Opinion ID: 194858
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the statutory issues

Text: 18 The merits of the appeals from the district court judgment turn principally on a narrow point of statutory construction, namely, whether the ventilation buildings that will vent the underground highway and harbor tunnel comprise a stationary source or sources within the meaning the Clean Air Act. If so labeled, a permit is required; apparently the amount of pollutant needed to qualify as a major source is not at issue. Easily stated, the issue is less easily resolved: there is little by way of statutory definition, no useful judicial precedent or legislative history offered to us, and a reasonable possibility that Congress never gave any thought to the idiosyncracy posed by these ventilation buildings. 19 Starting as one normally does with language, parts C and D, which contain the pre-construction permit requirements for major stationary sources, originally contained no definition of stationary source. Instead part D defines a major stationary source as any stationary facility or source emitting the specified quantity of pollutant. Part C, by cross-reference (see note 1, above), adopts the same language. Part A, concerned with so-called performance standards, other than air quality standards, did use the term stationary source in 42 U.S.C. Sec. 7411, defining it as any building, structure, facility, or installation which emits or may emit any air pollutant. 42 U.S.C. Sec. 7411(a)(3). That definition, however, was adopted for purposes of this section, i.e., section 7411. 4 20 Thus far the breadth of the language appears helpful to the Sierra Club position, since linguistically a ventilation system with a stack could be called a facility, a source or even a building. The table tilted back the other way in 1977 when Congress amended the Clean Air Act to exclude indirect sources from mandatory coverage in state implementation plans. 42 U.S.C. Sec. 7410(a)(5)(A). An indirect source is defined in the statute as 21 a facility, building, structure, installation, real property, road, or highway which attracts, or may attract, mobile sources of pollution. Such term includes parking lots, parking garages, and other facilities subject to any measure for management of parking supply.... 22 42 U.S.C. Sec. 7410(a)(5)(C). Asserting that auto makers should bear the brunt of reducing tailpipe emissions, Congress imposed the limitations already described on the EPA efforts to regulate the magnets for vehicles rather than the vehicles themselves. See H.R.Rep. No. 294, 95th Cong., 1st Sess. 219-227 (1977), U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News 1977, 1077, 1298-1306. 23 Although indirect sources are not in terms excluded from the definition of stationary sources--the former provision is cast instead as a limitation on EPA authority--the effect of the amendment is to treat indirect sources as a separate category of sources subject to a different legal regime. The states may still choose[ ] to regulate them in state implementation plans, 42 U.S.C. Sec. 7410(a)(5)(A)(i), but the decision whether and how to regulate is left largely to the states. Our best reading of the statute is that, at least after 1977, an indirect source is not to be treated as a stationary source under Parts C and D. Cf.South Terminal Corp. v. EPA, 504 F.2d 646, 669 (1st Cir.1974) (parking structures, which themselves emit no pollutants but instead only attract vehicles which emit pollution, are not stationary sources). 24 Assuming that a stationary source and an indirect source are exclusive categories, the difficult question remains whether ventilation buildings should be assimilated to the former or to the latter. It is a question that dictionaries cannot answer. The terms are technical rather than common ones, and they were developed against the background of a complex statute with interlocking provisions and specific goals. Nor does legislative history furnish any clue as to Congress' intent for ventilation buildings. Perhaps this small corner among possible applications of the statute was simply overlooked. 25 Similarly, it is difficult to derive any clear cut answer from analogy or policy. 5 A covered highway or tunnel with a ventilation system is akin to an uncovered highway or open sided garage--clearly, indirect sources--in multiple senses: in each instance the facility or space attracts more cars, pollution in the vicinity may be greatly increased, and the initial source of the pollution is the cars themselves. On the other hand, the possibility exists (no information has been provided to us on the point) that the large scale ventilation systems may be more potent than a highway or garage in concentrating and expelling pollutants in a specific area; and on this ground, if no other, one might distinguish between them and a facility that is ordinarily ventilated without mechanical aid. Thus the analogy hardly dispels all doubt. 