleaded that the NEPA process would protect that interest. Directing full NEPA review would thus redress the Center’s procedural injury. Plus, the permit here does more than allow construction—it authorizes the dock’s continued existence. So this case is not like the narrow set of procedural rights cases in which the plaintiffs’ claims were dismissed as moot because the challenged project was already completed. We thus hold that the Center had standing to bring at least one of its procedural rights claims. But we find the Center’s administrative record argument premature for consider