In a harshly worded filing, the National Mining Association and other industry groups asked for partial summary judgment in the suit filed against the EPA over the agency’s “final guidance” document on the Clean Water Act issued this past year.
“In both word and deed in drafting and implementing these “guidance” documents, EPA has dramatically overstepped the bounds Congress carefully crafted for EPA across multiple statutory programs that govern coal mining,” attorneys for the industry wrote. “If EPA had the authority to issue the proclamations found in these documents, which include regulation of mine design, presumptions on conductivity as a measure of water quality, and invasion into the states’ water quality standards, there would be no need for “guidance” in the first instance. EPA’s role and views would have been codified and woven into dozens of regulatory provisions that have governed environmental permitting for coal mining for at least the past three decades.
“The final guidance document runs roughshod over the carefully crafted regulatory schemes in the SMCRA and CWA… EPA exceeds multiple ceilings placed on its authority and disrupts the critical cooperative federalism balance that Congress intended between federal agencies and the states.”