Opinion ID: 163221
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: “Wholly Past” Violations

Text: The appellants assert that the district court erroneously dismissed four of their claims for failing to meet the standards set forth in RCRA, which authorizes citizen suits against “any person (including (a) the United States, and (b) any other governmental instrumentality or agency . . .) who is alleged to be in violation of any permit, standard, regulation, condition, requirement, prohibition, 1 (...continued) the document in which it was cited, in violation of 10th Cir. R. 36.3(C). -4- or order which has become effective pursuant to this chapter.” 42 U.S.C. § 6972(a)(1)(A). The wording of this and other environmental statutes–specifically, the phrase “is alleged to be in violation”–creates some uncertainty as to whether the violation must be ongoing at the time of the allegation. In Gwaltney of Smithfield, Ltd. v. Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Inc., 484 U.S. 49 (1987), the Supreme Court addressed this issue in the context of the Clean Water Act, 33 U.S.C. § 1365(a). 484 U.S. at 56. There, the Supreme Court interpreted “alleged to be in violation” to require that appellants allege a state of “continuous or intermittent violation.” Id. at 57. “Wholly past violations” are not covered by the phrase, and citizen suits for wholly past violations are therefore not authorized by the statute. Id. at 64. The Court noted that identical language was used in RCRA. Id. at 57. The district court observed that the Tenth Circuit has not yet addressed the question of whether the “wholly past” doctrine applies to RCRA; but it pointed out that every other circuit to have addressed the issue (and every district court in the circuits that have not addressed the issue) has held that Gwaltney applies to RCRA. Aplts’ App. at A-394 to A-395; id. at A-395 n.13. The appellants here, in fact, do not dispute Gwaltney’s applicability to their RCRA claims. We therefore need not address that issue, and we assume that the legal standard -5- employed by the district court now constitutes the law of the case. See, e.g., Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Ogden v. Coca-Cola Co., 4 F.3d 930, 933 n.3 (10th Cir. 1993). The appellants argue instead that the claims rejected by the district court were not wholly past violations. They claim that the violations could not have been wholly past because none of them had yet occurred as of the filing date of an earlier version of their complaint. See Aplts’ Br. at 31-35. That is, in their second amended complaint, the appellant’s alleged in general terms that violations were likely to occur in the future. The appellants then waited until–as is all but inevitable in an imperfect world, and under the overlapping safety systems in place at TOCDF–an alarm went off, at which point they filed their third amended complaint. They now attempt to insulate themselves from Gwaltney by noting that their second amended complaint was filed on a date before the violation, and they justify their lack of specificity therein by noting that they are not “psychic” and thus could not predict the exact date of the violation. Id. at 31. The appellants misconstrue Gwaltney, where the Court understood that a plaintiff’s case might be frustrated by a “suddenly repentant defendant,” 484 U.S. at 67 n.6, one who predictably begins to comply with the law only after the onset of the litigation. Here, by contrast, the appellants argue that their predictions of -6- future violations in one iteration of their complaint were borne out years later and were then included in a later iteration of their complaint. This, the appellants seem to suggest, prevents the specific violation from ever being deemed “wholly past,” because it was not “past” when they predicted it in their earlier complaint. This is an inventive argument, but it is ultimately unpersuasive. The district court was simply correct in determining that the alleged violations are neither continuous nor intermittent violations. All of the appellants’ specific claims involved discrete past incidents of alleged misconduct–incidents that were, we note, followed not only by efforts to assess whether any damage was done, but also by improvements in the facility’s procedures to prevent even those (thankfully) harmless violations from occurring again. These violations, therefore, are “wholly past” in the sense that the Gwaltney court used the term: violations that have ceased, not because of the onset of litigation but because the defendants had already corrected what they were doing. 2 2 The appellants also reassert a separate claim that the appellees violated relevant permit requirements by not including the private contractor EG&G on the original permit. Appellants are correct that Gwaltney does not apply to this claim, because the violation was ongoing when the original complaint was filed (and the original complaint specifically alleged this violation). In a separate proceeding, the district court dismissed this claim on the grounds of collateral estoppel. Chemical Weapons Working Group, Inc. v. U.S. Dept. of the Army, 990 F. Supp. 1316, 1320 (D. Utah 1997). Subsequently, the Utah Court of Appeals held that–although the Utah Solid and Hazardous Waste Control Board erred in concluding that EG&G did not need a permit–the Board (continued...) -7-