Supreme Court Rejects Petition To Hear CWA Jurisdiction Findings Suit

摘要

The Supreme Court has rejected a recycling company's petition to hear a case that sought to establish legal standing to file pre-enforcement challenges against EPA's and other regulators' determinations that waterbodies are "jurisdictional" under the Clean Water Act (CWA) and therefore subject to permitting mandates. However, the justices are likely to face another decision later this year on whether to hear a similar case, as an appellate court is poised to issue a ruling in a suit that could be a vehicle for a high court petition. In its March 23 orders following its March 20 conference, the high court denied certiorari in Kent Recycling Services v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where the recycling firm had urged the justices to overturn a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit order blocking pre-enforcement review of a CWAjurisdictional determination (JD). Industry has argued in a series of district and appellate cases that JDs should be reviewable in court based on the Supreme Court's 2013 ruling in Sackett v. EPA, where it opened the agency's CWA compliance orders, as well as some other pre-enforcement actions, to suit in part because such orders carry financial penalties for noncompliance above and beyond the consequences for violations of the water law.