Court Opinion

ID: 9491214
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:07:15.951626+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:35.459715
License: Public Domain

SILBE RMAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I join the opinion of the court and write separately only to make explicit what I think implicit in our opinion. We hold that the Corps’s interpretation of the phrase “addition of any pollutant to navigable waters” to cover incidental fallback is “unreasonable,” which is the formulation we use when we have first determined under Chevron that neither the statutory language nor legislative history reveals a precise intent with respect to the issue presented — in other words, we are at the second step of the now-familiar Chevron Step I and Step II analysis. See, e.g., Whitecliff Inc. v. Shalala, 20 F.3d 488 (D.C.Cir.1994); Fedway Associates, Inc. v. United States Treasury, 976 F.2d 1416 (D.C.Cir.1992); Abbott Labs. v. Young, 920 F.2d 984 (D.C.Cir.1990); Associated Gas Distribs. v. FERC, 899 F.2d 1250 (D.C.Cir.1990). As our opinion’s discussion of prior eases indicates, the word addition carries both a temporal and geographic ambiguity. If the material that would otherwise fall back were moved some distance away and then dropped, it very well might constitute an “addition.” Or if it were held for some time and then dropped back in the same spot, it might also constitute an “addition.” But the structure of the relevant statutes indicates that it is unreasonable to call incidental fallback an addition. To do so perforce converts all dredging — which is regulated under the Rivers and Harbors Act — into discharge of dredged material which is regulated under the Clean Water Act.
Moreover, that Congress had in mind either a temporal or geographic separation between excavation and disposal is suggested by its requirement that dredged material be discharged at “specified disposal sites,” 33 U.S.C. § 1344 (1994), a term which simply does not fit incidental fallback.
The Corps attempts to avoid these difficulties by asserting that rock and sand are magically transformed into pollutants once dredged, so all dredging necessarily results in an addition of pollutants to navigable waters. But rock and sand only become pollutants, according to the statute, once they are “discharged into water.” 33 U.S.C. § 1362(6) (1994). The Corps’s approach thus just leads right back to the definition of discharge.