Opinion ID: 2804920
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: lake & porter counties, indiana

Text: Petitioner Indiana challenges the designation of two of its counties as nonattainment. According to Illinois’s certified 2009 to 2011 data, the monitoring site at Zion, Illinois exceeded the NAAQS by 1 part per billion (ppb). See Chicago-Naperville, Illinois-Indiana-Wisconsin Area Designations for the 2008 Ozone NAAQS at 7–8 [hereinafter Chicago Area Designations]. Zion is about sixty miles from the Indiana border and, like the Indiana counties at issue here, belongs to the Chicago-Naperville-Michigan City CSA. Following the 2008 Guidance, the EPA presumed that all counties in this CSA should be designated as nonattainment areas due to the Zion violation, and then conducted its five-factor analysis. The agency preliminarily concluded that three Indiana counties—Lake, Porter, and Jasper—should be included in the nonattainment area. In response to the EPA’s 120-day letter, Indiana pointed to multiple asserted flaws in the EPA’s analysis. Most relevant here, it said that the agency had failed to account for the impact of a recent statutory change to Illinois’s vehicle emissions testing program. It also maintained that the agency’s meteorological analysis suffered from multiple weaknesses and inconsistencies. The EPA ultimately reversed its designation of Jasper County, but finalized the nonattainment designations of Lake and Porter Counties. Chicago Area Designations at 21. 41 Indiana now challenges those nonattainment designations as arbitrary and capricious.
Inspection Change First, Indiana challenges the EPA’s position regarding Illinois’s statutory change. After a prior nonattainment designation, Illinois had established a vehicle inspection and maintenance program that covered all model years beginning in 1968. 11 In 2006, however, Illinois exempted vehicles with model years between 1968 and 1995 from the testing requirements. See 625 Ill. Comp. Stat. 5/13C-15(a)(6)(L) (2012). Indiana maintains that it was the increase in vehicle emissions accompanying this exemption that directly caused the violation at the Zion monitor. Moreover, it contends that this legislative change amounted to an intentional violation of Illinois’s SIP. As the EPA points out, we made clear in Catawba County that a “contributing” county need not be the but-for cause of a violation in order to warrant a nonattainment designation. Resp’t’s Br. 94; see Catawba Cnty., 571 F.3d at 39 (“[E]ven were we to think that ‘contribute’ unambiguously means ‘significantly contribute,’ we still disagree that ‘significantly contribute’ unambiguously means ‘strictly cause.’ ”). And here, regardless of Illinois’s statutory change, the EPA’s five-factor analysis demonstrated that both Lake and Porter 11 See Approval and Promulgation of Air Quality Implementation Plans; Illinois; Motor Vehicle Inspection and Maintenance, 64 Fed. Reg. 8,517, 8,519 (Feb. 22, 1999); Approval and Promulgation of Air Quality Plans; Illinois; Post-1996 Rate of Progress Plan for the Chicago Ozone Nonattainment Area, 65 Fed. Reg. 78,961, 78,967–68 (Dec. 18, 2000). 42 Counties contributed to the Zion monitor. Chicago Area Designations at 6–21. 12 The alleged illegality of Illinois’s statutory change does not affect our conclusion. The Clean Air Act offers other avenues for addressing a State’s failure to comply with its SIP. In particular, the EPA Administrator can call for a SIP revision after “find[ing] that the applicable implementation plan for any area is substantially inadequate” to comply with the NAAQS. 42 U.S.C. § 7410(k)(5). The EPA declined to do so here and, instead, recently approved the Illinois change. 13 Indiana has since petitioned the Seventh Circuit to review the EPA’s approval. See EPA 28(j) Letter (Oct. 22, 2014). That is the appropriate forum for challenging the Illinois change, which in no way diminished the contribution of the Indiana counties. 12 Indiana protests that there likely would have been no violation at all at the Zion monitor if it were not for the emissions resulting from the statutory change. That argument is merely a rephrasing of the but-for causation rule that we rejected in Catawba County. In any event, the argument is not supported by the Indiana modeling analyses upon which it is based. See Letter from Ind. Dep’t of Envtl. Mgmt. to EPA, Enclosure 1 at 27–30 (Apr. 13, 2012). The first analysis concluded only that the change in Illinois’s program contributed 0.2 ppb to the Zion violation—not enough to account for the 2009 to 2011 exceedance of 1 ppb. The second analysis rested on a factual premise that the State never adequately explained: that the statutory change caused the emission reduction benefits of Illinois’s vehicle emissions testing program to decrease by 35 per cent. 13 See Approval and Promulgation of Air Quality Implementation Plans; Illinois; Amendments to Vehicle Inspection and Maintenance Program for Illinois, 79 Fed. Reg. 47,377 (Aug. 13, 2014). 43
