Court Opinion

ID: 9748406
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 16:01:11.845978+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:35.082934
License: Public Domain

FARRELL, Associate Judge,
dissenting:
The majority opinion, I believe, confuses the occupancy permit Perkins filed for and received with one he could have applied for and might (though not necessarily would) have received. It is true that “processing” as permitted in C-M districts has been defined broadly by the BZA. See Concerned Citizens of Brentwood v. District of Columbia Bd. of Zoning Adjustment, 634 A.2d 1234, 1242-43 (D.C.1993). Thus, in much the same way as did the applicant in Brentwood, Perkins could have sought permission to operate — as a form of processing — his business of compacting, deodorizing, and transferring non-hazardous waste for shipment.1 At the same time, permission to engage in processing and any other of the uses permitted in C-M districts is “subject to the standards of external effects set forth in [11 DCMR] § 804,” 11 DCMR § 801.7 (1986), including, for example, a prohibition on “[t]he emission of any odorous gases or other odorous matter.” Id. § 804.9. So an application to process trash material would have subjected Perkins’ proposal to examination for potential environmental impacts of that sort.
Perkins, however, did not apply for a permit to process non-hazardous waste. Admitting at the healing that “we were going to stay away from such words as transfer station, waste, recyclables, anything that would raise a red flag with the government,” he applied for and received a permit to conduct the following business:
Light Manufacturing, Processing, Fabricating, & Warehousing of Steel Products and Office and Retail Construction Industrial Supplies; All Material NonHazardous; Not sexually oriented.
He has never contended that “Steel Products and Office and Retail Construction Industrial Supplies” were to be the exclusive, or even a significant, part of the material he would “process” at the site. Instead, he reads these grammatical objects in the permit as qualifying only the verb form ‘Warehousing,” and the permission to conduct “Processing” as limited only by the exclusion of hazardous materials. The BZA rejected this reading, and *216unlike the court, I see no basis on which to withhold our normal deference to interpretations of that kind by the agency possessing expertise.
Both textually and as a matter of common sense, the permit appears to limit the named activities (manufacturing, etc.) to the two classes of objects described. If Perkins is right that warehousing alone among those activities is limited to steel products and industrial supplies, one would expect the permit to have made that distinction, perhaps by stating:
Light Manufacturing, Processing, or Fabricating; & Warehousing of Steel Products and Office and Retail Construction Supplies....
Instead, the direct objects follow a succession of verbs each naming an activity to which the objects naturally relate. Furthermore, it taxes common sense to read the permit as allowing the manufacture, processing, or fabricating of anything nonhazardous (all of which would entail some storage), but warehousing only of the materials specified.2
The “rale of the last antecedent,” discussed at length by the majority, does not assist Perkins because “[w]hen several words are followed by a clause ... as applicable as much to the first and other words as to the last, the natural construction of the language demands that the clause be read as applicable to all.” Porto Rico Ry., Light & Power Co. v. Mor, 253 U.S. 345, 348, 40 S.Ct. 516, 64 L.Ed. 944 (1920). The court rejects the BZA’s application of that principle as inconsistent with the regulation permitting “processing” (unqualified except — -importantly'—with regard to “the standards of external effects”). But, as I have said, this confuses the permit granted with one Perkins might have requested but deliberately did not. A regulation authorizing “processing” as such, but hedged with environmental limitations, did not preclude the grant of an occupancy permit requesting lesser authority. We know now what Perkins intended to do with the site, but the Board reasonably understood him to have requested and received permission to do something considerably more limited. The court’s decision effectively puts the burden on the permit administrators to ferret out the real purpose behind an application artfully drawn to camouflage that purpose.
I respectfully dissent.

. The applicant in Brentwood applied for permits “to allow construction and operation of a facility designed to collect, sort, compact, and transport recyclable waste materials ....” 634 A.2d at 1236.

. Indeed, 11 DCMR § 832.11 (1986) prohibits the manufacture of a variety of products (e.g bone products, animal rendering, and fertilizers) that may or may not involve hazardous materials.