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On Friday, we won another legal battle in the fight to bring protective ballast water standards to the Great Lakes! The federal appeals court in Washington, DC denied a legal challenge by ports and shipping interests to U.S. EPA’s Clean Water Act Vessel General Permit. The industry was challenging the permit because it incorporated state ballast water standards, such as those developed by California, New York, and Michigan, that are more stringent than inadequate federal and international standards. Many states have created their own ballast water requirements because they found that stronger protections were necessary to prevent further harm to their waters from invasive species dumped in vessels’ ballast water.
NRDC joined with three other environmental groups to intervene alongside EPA to help the agency successfully defend its Clean Water Act permit from the shipping industry challenge. In its decision on Friday, the D.C. Circuit held that the Clean Water Act plainly provides states with the authority to create such conditions on a federal permit to protect their water quality standards and requires EPA to incorporate them into the permit. The court rejected each of the industry’s procedural objections to EPA’s permitting process as meritless.
Complete Post at:
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/tcmar/federal_appeals_court_rejects.html
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