Source: http://www.acoel.org/?tag=/Waters+of+the+United+States
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 08:11:51+00:00

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In a rare moment of clarity in the benighted history of the Waters of the United States or WOTUS rule, a unanimous Supreme Court declared that jurisdiction to review the WOTUS rule lies in the District Courts and not the Courts of Appeal. The immediate effect of the January 22 ruling in National Assn. of Manufacturers v. Dept. of Defense is to lift the nationwide stay of the rule imposed by the Sixth Circuit—which held that the appellate courts have original jurisdiction over the rule—thus reigniting a lot of dormant trial court challenges.
The Clean Water Act applies to “navigable” waters, which is defined simply as “waters of the United States, including the territorial seas.” EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers administer the CWA, and have tried without much success to refine this vague definition. The latest attempt is the WOTUS rule, adopted by the Obama EPA in 2015. The issue in National Assn. of Manufacturers is not whether that attempt hits the mark, but in which court should challenges be heard.
As noted in Bob Brubaker’s take on this case, the Court looked to the plain language of the statute, and to context when further explanation is needed. The CWA extends original jurisdiction to the Circuits for EPA “approving or promulgating any effluent limitation or other limitation.” The government argued that the WOTUS rule falls within “any . . . other limitation.” The Supreme Court rejected that argument, holding that such other limitations must be related to effluent limitations, and the WOTUS rule just establishes a definition that would apply generally to the scope of CWA. The Court also rejected applicability of another CWA basis for Circuit Court jurisdiction advanced by the government, “issuing or denying any [NPDES] permit,” concluding simply that the WOTUS rule is not the same as permit issuance.
So what difference does it make if a trial judge or an appellate judge makes the initial decision on WOTUS? WOTUS has drawn a multitude of challenges in both the District Courts and Courts of Appeals, including some in which plaintiffs filed in both courts to be on the safe side. The case will end up at the Supreme Court anyway, right?
True, but consider that the Sixth Circuit consolidated all the challenges in other Circuits and issued a decision that applied across the country. The district court litigation has not been consolidated, and some cases have come to different conclusions, with many remaining to be litigated. So, we can expect years of litigation in many different courts, followed by years of appeals heard by the Circuits, and finally to the Supreme Court . . . again.
But wait, Scott Pruitt’s EPA has initiated a rulemaking process to rescind and replace the WOTUS rule, so wouldn’t that moot the pending challenges to the rule? It would not. EPA has announced it is delaying the effective date of the 2015 rule for two more years to allow the Agency to develop its replacement. But, in the meantime, the 2015 WOTUS rule remains in place.
The practical result is that the current round of cases in the District Courts will continue, followed -- if not accompanied -- by a new round of litigation challenging the proposed change of effective date, and the proposed rescission and replacement rules. Safe to say there will be no certainty on the definition of WOTUS and the scope of Clean Water Act jurisdiction for many years to come.
With a flourish of his pen, on February 28, President Trump signed an Executive Order aimed at dismantling the ill-fated Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule. The rule was the latest attempt by EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers to bring some clarity to the limits of federal authority under the Clean Water Act. Clarity in this area has been elusive, and though many were unhappy with the rule, no one benefits from the current state of confusion.
The uncertainty begins with the Clean Water Act, which Congress said applies to “navigable” waters and then helpfully defined navigable to mean “waters of the United States.” The agencies and the courts have struggled ever since to figure out when wetlands are jurisdictional. The courts have not helped. In Rapanos v. U.S., a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court found the Government had overreached, but could not agree as to why. Justice Scalia, writing for a plurality of the Court, would limit jurisdiction to “relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water,” excluding intermittent or ephemeral channels and most drainage ditches. In a concurring opinion, Justice Kennedy invoked a “significant nexus” test whereby jurisdiction should apply if a hydrologic connection between a wetland and a navigable water could be demonstrated. Later courts have tried to follow both tests, with mixed results.
In the meantime, property owners still would like to develop their property, and the Government still has to apply the law. The Trump Executive Order gives direction that a new WOTUS rule should follow the Scalia test, but that doesn’t reflect the way jurisdictional determinations are made today. Suffice to say that the Kennedy significant nexus test will still be in play for the near to intermediate term, and a prudent developer will include a wetlands determination as a key part of the due diligence for the project.
