Opinion ID: 722370
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Did the EPA reasonably interpret the term prolonged?

Text: 72 We reject TMPA's challenge to EPA's statutory interpretation of what constitutes prolonged. Again, we perform the Chevron two-step in reviewing EPA's interpretations of the Clean Air Act and its amendments. See supra Section III.A.2.b. 73 Having reviewed § 402(4)(A), we conclude that the term prolonged, as used in that section, is ambiguous. The common meaning of prolonged denotes an extended duration. See, e.g., Webster's Third International Dictionary 1815 (1961). What qualifies as extended, however, is not fixed. At best, the context of the term as used in § 402(4)(A) may suggest that Congress intended any definition of a prolonged outage[ ] to be less than a four-month outage, as a unit that suffered an outage lasting four months or more may have been able to receive an adjustment whether or not that outage was caused by an accident. This implication from the statutory context, however, hardly clarifies the meaning of the term sufficiently for us to reach an unmistakable conclusion that Congress had an intention on the ... question. Ohio v. U.S. Dep't of Interior, 880 F.2d 432, 441 (D.C.Cir.1989). 74 No other accepted form of statutory interpretation achieves some clearer understanding of prolonged as used in the provision. In particular, the presence of the Barton-Lent colloquy does not affect our result. As we have warned in the past, judges must  'exercise extreme caution before concluding that a statement made in floor debate, or at a hearing, or printed in a committee document may be taken as statutory gospel,'  in light of the  'endemic interplay, in Congress, of political and legislative consideration[s]'  likely unrelated to the interpretive tasks of a court. Gersman v. Group Health Ass'n, Inc., 975 F.2d 886, 892 (D.C.Cir.1992) (quoting Antolok v. United States, 873 F.2d 369, 377 (D.C.Cir.1989)), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 114 S.Ct. 1642, 128 L.Ed.2d 363 (1994). This caution is especially warranted when, as in this case, it appears that a colloquy was a direct result of a single member ... attempting to reassure his own constituency or even to create legislative history for citation by courts. Id. In this case, the colloquy in question does not give reason for us to draw the unmistakable conclusion that Congress intended prolonged, as used in § 402(4)(A), to have some fixed meaning. 75 Undertaking the second step of the Chevron inquiry, we also conclude that EPA's definition of a prolonged outage to mean an outage that lasts at least three months is reasonable. A baseline of three months is substantially longer than the average outage, but it is still sufficiently short as not to effectively write the prolonged outage language out of the statute. For instance, at least one party described in the record, which actually received an adjustment under another provision, could have sought an adjustment under the prolonged outage provision instead. See 58 Fed.Reg. at 15,724 (allowing adjustment for the George Neal plant). EPA thus acted within its authority when it denied TMPA's application for a baseline adjustment under § 402(4)(A). See id. (Table 3). 76