Opinion ID: 517580
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: direct environmental claims

Text: 8 The HWTC II, 861 F.2d 277, court did find standing for the organization as representative of one member firm; that firm, HWTC alleged, was injured as a consumer of the oil subject to the challenged regulations. HWTC asserted that the firm's facilities for receiving used oil are injured by adulterated or contaminated used oils, and that it is expensive to test every tankload. HWTC II, 861 F.2d at 281. More stringent EPA regulations would tend to protect against this sort of injury. 9 HWTC's charter states that it aims, among other things, to promote the protection of the environment through the adoption of environmentally sound practices and methods of destroying and treating hazardous wastes. Id. 861 F.2d at 285-86. The court in HWTC II had no doubt of [HWTC's] bona fides and held that the member firm's consumer interest was germane to the environmental organizational purpose. Id. The germaneness test requires mere pertinence between litigation subject and organizational purpose. Id. Relying on the reasoning in Humane Society of the United States v. Hodel, 840 F.2d 45, 58-60 (D.C.Cir.1988), the HWTC II, 861 F.2d 277, panel concluded that HWTC had standing to represent the consumer environmental interest there raised. HWTC II, 861 F.2d at 286. 10 According to affidavits attached to the supplemental briefs of petitioners, HWTC added two individuals as members on October 12, 1988. HWTC alleges direct environmental harm to these two individuals, Adolph Chilek and Larry Coogan, from the EPA actions challenged in No. 88-1177, and in Nos. 87-1487 and 87-1548, respectively. Chilek owns a homestead located directly on top of the Boling Salt Dome in Texas. Petitioner HWTC Supplemental Brief at 7 (No. 88-1177). Coogan lives and works near St. Mary's kiln in Michigan. Supplemental Brief of Petitioners at 6-7 (Nos. 87-1487, 87-1548). By asserting the interests of these new members, HWTC seeks to bring the organization within HWTC II 's consumer environmental injury holding. 11 The EPA has moved to strike the affidavits that allege the membership of Chilek and Coogan in HWTC and their threatened injuries. We agree with the EPA that it would circumvent the time limit on filing petitions for review under RCRA, 42 U.S.C. Sec. 6976(a)(1) (1982), to permit these new members, at this late date, to establish standing for HWTC. Under the cited time prescription, a party must file a petition for review of a regulation within ninety days of promulgation of that regulation. 12 Neither Chilek nor Coogan was a member when HWTC filed its petitions for review or at any other time during the two relevant RCRA ninety-day time frames. The regulations at issue in No. 88-1177 were published in the Federal Register on December 10, 1987, and HWTC filed a timely petition on March 2, 1988. The notice of extension at issue in Nos. 87-1487 and 87-1548 was published in the Federal Register on September 15, 1987, and HWTC filed a timely petition on October 6, 1987. Both Chilek and Coogan would be time-barred if they asserted their claims as individuals on October 12, 1988. 13 Under Hunt v. Washington State Advertising Commission, 432 U.S. 333, 97 S.Ct. 2434, 53 L.Ed.2d 383 (1977), an organization's standing turns on its members' standing to sue in their own right. Id. at 343, 97 S.Ct. at 2441. Although the interests Chilek and Coogan assert may rank with the consumer interest held sufficient for standing in HWTC II, 861 F.2d 277, these individuals did not file timely petitions for review. Petitioners assert that the time prescription, section 6976(a)(1), sets merely a notice deadline. Petitioners' Memorandum in Opposition to Respondent's Motion to Strike Affidavit at 8 (Nos. 87-1487, 87-1548). Circuit precedent instructs, however, that the time direction in question reflects  'the important purpose of imparting finality into the administrative process, thereby conserving administrative resources.'  Eagle-Picher Indus., Inc. v. EPA, 759 F.2d 905, 911 (D.C.Cir.1985) (quoting Natural Resources Defense Council v. NRC, 666 F.2d 595, 602 (D.C.Cir.1981)). 14 To allow a new and improved HWTC to establish a judicially cognizable challenge several months beyond RCRA's prescription period would undercut  'a deliberate congressional choice to impose statutory finality on agency orders.'  Id. (quoting City of Rochester v. Bond, 603 F.2d 927, 935 (D.C.Cir.1979)). Were we to agree with HWTC, an organization without current standing to sue could file a timely petition for review and thereby extend the statutory period while it seeks out and signs up a person who could have sued but did not do so within the prescribed time. Such an approach to timeliness would render the finality of agency action an uncertain, sometimes thing. 15 Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union v. OSHRC, 671 F.2d 643 (D.C.Cir.), cert. denied, 459 U.S. 905, 103 S.Ct. 206, 74 L.Ed.2d 165 (1982), is not precedent for the position petitioners here urge. In that case we allowed a petitioner to name the proper party respondent outside the sixty-day review period provided by the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Id. at 653. The petitioner had inadvertently named the incorrect respondent, and the amendment we permitted simply corrected the petition to read as it should have and could have read within the statutory period. In these cases, in contrast, HWTC seeks to allege facts (the memberships of Chilek and Coogan) necessary for standing that it could not have alleged truthfully within the statutory period. Although a court has the power to allow or require the plaintiff to supply, by amendment to the complaint or by affidavits, further particularized allegations of fact deemed supportive of plaintiff's standing, Warth v. Seldin, 422 U.S. 490, 501-02, 95 S.Ct. 2197, 2206-07, 45 L.Ed.2d 343 (1975), accord Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727, 736 n. 8, 92 S.Ct. 1361, 1366 n. 8, 31 L.Ed.2d 636 (1972), a petitioner asserting organizational standing cannot succeed if the new affiliation it pleads came about only after the statutory time limit. 4 III. ENVIRONMENTAL CONSUMER CLAIMS 16 Lax EPA regulation of hazardous waste disposal in salt domes, HWTC maintains, creates a dilemma for some of its members, and both horns entail economic injury: [M]embers that provide cleanup services or waste brokering for customers will either lose business if they do not use geologic repositories, or face greater potential liability for disposal in unprotective geologic repositories. Reply Brief of Petitioner at 4 (No. 88-1177). At oral argument HWTC vigorously asserted that members would be forced to utilize salt domes and become consumers of EPA-permitted lax disposal methods. In the event these allegedly unsafe repositories leak, HWTC continued, members using them would face strict, joint, and several liability under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), 42 U.S.C. Secs. 9601-9657 (1982). 17 This potential liability, however, insofar as it is incurred voluntarily, is not an injury that  'fairly can be traced to the challenged action,'  as required by Supreme Court decisions interpreting Article III of the Constitution. Valley Forge Christian College v. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Inc., 454 U.S. 464, 472, 102 S.Ct. 752, 758, 70 L.Ed.2d 700 (1982) (quoting Simon v. Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Org., 426 U.S. 26, 41, 96 S.Ct. 1917, 1925-26, 48 L.Ed.2d 450 (1976)). Rather, to the extent that this injury is self-inflicted, it is so completely due to the [complainant's] own fault as to break the causal chain. 5 Unlike the consumer firm in HWTC II, 861 F.2d 277, members choosing geologic repositories can avoid the threatened injury by choosing safer methods. If they instead choose disposal methods they believe to be unsafe, they presumably so do in their own self-interest. It is of no moment for the inquiry at hand that they may be forced by competitive pressures to choose unsafe methods; we cannot deem them injured, in the sense relevant under controlling precedent, by their own choice to compete in kind.