Section 101(f) of the Clean Water Act (CWA) creates a “national policy” that “to the maximum extent possible” the Act “shall” be implemented in a manner that “prevent[s] needless duplication and unnecessary delays at all levels of government.” (33 U.S.C. § 1251(f)) Although this and the other overarching goals in § 101 of the Act were “no exercise in boilerplate rhetoric,” (William Harsha, Jr. (Ohio), Congressional Record 16520 (Jun. 3, 1976)) they are typically ignored. Instead of ignoring § 101 of the CWA, however, a strong argument can be made that courts should remand or even vacate an agency’s action if it can be shown that such an action needlessly duplicates or unnecessarily delays efforts to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical, [or] biological integrity of the Nation’s waters. (33 U.S.C. § 1251(a)) This would further Congress’s intent as codified in §§ 101(a) & (f) of the CWA.
Consider the ongoing controversy about the recent “Waters of the United States” rule (Rule). (80 Fed. Reg. 37,054 (Jun. 29, 2015)) Many have said much about this Rule, focusing on lofty constitutional arguments, erudite discussions of which and when Supreme Court opinions control, and the finer points of APA jurisprudence. But few have argued that the automatic implementation of its increased jurisdictional scope would contravene § 101(f). Because the Rule seeks to increase the federal government’s jurisdiction under the CWA, without more, coverage of the Act’s regulatory requirements would immediately attach to previously non-jurisdictional waters. This inextricable link of new jurisdiction and implementation could lead to disruptive delays and associated problems.
The shift of focus from traditional waters of the United States to stormwater conveyances could divert and dilute scarce local government resources. This could delay meaningful water quality improvements for the lakes and rivers people actually use to swim and fish, and use for potable water could become more difficult to attain and then sustain. Such delays would serve no environmental benefit and would be especially unjustified where local governments only use those stormwater conveyances for stormwater management or for treating discharges from them into traditional waters of the United States. Indeed, until promulgation of the Waters of the United States Rule, stormwater conveyances have historically been excluded from the CWA’s jurisdictional reach.
William H. Green thanks Mohammad O. Jazil for his contributions to this post.
In June 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers released a rule to define “waters of the United States,” affectionately referred to as WOTUS. This definition goes to the scope of federal jurisdiction over wetlands and other waters that are not obviously free flowing and navigable. An in-depth analysis of the rule can be found here.
The rule hasn’t exactly played to rave reviews. It attracted over one million comments. Many complained the rule represents gross government overreach. Others criticize the rule for not being protective enough. The rule is also the subject of multiple challenges around the country, some filed before the rule was officially released. The lead case is now pending before the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. The Court of Appeals accepted original jurisdiction over a challenge to the rule based, in part, on the failure of the rule’s “distance limitations” to comport with good science, and on the inconsistency of the final rule with the proposed rule. The Court of Appeals thought enough of petitioners’ arguments that it stayed implementation of the new rule.
On this first anniversary of the rule, we thought a brief summary of the controversies surrounding the rule and current status might be helpful. The attached article, newly published in The Water Report, attempts to do just that. Many thanks to Diego Atencio, a third year law student at the University of Oregon and a summer associate at DWT, for his assistance in writing the article.
Anyone who reads this blog must have seen the explosion of reports in the trade press that EPA ignored significant criticism from the Army Corps of Engineers in promulgating its Waters of the United States rule. (For a useful summary of the rule and an analysis of some of the legal issues that might be raised in potential litigation, see Susan Cooke’s post from earlier this month.) I have not seen the memoranda, but, based on the press reports, it appears that EPA ignored criticism both that it was too stringent in some areas and that it was not sufficiently stringent in others. If EPA’s purpose wasn’t simply to make the rule more – or less – stringent, why did it ignore the Corps and try to bury the disagreement?
I noted earlier this year and as far back as 2010, EPA’s tendency towards self-righteousness. I also pointed out how counterproductive that self-righteousness is; it makes it more difficult for EPA to achieve its goals. While I still think that EPA is self-righteous, hubris seems the apt description today.
Caligula was the cruelest and craziest of a string of deranged Roman emperors. Among his meanest and most irrational acts was to have edicts carved at the top of tall columns and then punish unsuspecting violators, who had no way to decipher the obscure laws etched far over their heads. For this and other cruel acts, he was killed by his own Praetorian Guards.
For all its virtues, American environmental law has traces of this same sort of lunacy and unfair lack of certainty and notice to its regulated citizens. Examples include the chronic uncertainty, after over three decades, about what constitutes a “solid” or “hazardous waste” under RCRA, our basic waste management law, and what constitutes a “major modification” that triggers the onerous PSD Program of the Clean Air Act.
