Posted on February 1, 2011 by Donald Fowler
Over the past three decades, EPA has issued more than 1,700 CERCLA UAOs to roughly 5,400 PRPs ordering the performance of response actions at CERCLA sites costing in aggregate in excess of $5 billion. Only a small handful of those orders, however, have ever been challenged in court, and vanishingly few have been subject to any independent third party review whatsoever.
Why is that? Well, as even EPA might agree, it is not because the Agency is infallible. No, the reason for EPA’s essentially unreviewed exercise of its UAO authority is the CERCLA statute itself, which (a) by operation of Section 113(h), precludes any challenge to a UAO order until the ordered response action has been completed (typically many years later at an average cost of $4 million dollars) and (b) by operation of Sections 106 and 107, subjects any PRP who elects to defy a UAO to treble punitive damages and additional penalties of $37,500 per day, which accumulate until EPA, at its sole discretion, brings an enforcement action.
In this regard, CERCLA is an outlier in administrative law. Though instances are common where federal statutes give agencies the power to issue administrative orders, virtually every other comparable scheme affords recipients of such orders either a prior hearing or the prompt opportunity for independent review after the order is issued. CERCLA, of course, provides neither.
So what justifies this unusual approach? It has been suggested on occasion that due process must be dispensed with because UAOs are needed to address emergency conditions. They can only be issued, after all, where an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health or the environment is shown. There are two problems with that rationale, however. First, the courts have largely upheld EPA’s position that “imminent and substantial endangerment” doesn’t really mean “imminent” or “substantial” – there really is no site involving a hazardous substance and a release (actual or threatened) that doesn’t meet the statutory criteria for UAO issuance. Second, as EPA has conceded in litigation, the fact is that EPA doesn’t issue UAOs in true emergencies; in those circumstances, it does the work itself and seeks to recover its costs later.
Okay, so even if true emergencies are not implicated, it’s still the case that EPA has a need to act quickly and that allowing pre- (or prompt post-) issuance review would unduly impede cleanup of hazardous sites, right? Well, as it turns out, that’s not true, either. Analysis of EPA’s CERCLIS database reveals an average 8-year lag-time between identification of a site and issuance of a UAO and a 4-year lag between remedy selection and UAO issuance. Obviously, there’s plenty of time in the system for a little due process.
So why haven’t past procedural due process challenges to this UAO scheme (and there have been a number of them) succeeded? The courts that have rejected those challenges have commonly concluded that the challenging PRPs couldn’t show a pre-hearing deprivation of property, as is required to trigger Fifth Amendment protections. Those courts reasoned that a PRP could simply refuse to comply with and wait for EPA to sue to enforce the UAO, and in that event would suffer no pre-hearing deprivation of property since penalties and damages could only be awarded following a court hearing.
Though the conclusion is facially appealing, its fallacy is demonstrated by the record of the most recent constitutional challenge brought by GE. There, following extensive discovery from EPA and expert testimony on both sides, GE was able to demonstrate empirically that a PRP that elected to defy a UAO would be immediately punished by the equity and capital markets, which would recognize the massive contingent liability such defiance would create and account for it by lowering the PRP’s stock value and increasing its cost of financing, with consequent impacts on its ability to bid for new projects or to hire additional employees, among other things. Indeed, although he took issue with GE’s assessment of the magnitude of the impact, even EPA’s economic expert agreed that defiance would occasion such harmful effects and that they would be significant. And the District Court agreed, as well, that defiance would not avoid a deprivation of property, though it ultimately ruled against GE on the basis that the burden to EPA of providing hearings outweighed the private party interests favoring such hearings.
On appeal the D.C. Circuit rejected the district court’s finding of a pre-hearing property deprivation, however, and ruled instead that such harmful impacts did not involve constitutionally protected property rights and so dismissed GE’s constitutional challenge on that predicate ground without reaching the District Court’s balancing analysis. The potential implications of that holding – which GE believes is inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent – extend well beyond CERCLA confines, and so GE has sought certiorari review. The government’s response to GE’s petition is due February 4.
Stay tuned.
Tags: Superfund