Opinion ID: 2198217
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Informational Injury

Text: Informational injury is a claim that Friends raises with particularity for the first time on appeal. Friends posits that the District's failure to order Clark to prepare an EIS deprived Friends of information necessary to fulfill its organizational purpose, which is to educate the community about the environmental impacts of Clark's project. As Friends did not advance this argument in the Superior Court, we would be justified in disregarding it altogether. See, e.g., Barrera v. Wilson, 668 A.2d 871, 872 (D.C.1995). To the extent, however, that the specific informational injury claim is subsumed within Friends' general claim of interference with its mission, we think it suffices to say the following. To begin with, the concept of informational injury that Friends advances for standing purposes is an elusive one. It is true that the statutory requirement of an EIS is informational in nature. If the District determines that a proposed major action is likely to have substantial negative impact on the environment, if implemented, the proponent of the action must prepare an EIS describing and analyzing the impact. D.C.Code § 8-109.03(a). The District then must make the EIS available for public comment. See D.C.Code § 8-109.03(b). These provisions, however, do not confer on any and every person who happens to be interested an enforceable legal righti.e., standing to require preparation of an EIS merely upon a showing that the statutory conditions are met. In that respect, the DCEPA is unlike either a freedom of information statute that entitles any person with an interest in doing so to obtain government documents that are already in existence, or a statute that entitles any person to particular information upon request. Cf. Havens Realty Corp., 455 U.S. at 373-74, 102 S.Ct. 1114 (where statute confers on all persons an enforceable legal right to receive truthful information about available housing, testers posing as interested renters or purchasers who are given false information about housing availability suffer actual injury and have standing to sue for damages). If not everyone, then who is entitled to assert the deprivation of an ability to disseminate EIS information as a basis for standing to sue? The basic requirement of constitutional standing is a concrete and particularized injury in fact. For the inability of an organization to disseminate an EIS to amount to such an injury in the absence of a statutory entitlement to the document, it therefore is not enough that the organization has a special interest, Sierra Club, 405 U.S. at 739, 92 S.Ct. 1361, in the environment or in informing its members or supporters about environmental matters. If the threshold were set that low, virtually any plaintiff would be able to surmount it. See Foundation on Economic Trends v. Lyng, 291 U.S.App.D.C. 365, 370, 943 F.2d 79, 84 (1991) (observing that such a broad approach .... would potentially eliminate any standing requirement in NEPA cases, save when an organization was foolish enough to allege that it wanted the information for reasons having nothing to do with the environment); accord, Competitive Enter. Inst. v. National Highway Traffic Safety Admin., 284 U.S.App. D.C. 1, 16, 901 F.2d 107, 122 (1990) (To show injury-in-fact, an organization must allege more than a mere `setback to [its] abstract societal interests.') (quoting Havens, 455 U.S. at 378-79, 102 S.Ct. 1114). Havens, 455 U.S. at 379, 102 S.Ct. 1114, suggests that at a minimum, the organization must point to concrete ways in which [its] programmatic activities have been harmed by its inability to disseminate the information in an EIS for such informational harm to give rise to standing. Competitive Enter. Inst., 284 U.S.App.D.C. at 17, 901 F.2d at 123. The Circuit Court of Appeals added, in what appears to be a more restrictive formulation, that [a]llegations of injury to an organization's ability to disseminate information may be deemed sufficiently particular for standing purposes where that information is essential to the injured organization's activities, and where the lack of the information will render those activities infeasible. Id., 284 U.S.App.D.C. at 16, 901 F.2d at 122; accord, Animal Legal Defense Fund v. Espy, 306 U.S.App.D.C. 188, 194-95, 23 F.3d 496, 502-03 (1994). In the Superior Court, Friends did not respond to Clark's challenge to its standing by pointing to concrete ways in which its programmatic activities had been harmed by the District's failure to order an EIS. See note 4, supra. The record does not show such harm. Perhaps Friends' efforts to educate and organize its neighbors to protect environmental values in North Cleveland Park might be enhanced if Friends could disseminate the information that an EIS would contain, but informational standing requires more. It is not evident that the feasibility of Friends' organizing efforts is affected materially by the unavailability of an EIS. To the contrary, though it is not necessarily dispositive of the issue, is the fact that the record already contains a good deal of information, some of it developed by Friends itself, concerning the potential environmental impact of construction at 3883 Connecticut Avenue. Moreover, as shown by the reaction to its first lawsuit, Friends has proven itself adept at attracting public scrutiny to that project. We cannot conclude that Friends' inability to disseminate an EIS to its supporters constituted an injury in fact that might serve as a basis for standing.