Nowhere is this uncertainty more glaring than in the Clean Water Act (CWA). More than 40 years after its passage, what constitutes a vaguely-defined “water of the U.S.” regulated under the Act is now murkier than ever. At this juncture, however, EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers have a unique opportunity to provide clarity, certainty, and consistency to this key concept by taking three critical actions that would (1) properly clarify by rule the nature and scope of CWA-regulated waters; (2) clearly describe the process for making and also tracking “jurisdictional determinations” made under such rule; and (3) provide affected parties the right to seek prompt judicial review of any final approved determination.
EPA and the Corps have undertaken the first key task by an ongoing rulemaking set to be completed in 2015. While aspects of the agencies’ initial proposed rule were problematic, calls by some quarters to ban or “ditch the rule” altogether are misguided. EPA and the Corps already have on the books vague rules defining regulated waters that are inconsistent with the Supreme Court‘s 2006 Rapanos decision and subsequent case law, and it is in no one’s interest simply to maintain the current status quo of uncertainty and inconsistency. As Chief Justice Roberts emphasized in Rapanos, if the agencies had adopted reasonable rules clarifying the scope of regulated waters a decade ago, as originally planned, the confusing result in Rapanos would likely have been avoided.
In finalizing such rule, however, the agencies should recall that their role and legal duty is to identify and implement the intent of Congress under the 1972 Act, not embark on a policy making exercise about what additional areas should be regulated as a matter of public policy. They should also strive to increase, not decrease, the clarity and certainty of what constitutes regulated wetlands and other waters. For example, aspects of the proposed rule properly and helpfully exclude groundwater and minor ephemeral drainages but then elsewhere create confusion and inconsistency by suggesting that subsurface hydrologic connections and overly broadly defined tributaries can still make an area jurisdictional. Overly expansive proposed approaches to determining “adjacency” and aggregating numerous small areas for their cumulative nexus to downstream navigable waters similarly increase, rather than lessen, the current regulatory confusion and uncertainty. Whether the pending rulemaking is a helpful clarification, or just yet another Caligula’s column, depends on how the agencies resolve those and other problematic provisions in the final rule.
The agencies should also use this occasion to develop a specific process and procedures for making approved “jurisdictional determinations (JDs)” under the final rule. That process should include improved procedures for regulated entities to present evidence that an area is not a “jurisdictional water” under the Act, and for the agencies to track and publically post all final approved JDs as they are made, so they can be used to ensure consistency and inform the public about past determinations in an area.
The third critical fix to make this JD process fair and transparent is to provide that final agency jurisdictional determinations are subject to judicial review. The Corps’ rules already provide for an administrative appeal of approved JDs, as well as proffered or denied 404 permits. 33 CFR Part 331. Inconsistent with that appeal process, however, the Corps and EPA have taken the position that their final decisions on JDs, unlike permitting decisions, are not judicially reviewable “final agency actions” under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The 5th Circuit agreed with that position in July 2014 in Belle Company, LLC v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is subject to a pending Petition for Certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a pending appeal of this issue before the 8th Circuit in Hawkes Co. v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, two judges during oral argument on December 11, 2014 indicated disagreement with Belle, suggested the agencies’ position is inconsistent with the Corps’ administrative appeal rules, and described this claimed exemption from judicial review as “government by regulatory tyranny.” An eventual adverse ruling by the 8th Circuit would greatly increase the odds of the Supreme Court granting certiorari in the Belle case or later in the Hawkes case. The agencies could avoid that uncertainty and the cost, effort, and risk of litigating this issue before the Supreme Court by simply confirming by rule that final approved JDs are final agency actions subject to judicial review under the APA. That confirmation would be consistent with the Corps’ administrative appeal rules and the Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling in Sackett v. EPA, which held that EPA compliance orders (that have a parallel practical effect) are subject to judicial review.
EPA and the Corps are at a crossroads. They can decide to make the definition and identification of jurisdictional “waters of the U.S.” subject to the Clean Water Act clear, consistent, based on Congress’ original intent in 1972, and subject to prompt, objective judicial review. Or, they can decide to keep that process complex and ambiguous, expanded beyond Congress’ original intent, determined case-by-case in the varying judgment of agency personnel, and unreviewable by any court – in effect etched on a proverbial Caligula’s column. The choice should be clear. It’s time to knock that column down.

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