Opinion ID: 785944
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Vandergrift Plant

Text: 77 ALC cites to two main instances of alleged miscalculation of benefit. The first, relating to the Vandergrift plant, stems from the District Court's calculation which incorporated a $600,000 project that the government's expert posited would have brought ALC into compliance with the pretreatment permit issued for that site. ALC, however, claims that, in October of 1993, shortly before the Vandergrift violations ceased, it installed and began to operate a diversion tank connected to the discharge piping leading to the Vandergrift facility WWTP outfall. This diversion tank cost no more than $150,000 to buy and install. According to ALC, the pretreatment violations stopped shortly after the installation of the diversion tank although there were two monthly average and four daily maximum violations in November and December 1993, which ALC attributed to start-up problems. ALC contends that starting December 15, 1993, not a single violation occurred. ALC then argues that, in adopting the government's proposed $600,000 project to solve the problem and bring ALC into compliance, the District Court made clearly erroneous findings of fact. 78 There is, however, another side to the story. As noted above, there were several so-called start-up violations after the diversion tank was installed, and ALC cannot claim a clean record until December 15, 1993. ALC claims that the District Court should have used the December 15, 1993 date as the compliance date because that is the last reported pretreatment violation before the WWTP upgrade in August of 1994. However, the government's expert, Gary Amendola, explained that he chose to use August 1994 as the compliance date (as did the District Court) because the diversion tank installed in October 1993 was not sufficient to address the problem at Vandergrift. Amendola explained that the fact that ALC had reported no violations during the first half of 1994 did not establish that the diversion tank was a sufficient compliance measure because the facility had previously operated for months at a time without reporting any violations. The District Court chose to credit the testimony of the government's expert that the diversion tank would not have been adequate to prevent all violations. A decision to credit the expert testimony of one expert witness over another is entitled to deference. See Gen. Elec. Co. v. Joiner, 522 U.S. 136, 143, 118 S.Ct. 512, 139 L.Ed.2d 508 (1997) (holding that a District Court's assessment of expert testimony is to be accorded the deference that is the hallmark of abuse-of-discretion review). Under these circumstances the District Court's findings of fact were not clearly erroneous, and they must therefore be left to stand.