Opinion ID: 1262679
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Design, construction, and maintenance of the wastewater system

Text: The Terbushes claim that the NPS's negligent design, construction and maintenance of the wastewater facilities atop Glacier Point exacerbated the natural exfoliation of Glacier Point Apron, thereby creating an unseen hazard to climbers like Peter Terbush. Our case law teaches, however, that design matters involve discretionary decisions by government actors. See, e.g., Kennewick Irrigation Dist. v. United States, 880 F.2d 1018, 1027 (9th Cir.1989); Chaffin v. United States, 176 F.3d 1208, 1210 (9th Cir.1999) (discretionary function exception renders the government immune from a negligence claim for [a] design decision [in the construction of a cabin]). In light of this obstacle, the Terbushes counter that they are not asserting a faulty design claim, but rather their claim is about the NPS's failure to implement mandated safety reviews prior to the construction of the facilities atop Glacier Point and ongoing maintenance after construction. We agree with the district court's detailed analysis that the various NPS policies do not contain mandatory and specific directives to which the NPS. had no rightful option but to adhere, Berkovitz, 486 U.S. at 536, 108 S.Ct. 1954, and that these decisions were grounded in the policy regime established by the Organic Act.
We do not read the policies cited by the Terbushes to contain mandatory and specific provisions dictating that impairment, safety and hazard reviews must occur in the manner they describe, and note that sections of the policies to which they cite vest considerable discretion in the NPS that is clearly grounded in the broad mandate to balance conservation with access and safety. For example, the 1988 Management Policies apply to all national parks and guide policy that sets the framework and provides direction for management decisions that are to be made by managers and superintendents, who are to ascertain park-specific purposes and management direction. The Management Policies state that [w]ide variations exist in the degree to which the laws and proclamations creating the individual units of the national park system prohibit or mandate specific management actions. Although the policies generally allow for management discretion . . . they are mandatory where the language so indicates. More specifically, the so-called impairment review described by the Terbushes is explicitly recognized as involving a decision by the superintendent that calls for reconciling the inevitabl[e] . . . tension between conservation of resources on the one hand and public enjoyment on the other. This reconciliation calls for judgment on the part of the NPS: [w]hether an individual action is or is not an `impairment' is a management determination. In reaching it, the manager should consider such factors as the spatial and temporal extent of the impacts, the resources being impacted and their ability to adjust those impacts, the relation of the impacted resources to other park resources, and, the cumulative as well as the individual effects. This provision is not a mandatory and specific policy, and the language itself implicates the NPS's broader mandate to balance access with conservation. Nor do the 1988 Management Policies explicitly call for safety and hazard reviews. While the document states that facilities will not be located in areas where natural processes, including geologic conditions, pose a persistent threat unless no practicable alternative site exists and unless all safety and hazard probability factors have been considered, nowhere is there an explicit call for a safety and hazard review. Rather, [w]here facilities must be located in such areas, their design and siting will consider the nature of the hazard and include appropriate mitigating measures to minimize the risks to human life and property. Unlike wetlands and floodplains, for which the NPS elsewhere provides further requirements to be met prior to development, no further requirements are provided for mitigation measures relating to geologic conditions. Absent further mandatory and specific directives, in constructing the facilities atop Glacier Point, the NPS is left to balance its various policy mandates of access, safety and conservation.
Recognizing the absence of mandatory standards vis-a-vis design, the Terbushes shift the focus of their claim arguing that [t]he gravaman of [their] reasoning goes not to facility design and location but to the operation and maintenance of the [wastewater] system, which they claim was negligent. The Terbushes also claim that the magistrate judge ignored the existence of NPS-50 [the 1991 Loss Control Management Guidelines], OSHA standards and Parks-pecific policies and failed to recognize that maintenance is not the kind of policy weighing decision automatically provided immunity. The government' responds that because the Terbushes cannot point to any mandatory or specific requirements for the repair and maintenance of the facilities, the first prong of the discretionary function analysis is not at issue. It is true that the magistrate judge did not analyze the maintenance claims in the same detail as the other claims. [2] Nonetheless, we agree with the government that absent a mandatory and specific policy dictating otherwise, we are left to assume that the maintenance of the wastewater management system is a discretionary function. Analyzing the maintenance claims under the second Berkovitz prong is, however, a bit more complicated. We must determine whether such maintenance work would involve protected policy judgments. The focus of our inquiry is on the nature of the actions taken and on whether they are susceptible to policy analysis. Gaubert, 499 U.S. at 325, 111 S.Ct. 1267. Relying on a footnote in Whisnant, the government argues the maintenance decisions clearly implicate the NPS's policy regime. Citing Bear Medicine, Whisnant summarized: The decision to adopt safety precautions may be based in policy considerations, but the implementation of those precautions is not. . . . Whisnant, 400 F.3d at 1182 (quoting Bear Medicine v. United States, 241 F.3d 1208, 1215 (9th Cir.2001)). The opinion goes on to state in a footnote: [3] Our case law reveals one exceptionnot relevant hereto the design/implementation distinction: The implementation of a government policy is shielded where the implementation itself implicates policy concerns, such