Tomorrow, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the forest roads case (consolidated:
Decker v. NEDC, No. 11-338, and
Georgia-Pacific West, Inc. v. NEDC, No. 11-347).
I've been following this legal battle for quite some time, so my readers know its importance for forest landowners.
The statutory and regulatory mechanisms in play are complex, which has made the case tough to follow. The National Alliance of Forest Owners, however, has
boiled down the legal arguments in the briefs of the parties and the many amici to three main questions:
- Is the Silvicultural Rule defining these roads as nonpoint sources a valid interpretation of the Clean Water Act (CWA)?
- Did the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) exclude logging from the industrial activity category which requires stormwater discharge (NPDES) permits?
- Does the CWA allow NEDC to file this case in a federal district court 30 years after the Silvicultural Rule became final?
SCOTUSblog, as usual,
has a great preview of the case:
Next week, in Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center and Georgia-Pacific West, Inc. v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center, the Court will review a controversial Ninth Circuit environmental decision that has swept up all three branches of government. A panel of the court that included Justice Breyer’s younger brother Charles, sitting by designation, rejected the Environmental Protection Agency’s view that the federal Clean Water Act does not require permits for stormwater runoff from ditches and culverts on roads used for harvesting lumber (i.e., logging). Congress was sufficiently unhappy with the decision that bipartisan majorities enacted legislation to stay permitting until the beginning of this Term, and members of Congress have introduced legislation seeking to restore EPA’s former approach. To top it all off, EPA recently released proposed regulations for comment that, if finalized, would “clarify” that such stormwater runoff is not subject to permitting.
The case is of central importance to the logging industry and businesses that rely on it. If the Ninth Circuit’s decision is upheld (and, of course, the regulations exempting logging roads are not finalized soon), in the near term, it would mean a significant additional regulatory burden on logging operations because of the expense in obtaining permits, the ability of environmental groups to delay the permitting process, and the “mind boggling” number of logging roads nationally – there are an estimated 15,000 miles of logging roads in the State of Maine alone and hundreds of thousands more in the Northwestern United States. Depending on the Court’s rationale, a variety of work-arounds (from revised EPA regulations to blanket permits) could render the impact manageable in the longer term, but there is no question that affirmance would be disruptive to the logging industry.
When the case was first granted, many believed that the case reflected overreaching by the Ninth Circuit and concluded it was headed towards certain and overwhelming reversal. The Northwest Environmental Defense Center (“NEDC”) – the plaintiff below, but the respondent at the Court – must “run the table” and win every issue presented to prevail. Still, the case’s fate is far from clear.
***
On balance, the NEDC has the more difficult challenge: It must win all threearguments to prevail. But while the early consensus appeared to be that the Supreme Court would clearly reverse the Ninth Circuit’s decision, focusing on the Silvicultural Rule, as argument approaches, it appears the case presents some closer questions. The jurisdictional issue is of particularly broad importance, because affirmance could broaden the ability to challenge EPA interpretations of regulations.
Meanwhile,
EPA's new logging road rule was signed on Friday. It will go into effect 30 days after it is published, which should be soon. The rule is nearly identical to the proposed rule,
which I discussed here. The industry has
criticized the rule as poorly timed and creating legal uncertainty, even though it clarifies that logging roads are not be subject to the mandatory NPDES permit requirement under Phase 1 of the stormwater program for discharges associated with industrial activity.
