The Supreme Court docket appeared cut up Wednesday on a problem from town of San Francisco to the U.S. Environmental Safety Company over federal wastewater guidelines.
In its lawsuit towards the federal company, town argued rules round discharge of untreated sewage had been unclear, together with the potential price ticket for violations, and that they might depart town on the hook for components past its management, akin to the standard of water that enters the San Francisco Bay from elsewhere.
The excessive court docket agreed to listen to the case after the ninth US Circuit Court docket of Appeals dominated towards town 2-1 final summer season.
In oral arguments Tuesday, Tara Steeley, an lawyer for town, advised the court docket that below the established order, “they might as well have said: Do not violate the Clean Water Act. It doesn’t tell us anything.”
The court docket’s liberal minority appeared broadly skeptical of town’s argument, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor pushing again on Steeley’s characterization that town was anticipated to “shift on a dime.”
“No one’s asking you to shift on a dime. What they’re asking you to do is to become responsible for doing what’s necessary, not on a dime, but to take the steps necessary to control situations that develop,” Sotomayor stated.
Nevertheless, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared receptive to town’s arguments.
“What the permit system was designed to do was give some notice to the different dischargers about what was going to be required of them, [but] your water quality system gives you complete discretion in which who’s going to bear the burden and who’s not,” Roberts stated to Assistant to the Solicitor Basic Frederick Liu.
Kavanaugh, in the meantime, requested Liu if “you can go after an individual entity, like the City of San Francisco, based on the past when they didn’t know what the relevant limitation on them was and seek retroactively, without fairness, huge penalties, including criminal punishment, based on something that they didn’t know what they could discharge or not discharge.”
“You’re suing San Francisco separately for a lot of money, based on a standard that they had no idea [of], at least that’s the theory,” Kavanaugh added.
The court docket’s conservative supermajority has repeatedly issued rulings curbing the authority of federal regulatory companies, together with in its most up-to-date time period, when it threw out the Chevron deference, which gave federal companies broad discretion in decoding statutes.