as where government officials must consider competing firefighter safety and public safety considerations in deciding how to fight a forest fire. Id. at 1182 n. 3. According to the government, the maintenance of the wastewater system is clearly within the exception in Whisnant. Thus, like firefighters needing to consider public safety and their own safety in battling forest fires, see Miller v. United States, 163 F.3d 591, 595-96 (9th Cir.1998), prison guards who must balance prisoner safety and their own safety in searching prisoners' cells in response to a reported threat, see Alfrey v. United States, 276 F.3d 557, 565 (9th Cir.2002), or the FAA's efforts to oversee compliance with federal safety regulations, see GATX/Airlog, 286 F.3d at 1175-77, the government contends that the maintenance of the wastewater system implicates the policy concerns of the regulatory regime of the Organic Act and other policies. It is a long leap from routine maintenance of a wastewater system to fighting forest fires and guarding prisoners. The decisions and actions in the cases highlighted by Whisnant appear to involve far more than mere maintenance (indeed, what unites them are safety considerations), which returns our focus to the nature of the actions and decisions in question here. Our case law directs that, by nature, matters of routine maintenance are not protected by the discretionary function exception because they generally do not involve policy-weighing decisions or actions. See Bolt v. United States, 509 F.3d 1028, 1034 (9th Cir.2007) (observing that snow removal from a parking lot is maintenance work, which is not the kind of regulatory activity' to which the Supreme Court envisioned the discretionary function exception applying) (quoting ARA Leisure Servs. v. United States, 831 F.2d 193, 195 (9th Cir.1987)). For example, in Whisnant, we confronted a clear case of maintenance failure: claims against a naval commissary for failing to eradicate a mold problem in its meat department. See Whisnant, 400 F.3d at 1181. Looking to other circuits, we observe that sometimes maintenance is far from routine and may involve considerable discretion that invokes policy judgment. See, e.g., Mitchell v. United States, 225 F.3d 361, 364 (3d Cir.2000) (noting that repairing roadside wall involved balancing several policy considerations); Baum v. United States, 986 F.2d 716, 723-24 (4th Cir.1993) (noting that maintenance could be accomplished only by outright replacement, and was thus a decision about how and when to replace a major element of a substantial public facility that implicated economic and political policy, i.e., allocation of funds); Cope, 45 F.3d at 451 (observing that further repairs of a road required NPS to prioritize among its repairs and to establish priorities for the accomplishment of its policy objectives against such practical considerations as staffing and funding.) (quoting Varig, 467 U.S. at 820, 104 S.Ct. 2755). Though our own case law frowns upon the government. relying solely on fiscal policy and budgetary constraints as the protected policy considerations protected by the exception, [4] Cope and Baum nonetheless lend support to the government's arguments by substantiating the possibility that particular maintenance activities, unlike cleaning out mold from a store, as in Whisnant, or re-paving a road to precise specifications, as in ARA Leisure, can involve more than initially meets the eye. If the maintenance of the wastewater facilities turned out to involve a balancing of policy considerations, more complex decisions or outright replacement, as in Baum, these decisions would tend to implicate the broader mandates of the NPS's policy regime. The difficulty here is that we cannot determine on the record before us whether the challenged maintenance at issue is maintenance that falls beyond policy judgments or whether it tends to the other end of the spectrum, which implicates broader mandates of NPS's policy regime. Merely establishing that the boundaries of maintenance are discretionary is not sufficient. Although we recognize Gaubert's presumption of actions taken in furtherance of a regulatory regime's goals to be grounded in the policy of the regulatory regime, and are aware that we do not need actual evidence of policy-weighing in any given decision, there still must be some support in the record that the decisions taken are susceptible to policy analysis for the discretionary function exception to apply. On this point, the government bears the burden. It is not sufficient for the government merely to waive the flag of policy as a cover for anything and everything it does that is discretionary in nature. Consideration of tenets that sweep so broadly is of little use in the application of the discretionary function exception. Gotha, 115 F.3d at 181 (declining to see the Navy's mission to provide a defense to the Nation or to enforce its diplomatic efforts implicated in a decision to install a handrail on a staircase). Indeed, if all that were required were a bald incantation of policy, then such an approach would swallow the second prong of Berkovitz. In reviewing the extensive and varied case law in this circuit and elsewhere, we decline to adopt a rule that would eviscerate the original purpose of the statute by an overly-generous reading of the policybased prong of the exception. As we noted in O'Toole, the FTCA was created by Congress with the intent to compensate individuals harmed by government negligence, and as a remedial statute, it should be construed liberally, and its exceptions should be read narrowly. 295 F.3d at 1037 (citing Kielwien v. United States, 540 F.2d 676, 681 (4th Cir.1976)). Although much time has passed, we should not forget the Supreme Court's early observation that in adopting the FTCA, Congress sought to prevent the unfairness of allowing the public as a whole to benefit from the services performed by Government employees, while allocating the entire burden of government employee negligence to the individual, leav[ing] him destitute or grievously harmed. Rayonier Inc. v. United States, 352 U.S. 315, 320, 77 S.Ct. 374, 1 L.Ed.2d 354 (1957). Because the parties and the district court to some degree lumped the question of maintenance together with the other claims regarding design and construction, we cannot determine whether the government met its burden to prove the applicability of the exception as a matter of law. Accordingly, we remand for further proceedings on this issue.