Opinion ID: 183689
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Interference with State Policymaking

Text: Even if we were to find adequate review available in the commonwealth courts, we nonetheless would consider this case to be an improper candidate for Burford abstention. As we have said, the animating concern under Burford is the threat that federal courts will usurp the role of state administrative agencies in deciding issues of state law and policy that are committed in the first instance to expert administrative resolution. Patch, 167 F.3d at 24. In light of the intertwined state and federal interests implicated by RCRA, that concern does not obtain here. The Supreme Court's articulation of the Burford doctrine in NOPSI provides a convenient analytical framework for evaluating this interplay of interests. Accordingly, we first examine whether there are `difficult questions of state law bearing on policy problems of substantial public import whose importance transcends the result in the case ... at bar.' NOPSI, 491 U.S. at 361, 109 S.Ct. 2506 (quoting Colo. River, 424 U.S. at 814, 96 S.Ct. 1236). The substantive laws at issue in Chico's citizen suit are indeed commonwealth regulations, but they rest heavily on a framework of federal law. To a large extent, RCRA dictates the content and standards of Puerto Rico's UST program, leaving the Commonwealth only the discretion to enact regulations that are no less stringent than those developed by the EPA. See 42 U.S.C. § 6991c. The questions of law at issue in this suit are therefore only marginally questions of commonwealth law, with a strong federal cast. Moreover, they are of no particular difficulty. Federal courts regularly interpret EPA regulations substantively identical to those here, [17] see, e.g., Albany Bank & Trust Co. v. Exxon Mobil Corp., 310 F.3d 969, 974 (7th Cir. 2002), and have an affirmative interest in ensuring that corresponding state regulations are interpreted in a consistent manner. Nor are we concerned, turning to the second category of cases identified by NOPSI to warrant abstention, that the exercise of federal review of the enforcement of state regulations in this case or similar cases `would be disruptive of state efforts to establish a coherent policy with respect to a matter of substantial public concern.' NOPSI, 491 U.S. at 361, 109 S.Ct. 2506 (quoting Colo. River, 424 U.S. at 814, 96 S.Ct. 1236). In enacting RCRA, Congress made an express determination that a coherent national policy was necessary to address the serious, jurisdiction-spanning problems of solid and hazardous waste, thereby inherently privileging the consistency of federal regulation over local control. See 42 U.S.C. § 6901(a)(4). By design, RCRA interferes with a state's efforts to establish its own policy with respect to hazardous waste, both in subjecting state regulations to federal review and in mandating that they adhere to a federal framework. It would fly in the face of Congress's unmistakable attention to the coherency of national policy for a federal court to defer to a local agency. As one of our sister circuits has observed in similar circumstances, such ill-advised deference might well result in review by fifty different state agencies with fifty different charters, which would all but ensure non-uniformity in interpretation and enforcement. Cnty. of Suffolk v. Long Island Lighting Co., 907 F.2d 1295, 1310 (2d Cir. 1990).