Next, Indiana argues that the EPA failed to adequately respond to its comments about the impact of Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s emissions on the violation at the Zion monitor. According to the source apportionment modeling submitted by Indiana, the Milwaukee area contributed over 5 ppb to the Zion violation, while Lake, Porter, and Jasper Counties contributed 4 ppb, 2 ppb, and 0.5 ppb, respectively. See Letter from Ind. Dep’t of Envtl. Mgmt. to EPA, Enclosure 1 at 13–14 (Apr. 13, 2012). This, Indiana maintains, produced the “inconsistent and unfounded” result of nonattainment designations for the Indiana counties but an attainment designation for the Milwaukee area. Id. at 14. As an initial matter, we note that, because the Milwaukee area is not a single county but rather is a metropolitan area made up of five counties, Indiana’s argument is premised on an apples-to-oranges comparison. More important, we have no basis for finding the EPA’s designations inconsistent given that Indiana’s modeling—which was limited to meteorological linkages and therefore fell short of a full analysis—did not establish that Milwaukee “contributed to” the Zion violation under the agency’s five-factor analysis. By contrast, after conducting its full five-factor analysis, the EPA found that Lake and Porter Counties did contribute. Accordingly, the EPA’s determination regarding the Milwaukee metropolitan area was neither unreasonable nor inconsistent with its determination regarding the Indiana counties. We also find that the EPA did adequately respond to Indiana’s comments about its modeling results, although without mentioning Milwaukee specifically. Indeed, the modeling was one of the factors that led the EPA to reconsider its designation of Jasper County. See Chicago Area 44 Designations at 21 (describing Jasper County’s 0.5 ppb contribution as “not significant”). But the EPA simply disagreed with Indiana’s premise that 2 ppb and 4 ppb were insufficient contributions when considered as part of the five-factor test, for reasons that were reasonable and well explained. See id. at 18 (“In keeping with EPA’s ozone contribution levels used to select states that should be covered in regional emission control programs, 2 ppb to 4 ppb ozone concentration contributions are considered to be significant ozone contributions.”).
Finally, we briefly consider Indiana’s remaining arguments. First, the record does not support Indiana’s claim that the EPA improperly relied on late-submitted data from Wisconsin’s Chiwaukee Prairie monitor, rather than relying solely on the Zion monitor data, in making the contribution determinations regarding the Indiana counties. See Chicago Area Designations at 8 (noting that the EPA considered the Wisconsin data in determining whether Kenosha County, Wisconsin (and not the Indiana counties) should be included in the Chicago nonattainment area); id. at 21–22 (describing bases for Lake, Porter, and Kenosha County designations). Second, the EPA did not fail to adequately explain why it used some 2006 to 2008 weather data in conducting the contribution analysis. The agency explained that historical data provided a “general conceptual model to explain the development and transport of high ozone levels in this area.” Addendum to Response to Comments at 7 (May 31, 2012); see also EPA Response to Indiana Pet. for Reconsideration 3. That explanation is deserving of the deference that we give to the EPA’s “evaluati[on] [of] scientific data within its technical expertise,” Catawba Cnty., 571 F.3d at 41 (quoting City of Waukesha, 320 F.3d at 247). 45 In sum, we reject Indiana’s contention that the EPA’s designations of Lake and Porter Counties are arbitrary or capricious.