San Francisco has long used the Pacific Ocean as a rest room. When it rains heavily, the hilltop town can't store all of the storm sewage and sewage that flows to a seaside treatment plant in a single old pipe, so some head out to sea. Now, in a case with national implications, San Francisco is hoping the U.S. Supreme Court will allow the corporate to often pollute the oceans without violating the federal Clean Water Act.
Although San Francisco has lived under this regulatory construct for a long time, it has now decided to check the bounds of federal regulations with a right-leaning Supreme Court known for restricting environmental laws.
It's greater than ironic that San Francisco is often the American right's favorite punching bag, with Florida's Ron DeSantis once showing a map of it Defecation points for homeless people on the town while debating California's Gavin Newsom. But now San Francisco is attempting to benefit from this notoriously right-wing court.
While town denies that its legal challenge has anything to do with how Donald Trump fundamentally transformed this court during his presidency, the timing speaks for itself. San Francisco is a regressive city in relation to water.
It's California's Trumpsville.
Nothing lower than 12 other states fight San Francisco in court. This also applies to the Attorney General of California Rob Bonta. This also applies to the Biden administration, which has taken San Francisco to court for failing for years to modernize a Nineteenth-century sewage system.
But San Francisco doesn't appear to care. All it wants is five black-clad judges in Washington, DC, to strike down some regulations. And within the face of judgment oral arguments earlier this month, San Francisco could also be on its method to weakening environmental protections for the remainder of the nation.
“We know that the San Francisco system results in 196 million gallons of wastewater being dumped onto San Francisco beaches,” argued Frederick Liu, an attorney for the federal Environmental Protection Agency. “We know that sewer backups occur in homes and businesses. We know that their infrastructure is aging and failing. We know that the discharges lead to excessive concentrations.”
Is SF really the victim?
Still, San Francisco looks at itself the victim.
“San Francisco is therefore subject to severe criminal and civil penalties even if it otherwise complies with its 300-page approval,” argued Assistant Attorney General Tara Steeley. “It doesn’t tell permit holders in advance what we need to do to control our discharges.”
San Francisco's water management reeks of arrogance.
The system begins by storing water in Yosemite National Park's Hetch Hetchy Valley, a glacially carved wonder that now lies underwater. The untouched snowmelt then flows into town. There, after San Franciscans flush their toilets, little or no water is reused through recycling – an enormous missed opportunity. Rather, the treated wastewater either leads to San Francisco Bay or the Pacific Ocean when it doesn't rain. When it pours, the system can discharge untreated wastewater.
Sacramento is the opposite major California city with an identical “combined” system, with a pipe for stormwater and wastewater downtown. But Sacramento isn't in court over its approval. It treats “practical” all wastewater before discharge into the Sacramento River.
At issue is San Francisco's waterfront facility, which is just unable to adequately treat the waste of 1 / 4 of 1,000,000 San Francisco residents when it rains. The plant plunges into the ocean at seven locations near the coast and at one location 5.3 kilometers into the ocean.
San Francisco welcomes that the Clean Water Act has allowed regulators to impose numerical limits on discharges and their components. However, it opposes broad prohibitions on pollution, contamination or making a nuisance, on this case known as “general prohibitions”.
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemed outraged by the thought.
Speaking to Steeley, Kavanaugh said, “You're facing millions of dollars and possible prison time even though you didn't know in advance what your liabilities were,” an issue “that's written into the law.”
No lawyer could cite a case during which a wayward wastewater operator ever faced prison time. Rather, Liu told the court that state and federal regulators needed to resort to some general permit conditions because San Francisco made it inconceivable to do otherwise.
“We were unable to include the limitations of this adjustment in this permit because San Francisco withheld from us the very information we would need to do so,” Liu said.
Real World Impact
State and federal authorities are fed up with the blockades sued San Francisco hoping to force town to modernize its sewage system.
“The city has done virtually nothing to invest in improving its combined sewer system since the mid-1990s,” said Eric Buescher, an attorney for the environmental group San Francisco Baykeepers.
The lawsuit, currently in its early stages, goals to stop further clean water violations and civil penalties. Steeley told the Supreme Court that penalties could possibly be as high as $10 billion. Liu said they weren’t calculated. In principle he is true, the truth is that the case remains to be removed from a verdict.
Liu appeared to bring the right-wing justices to a standstill as he outlined the real-world implications of striking down the Clean Water Act as San Francisco wants.
The EPA has long since approved permits for countless farmers and construction projects in 14 days, provided they largely promise to comply with environmental laws. If the courts were to force regulators to impose specific numerical discharge limits on these routine permits, what’s now taking days could drag on for months. And that will “undermine the small business economy,” Liu said.
If the court were to achieve such a compromise, San Francisco's own recalcitrance to offer information that the federal government supposedly doesn’t have could be doomed to failure.
San Francisco's water management stays stuck within the Nineteenth century by defending a sewage system of that era. It could advance into the twentieth century by adopting the environmental laws of that point of their implementation. And it could make the leap into the fashionable world by joining its urban water peers, particularly those in Southern California, in recycling Sierra water over and all over again. Diversifying its Sierra-centric water portfolio would cut back San Francisco's dependence on Yosemite. Such a prospect is one which town's outdated water orthodoxy has never been in a position to fathom.
Pacific shouldn't be San Francisco's biggest foul that it might probably get away with.
California's most notorious Trump city will remain this fashion until it cleans up its water law in some ways.
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