Opinion ID: 2198217
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Procedural Injury

Text: Friends contends that it suffered a procedural injury when the District, allegedly in contravention of the DCEPA, rescinded Clark's stop work order without requiring Clark to prepare an EIS. Friends is vague about the specific procedural rights it claims to have lost. However, the DCEPA provides for public review and comment when an EIS is prepared, and for a public hearing if there is sufficient interest, see D.C.Code § 8-109.03(b). An entity such as Friends presumably could participate in any of these proceedings. We shall assume, therefore, that the District's failure to require an EIS did deprive Friends of a procedural right that it could have exercised had there been an EIS. See Speyer, 588 A.2d at 1162 (upholding neighbors' standing to challenge District's failure to apply for a certificate of need for a residential treatment center because the consequent denial of the [statutory] right to attend and participate in the [agency] proceedings [on the application] constitutes an independent and legally sufficient injury.). Friends asserts that the deprivation of its procedural right created the risk that environmental damage would go undiscovered and thereby caused injury to the very mission and purpose of Friends. When the Supreme Court considered procedural injury as a basis for standing, it recognized that [t]here is this much truth to the assertion that `procedural rights' are special: The person who has been accorded a procedural right to protect his concrete interests can assert that right without meeting all the normal standards for redressability and immediacy. Lujan, 504 U.S. at 572 n. 7, 112 S.Ct. 2130. But the Court rejected the notion that a statute purporting to allow any person to commence a lawsuit to challenge an agency's failure to comply with procedural requirements afforded standing to sue notwithstanding [the person's] inability to allege any discrete injury flowing from that failure. Id. at 572, 112 S.Ct. 2130. Instead, the Court said, a party assuredly can enforce procedural rights so long as the procedures in question are designed to protect some threatened concrete interest of [the party] that is the ultimate basis of [the party's] standing. Id. at 573 n. 8, 112 S.Ct. 2130. By way of illustration, the Court said that a plaintiff has standing to enforce the procedural requirement for an environmental impact statement if a separate concrete interest of the plaintiff was threatenedas where the plaintiff is a person who lives adjacent to the site of a construction project that is subject to the EIS requirement. Id. at 572 & n. 7, 112 S.Ct. 2130. In contrast, plaintiffs who have no concrete interest at stake, such as persons who live (and propose to live) at the other end of the country from the project, do not have standing to enforce the EIS requirement in court. Id. at 572 n. 7, 112 S.Ct. 2130. Accord, Sabine River Auth., 951 F.2d at 674 (stating that procedural injury from failure to prepare an EIS can support standing provided that the plaintiff has a sufficient geographical nexus to the site of the challenged project to suffer its environmental consequences). It follows that in reviewing an EIS claim, a court must examine whether the demonstrably increased risk of serious environmental harm shown actually threatens the plaintiff's particular interests before that plaintiff may have a particularized injury sufficient for standing. Florida Audubon Soc'y v. Bentsen, 320 U.S.App.D.C. 324, 333, 94 F.3d 658, 667 (1996) (en banc). Despite the foregoing precedent, Friends contends that our pre- Lujan decision in Speyer, supra, stands for the proposition that a procedural injury alone is sufficient to establish standing under District law regardless of any threat to a separate concrete interest of the would-be plaintiff. We do not agree with that reading of Speyer, for no such proposition was at issue in the case. The procedural injury in Speyer was the deprivation of the plaintiffs' statutory right to oppose the issuance of a Certificate of Need (CON) for a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children. Id., 588 A.2d at 1161-62. As this court took care to note, the denial of that right affected the plaintiffs' interests because they resided in the neighborhood in which the treatment center was to be located. See id. at 1161. Specifically, plaintiffs claimed that the treatment center threatened their interests in neighborhood tranquillity, property values, public safety and traffic congestion, id. at 1160. Speyer neither holds nor implies that a plaintiff whose interests are not concretely affected by the denial of a procedural right would nonetheless have standing to challenge that denial in court. By itself, therefore, the loss of an entitlement to participate in agency evaluation of an EIS does not constitute sufficient injury in fact to support standing to sue. The issue remains whether Friends as an entity had some other concrete interest at stake. Friends' ancillary assertion that its inability to weigh in on an EIS jeopardized its very mission and purpose does not identify such an interest, for as the Supreme Court said, a special interest in a subject is not enough for standing. Sierra Club, 405 U.S. at 739, 92 S.Ct. 1361. We are left to consider Friends' claim that it sustained informational injury.