Environmental Protection Agency v. Brown Environmental Protection Agency v. Maryland State Air Pollution Control Board v. Costle Costle v. District of Columbia
| Decision Date | 02 May 1977 |
| Docket Number | 75-960,75-1050 and 75-1055,Nos. 75-909,s. 75-909 |
| Citation | 52 L.Ed.2d 166,431 U.S. 99,97 S.Ct. 1635 |
| Parties | ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY, Petitioner, v. Edmund G. BROWN, Jr., Governor of California, et al. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY, Petitioner, v. State of MARYLAND et al. STATE AIR POLLUTION CONTROL BOARD, Petitioner, v. Douglas M. COSTLE, Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency. Douglas M. COSTLE, Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency, Petitioner, v. DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA et al |
| Court | U.S. Supreme Court |
These cases arise under the Clean Air Act, as amended by the Clean Air Amendments of 1970, 84 Stat. 1676, 42 U.S.C. § 1857 et seq., and raise questions concerning the authority of the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency to compel various types of implementation and enforcement actions by the States. Four separate decisions in the Courts of Appeals reviewed transportation control plans promulgated by the Administrator for several States which had previously failed to submit adequate plans of their own. Four petitions have been filed seeking review of those decisions which, with limited exceptions, invalidated the Administrator's transportation control plans which had been adopted in the form of regulations.
Those transportation control plans have a variety of aspects which need not be discussed in great detail to explain our disposition of these cases. In general, they imposed upon the States the obligations (1) to develop an inspection and maintenance program pertaining to the vehicles registered in the affected Air Quality Control Regions, and to submit to the Administrator, by fixed deadlines, both a schedule of compliance and the operative regulations by which the program was to be run; (2) to develop various retrofit programs pertaining to several classes of older vehicles, in order to minimize several different types of emissions; (3) to designate and enforce preferential bus and carpool lanes, on streets sometimes specifically identified in the regulations and sometimes left to be chosen by the State; (4) to develop a program to monitor actual emissions as affected by the foregoing programs; and (5) to adopt certain other programs which varied from State to State.
The critical fact about all of the foregoing obligations was that they were imposed on the States, under 40 CFR § 52.23 (1976), as elements of an applicable implementation plan. A State's failure to carry out any of them would therefore not merely allow the Administrator to step in and carry them out himself under § 113(a)(2) of the Clean Air Act,1 but would in the view of each of the Courts of Appeals, render the State "in violation of any requirement of an applicable implementation plan" and therefore apparently subject to direct enforcement actions against it under the provisions of § 113(a)(1), 42 U.S.C. § 1857c-8(a)(1):
Under dual challenges by the States that these regulations were not within the mandate of the Act, and that if they were they were in violation of the Constitution, the United States Courts of Appeals for the Ninth, Fourth, and District of Columbia Circuits struck them down. All of the courts rested on statutory interpretation, but noted also that serious constitutional questions might be raised if the statute were read as the United States argued it should be. Brown v. EPA, 521 F.2d 827 (CA9 1975); Arizona v. EPA, 521 F.2d 825 (CA9 1975); District of Columbia v. Train, 172 U.S.App.D.C. 311, 521 F.2d 971 (1975); Maryland v. EPA, 530 F.2d 215 (CA4 1975). The only substantial variation in the outcome of these decisions 2 was that the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed regulations requiring the creation of bus lanes, the purchase by the affected jurisdictions of a fixed number of new buses, and the denial of registration to a vehicle whose owner is unable to produce a federal certificate of compliance, should a federal inspection program be instituted.
The Solicitor General's petitions from all three Courts of Appeals challenged them only insofar as they invalidated the regulations requiring state inspection and maintenance programs. In addition, we granted the petition for certiorari of the Commonwealth of Virginia on its challenge to the regulations which the District of Columbia Circuit had upheld. Prior to argument, the Solicitor General informed the Court that repeal of the bus purchase regulations was imminent, Reply Brief for Federal Parties 25,3 and that issue was thereby effectively removed from the case. Thus the litigation has undergone a great deal of shrinkage since the decisions below due to the federal parties' exercise of their prerogative not to seek review of the invalidation of certain regulations.
But the federal parties have not merely renounced an intent to pursue certain specified regulations; they now...
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