Court Opinion

ID: 9482300
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:45:57.609281+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:53.528828
License: Public Domain

SELYA, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
I join in Judge Hill’s persuasive opinion, but I have nonetheless elected to write separately for two reasons. First, I think *559it advisable to underscore the closeness of the questions raised in this appeal. Second, I want to make clear my view that the dispositive feature in the case is that the Massachusetts Clean Waters Act (MCWA), as a whole, is a “State law comparable to” subsection 309(g) of the Federal Act. See 33 U.S.C. § 1309(g)(6)(A). That is to say, inasmuch as the MCWA contains an adequate mechanism for assessing administrative penalties against polluters, see M.G.L. ch. 21, § 42; see also M.G.L. ch. 21A, § 16, it is “comparable” to subsection 309(g) in the statutorily significant sense. Thus, as the district court found and as this court now rules, because the Massachusetts DEP took action against the Town of Scituate under the MCWA, and continues diligently to prosecute that action, a later-filed citizens’ suit is necessarily barred.
The appellant’s attempt to balkanize the MCWA by focusing the requisite comparison more narrowly would, if successful, produce a weird asymmetry, destroying uniformity in the application of federal law by subjecting the workings of an important federal statute to the vagaries of draftsmanship in the legislatures of the several states. Moreover, the approach would require that cases like this one turn on essentially clerical considerations — here, whether or not the state’s formal recital of the source of its power, in the issuance of its administrative order, included, or omitted, a specific reference to M.G.L. ch. 21, § 42. Since the substance of the DEP’s administrative order could — and, unquestionably, would — have remained precisely the same notwithstanding the inclusion of such a ritualistic incantation, it would seem overly formalistic, if not mindless, to accord decre-tory significance to the presence or absence of an explicit reference. I simply do not believe it to be likely that Congress intended so odd a result.