{"id":10779,"date":"2018-12-03T18:47:05","date_gmt":"2018-12-03T18:47:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.environment-hawaii.org\/?p=10779"},"modified":"2018-12-07T20:04:08","modified_gmt":"2018-12-07T20:04:08","slug":"new-noteworthy-maui-court-cases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/?p=10779","title":{"rendered":"New & Noteworthy: Maui Court Cases"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Maui Goes to Court:<\/strong> Maui County is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review \u2013 and overturn \u2013 the decision of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last February that found the county was operating its Lahaina wastewater treatment plant in violation of the federal Clean Water Act.<\/p>\n

In its petition for cert, filed in late August, the county labels the appellate court\u2019s decision as a \u201cradical expansion of point source permitting\u201d and repeatedly refers to a \u201cbright-line test\u201d to distinguish between point source and nonpoint source pollution. \u201cWithout this Court\u2019s intervention,\u201d the county\u2019s attorneys, based in Richmond, Virginia, state, \u201ca wide array of sources previously regulated outside the [National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System] point source program, like the underground injection control (UIC) wells at issue here, will be brought suddenly within it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Filing amicus briefs in support of the county are the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation and a group of 17 state governments and the governors of Kentucky and Mississippi. A third amicus brief was filed by the National Association of Counties, the National League of Cities, and a host of organizations representing municipal sanitation agencies and other interested parties.<\/p>\n

Opposed to the petition are the Hawai\u2018i Wildlife Fund, the Sierra Club\u2014Maui Group, the Surfrider Foundation, and the West Maui Preservation Society. These groups are the original plaintiffs.<\/p>\n

In the brief filed by their attorney, David Henkin of Earthjustice, they dispute the county\u2019s claim that the lower court\u2019s decision, if upheld, will increase the number of facilities requiring NPDES permits \u201cby several orders of magnitude.\u201d \u201cThe determination whether an indirect discharge \u2018is the functional equivalent of a discharge into the navigable water\u2019 is fact-specific,\u201d Henkin writes, to be made on a case-by-case basis.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven should the number of facilities requiring permits increase,\u201d Henkin argues, many, if not most of them, could qualify for general permits, \u201cwhich greatly reduce the administrative burden.\u201d Of the 137,455 facilities nationally that have NPDES permits, he notes, more than two-thirds operate under such general permits.<\/p>\n

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Palauaea Beach<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Maui Is Taken to Court:<\/strong> Another case involving Maui County is on appeal to the highest court in the nation \u2013 this one brought by Douglas Leone, one of the richest men in the country. Leone and his wife, Patricia Perkins-Leone, own coastal property in Makena, Maui. The county denied them permission to build a single-family residence on the lot. Leone appealed in state court, with the county\u2019s denial ultimately upheld by the state Supreme Court in October 2017. (For details, see the cover article in the November 2017 edition of Environment Hawai\u2018i<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Once again, the Pacific Legal Foundation is weighing in with an amicus brief, on behalf of itself, the Cato Institute, the Owners\u2019 Counsel of America, the South- eastern Legal Foundation, University of Hawai\u2018i law professor David Callies, the Land Use Research Foundation of Hawai\u2018i, and the NFIB Legal Center. Also supporting Leone are briefs from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the conservative Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.<\/p>\n

Exploring the Abyss: Craig Smith of the University of Hawai\u2018i\u2019s School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology will be the featured speaker at Environment Hawai\u2018i\u2019s annual dinner, to be held January 18 in Hilo\u2019s \u2018Imiloa Astronomy Center. Smith will describe the jaw-dropping finds he and his team made when exploring the seafloor of the Clarion-Clipperton zone. That area, which lies between Hawai\u2018i and Mexico, has been proposed for deep-ocean mining of manganese nodules.<\/p>\n

In addition to a buffet dinner, the evening will include live music by Jazz X 2 and a silent auction. The cost is $70 a head, which includes a $35 tax-deductible donation.<\/p>\n

Reserve your place now. Call 808 934-0115 to charge your order, or mail a check to the office: 190 Keawe Street, #29, Hilo HI 96720.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maui Goes to Court: Maui County is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review – and overturn – the decision of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last February that found the county was operating its Lahaina wastewater treatment … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10047,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[7],"class_list":["post-10779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-december-2018","tag-patricia-tummons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}