26 Two other arguments pressed by the parties seem to us inconclusive. The Sierra Club points us to a new provision, added to Title I in 1990 without limitation as to its application, which for the first time defines stationary source as meaning generally any source of an air pollutant except those emissions resulting directly from an internal combustion engine for transportation purposes or from a nonroad engine or nonroad vehicle as defined in section 7550.... 42 U.S.C. Sec. 7602(z). The Sierra Club stresses the word directly, arguing that the emissions from the ventilation shaft do not fit the except clause because the auto emissions are emitted first (directly, in the Sierra Club's view) into the air of the covered highway or tunnel and only then gathered by fans and spewed out through the ventilators. 27 The government brief offers its own parsing of this new language, but both sides' arguments about what is direct and what is an indirect emission have the flavor of a Medieval dispute in theology. The reality is that Congress framed this new subsection (z) to deal with an entirely different problem, namely, to include within the stationary source definition mobile sources of pollution, like ships in port and portable asphalt concrete plants, so far as they emit pollutants as part of their stationary activities, e.g., by leaking fuel at dockside (in contrast to engine emissions that occur when the ship or plant travels to a new destination). S.Rep. No. 228, 101st Cong., 1st Sess. 376 (1990). In other words, Congress was not addressing tunnel ventilation when it drew up this new provision. 28 Conversely, we are doubtful about the government's argument based upon the structure of the statute. Admittedly, Congress did establish two different regimes: that in Title I, with which we are concerned, governed stationary sources; that in Title II created a quite different regime, part of which is familiar to anyone who has a car inspected, to regulate vehicle emissions directly. This symmetry could suggest that tailpipe pollution--the source of the pollutants at issue here--was not meant to fall within Title I at all. The difficulty is that Congress might not have minded two layers of control, and contrivances like the indirect source provision in Title I blur the notion that auto pollution is exclusively a Title II problem. 29 In the end, we think the balance is tipped here by the explicit administrative interpretation of the Clean Air Act adopted by the EPA. In approving the addition of regulation 7.38 to Massachusetts' state implementation plan, the EPA stated: 30 Tunnel ventilation systems, which do not generate their own emissions but rather simply funnel emissions from mobile sources, are not stationary sources within the meaning of the Clean Air Act. 31 57 Fed.Reg. 46310, 46311 (1992). The Supreme Court has told us that in construing a statute the courts should ordinarily show a measure of deference to the agency charged with administering the statute. 6 The case most often cited for that precept is Chevron, which involved a different application of the very same stationary source provision that is now before us. 32 The Chevron doctrine has been the subject of much debate and, in subsequent decisions, the Supreme Court may have softened its impact somewhat and in some situations. See, e.g.,INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S. 421, 448, 107 S.Ct. 1207, 1221, 94 L.Ed.2d 434 (1987). To be sure, the courts have the last word on statutory interpretation--the question is one of the weight to be accorded to agency views--and often the statute's language or history leaves no latitude for the agency. In other cases the issue of interpretation may be so central to the operation of the statute that, whether or not Congress' meaning is clear, it is improbable that Congress meant for the courts to defer to the agency. We do not think these or other qualifications on Chevron deflect its impact here. 33 On the contrary, this statute is ambiguous on the issue before us, at least when the words stationary source are read together with the indirect source proviso and the structural juxtaposition of Titles I and II. The application of the stationary and indirect source language to tunnel ventilation is not the heart of the statute but a fringe issue on which Congress did not clearly express its intent. The Clean Air Act is an immensely complex and technical statute more familiar to the EPA than to anyone else, and the task of making its parts function together harmoniously is entrusted to many actors but above all to the EPA. 34 In sum this is a case in which Chevron and deference to the agency are not make-weights or subsidiary arguments. Rather, in this fairly debatable case, where statutory language is ambiguous, legislative history is silent and policies and analogies can be and have been mustered on both sides, we think that the EPA's unqualified and precise reading is decisive. It is unnecessary to calibrate perfectly the weight to be accorded to the agency view in a case of this species: once considerable weight is accorded to EPA's reading of the statute, seeChevron, 467 U.S. at 844, 104 S.Ct. at 2782, it is enough to tip a set of scales otherwise so closely balanced. 35