Opinion ID: 3009961
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Pre-Complaint Discharge Violations

Text: The district court held that pre-complaint discharge violations not included in plaintiffs' notice letter cannot be included in the suit unless listed in a subsequent notice. For this reason, the district court granted defendant's summary judgment motion as to forty-four pre-complaint discharge violations.12 We do not agree. For the reasons stated in Part III, supra, we hold that a notice letter which includes a list of discharge violations, by parameter, provides sufficient information for the recipients of the notice to identify violations of the same type (same parameter, same outfall) occurring during and after the period covered by the notice letter. The facts of this dispute support this holding. Less than two months after receiving the plaintiffs' 60-day notice letter, the State filed a Notice of Civil Penalty Assessment against Hercules for discharge violations of the permit. Although many of the sixty individual violations included in the State's initial list were exactly the same violation as included in the plaintiff's 60-day notice letter, there were several that were not on the plaintiffs' list. Some of these additional do not therefore address this aspect of the district court's opinion. 12 This includes 23 pre-notice discharge violations and 21 post-notice discharge violations. violations occurred in months during which plaintiffs did not identify any discharge violation. We infer from this comparison that the State examined Hercules' DMRs on file to achieve a more comprehensive list of discharge violations. Almost two years later, in March 1991, Hercules and the State executed an ACO under which Hercules agreed to pay the State $600,000 as a penalty for 115 discharge violations of its permit. The fact that the State's list of Hercules' discharge violations grew from 60 to 115 in the final ACO demonstrates that once the State received the citizen letter noting that Hercules was violating its permit, the State committed resources to monitoring Hercules' compliance and, in particular, to monitoring Hercules' compliance with the noticed parameters. We hold, therefore, that the district court erred in granting Hercules' summary judgment motion as to the forty-four pre-complaint discharge violations not included in plaintiffs' notice letter. We will remand this case to the district court to reinstate those alleged violations which are of the same type (same parameter, same outfall) as the alleged violations included in the plaintiffs' 60-day notice letter.13