Opinion ID: 3217620
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Costs and Equitable Principles

Text: Washington contends that the district court’s injunction fails properly to take costs into account, and that its injunction is inconsistent with equitable principles.
Washington writes in its brief that correction of WSDOT barrier culverts will cost approximately $1.88 billion over the course of the seventeen-year schedule ordered by the court, 52 UNITED STATES V. WASHINGTON or “roughly $117 million per year of the injunction.” (Using Washington’s own estimates, a correct calculation is actually $110.6 million per year rather than $117 million.) Washington’s estimated total cost is based on an assumption of 817 corrected culverts, at an average correction cost of $2.3 million per culvert. Washington’s cost estimates are not supported by the evidence. Washington contended at trial, as it now contends to us, that the average cost to replace a WSDOT barrier culvert would be $2.3 million. But the district court did not accept this estimate. The court found that “the actual cost of construction for twelve WSDOT stream simulation culvert projects completed prior to the 2009 trial ranged from $413,000 to $1,674,411; the average cost for the twelve was $658,639 each.” In 2013, the State submitted a declaration from WSDOT official Wagner listing thirty-one culvert correction projects completed state-wide since October 2009. Of these, twenty-four used either a stream simulation design or a bridge. The declaration stated that the average cost for each these twenty-four projects was $1,827,168, not $2,300,000 as the State now contends. The district court noted that even Wagner’s lower figure could not be confirmed because cost data was missing for eight of the twenty-four projects. There are additional reasons to disregard the State’s estimate of total cost. First, Washington assumes that all 817 of the state-owned barrier culverts will be corrected on the seventeen-year schedule. This is demonstrably incorrect. According to the State’s own evidence, Paragraph 8 of the injunction will allow the State to defer correction of approximately 230 of the 817 culverts. If cost of barrier correction (rather than merely amount of upstream habitat) is UNITED STATES V. WASHINGTON 53 taken into account in deciding which culverts to defer, fewer but more costly culverts will be deferred. Second, and perhaps more important, Washington must eventually correct its barrier culverts, irrespective of the court’s order in this suit. The district court wrote that federal and state law require Washington to correct its barrier culverts “in any case,” and that the only consequence of its order will be an “acceleration of barrier correction.” The net costs imposed on Washington by the injunction are thus not the full costs of barrier correction, but rather only the “marginal costs attributable to an accelerated culvert correction schedule.” Finally, we note that a portion of WSDOT’s funding for correcting its barrier culverts will come from the United States. The court wrote, “[T]he state expects to receive over $22,000,000 for fish passage barrier projects from the federal government in the years 2011 to 2017. Of this amount, $15,813,000 is expected in the 2013–2015 biennium.”
Washington makes one specific objection based on equitable principles. It objects that the court abused its discretion in requiring that “the State alone,” rather than State in conjunction with the United States, be “burdened with the entire cost of culvert repair.” Brief at 63. We disagree. The court’s order required correction of only those barrier culverts that were built and maintained by the State. It was not an abuse of discretion to require the State to pay for correction of its own barrier culverts. Further, we note more generally that the district court did consider equitable principles, and concluded that those 54 UNITED STATES V. WASHINGTON principles favored the Tribes and the citizens of the State. The court wrote: The Tribes and their individual members have been harmed economically, socially, educationally, and culturally by the greatly reduced salmon harvests that have resulted from State-created or State-maintained fish passage barriers. This injury is ongoing, as efforts by the State to correct the barrier culverts have been insufficient. . . . Remedies at law are inadequate as monetary damages will not adequately compensate the Tribes and their individual members for these harms. . . . The balance of hardships tips steeply toward the Tribes in this matter. The promise made to the Tribes that the Stevens Treaties would protect their source of food and commerce was crucial in obtaining their assent to the Treaties’ provisions. . . . Equity favors requiring the State of Washington to keep the promises upon which the Tribes relied when they ceded huge tracts of land by way of the Treaties. ... The public interest will not be disserved by an injunction. To the contrary, it is in the public’s interest, as well as the Tribes’ to accelerate the pace of barrier correction. All UNITED STATES V. WASHINGTON 55 fishermen, not just Tribal fishermen, will benefit from the increased production of salmon. . . . The general public will benefit from the enhancement of the resource and the increased economic return from fishing in the State of Washington. The general public will also benefit from the environmental benefits of salmon habitat restoration.