In a decision anxiously awaited by both builders and environmentalists, the U.S. Supreme Court has moved to decrease the power of the Environmental Protection Agency on matters governing the nation’s waterways and wetlands.
In a 5 to 4 ruling, the court provided a new definition of what the word “wetlands” means, handing a victory to a couple who received a notice from the EPA when they were in the early stages of building a house on land they owned near Priest Lake, Idaho.
The agency informed Chantell and Michael Sackett that the land in question was subject to the federal Clean Water Act, and as such, they were charged with illegally placing fill materials in the form of gravel and sand to make a stable grade into what was described as “jurisdictional wetlands.”
Filing a lawsuit in response to the EPA’s actions, the Sacketts met with defeat in both a district court and circuit court of appeals before taking their case to the Supreme Court.
Now in the matter of Sackett v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the higher court has declared that what’s at stake is where a given wetlands is located. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito argued that the Clean Water Act extends only to “wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are waters of the United States in their own rights.”
Alito added that the “wetlands on the Sackett property are distinguishable from any possibly covered waters.”
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the majority ruling was essentially rewriting the Clean Water Act, casting aside in the process “45 years of consistent agency practice.”
In making a distinction between wetlands that are part of a separate body and wetlands that are connected to something larger, Kavanaugh continued, the majority decision “will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States.”
Builders have long thought that the EPA’s wetlands regulations were too restrictive. In a statement after the Supreme Court ruling, Stephen Sandherr, chief executive office of the Associated General Contractors, said the decision will “return consistency and sanity to the permitting process.”
Added Sandherr: “This decision will allow vital infrastructure and development projects to proceed in a timely matter while still providing strong protections for the actual waters of the U.S.”
Jason Mark, editor of Sierra, a magazine published by the Sierra Club, said the Supreme Court in its wetlands ruling “continued its assault on basic environmental safeguards,” arguing that the Sackett decision means that “polluting or filling in some wetlands if permissible under the Clean Water Act, the law that has protected the integrity of U.S. lakes, rivers, streams, and other water bodies for 50 years.”
In a posting on the Sierra Club’s website, Mark added that the ruling “wipes out protections for more than half of the country’s wetlands, going even further than policies proposed by the Trump Administration.”
By Garry Boulard
