Case Law Details
Friends of the Capital Crescent Trail v. Army Corps of Engineers
Project Description:
The Purple Line is a 16.2-mile light rail transit project in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. The project will provide east-west transit service connecting several major activity centers, including two employment hubs and the state’s flagship university campus. It would also provide connections to four stations on the region’s Metrorail subway system. The NEPA process for the Purple Line began in 2003. The Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) and Federal Transit Administration (FTA) published the Draft EIS in 2008. The Draft EIS evaluated eight alternatives, including three bus rapid transit alternatives, three light rail transit alternatives, a “transportation system management” alternative (involving improvements to existing transportation services), and a no-build alternative. MTA identified one of the light rail options as its locally preferred alternative in 2009. The agencies issued the Final EIS in 2013, and FTA issued a Record of Decision approving the locally preferred alternative in 2014. Following the Record of Decision, the state entered into a public-private partnership agreement with a developer team, under which the developer would be responsible for completing the project design, financing and building the project, and then operating and maintaining the project for 30 years. In 2017, FTA approved a full funding grant agreement and committed $900 million in funding from the New Starts grant program. In March 2018, the Army Corps of Engineers issued a permit pursuant to Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. In determining that the locally preferred alternative was also the least environmentally damaging practicable alternative (LEDPA) under its Clean Water Act section 404(b)(1) guidelines, the Corps analyzed the eight alternatives in the EIS and a “Metrorail loop” alternative that had been rejected earlier in the NEPA process. The locally preferred alternative would impact 0.49 acres of wetlands and 5,108 linear feet of streams.
453 F. Supp. 3d 804
453 F. Supp. 3d 804
U.S. District Court – Maryland
04/13/2020
Purple Line
Transit
Case Summary
This is the third lawsuit challenging the Purple Line. The first lawsuit involved challenges under NEPA and other environmental laws to the adequacy of the EIS and to FTA’s determinations that a supplemental EIS was not required. In December 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in favor of MTA and FTA on all issues in that first case. The second lawsuit involved a challenge to FTA’s full funding grant agreement and claims that FTA was not complying with its mitigation commitments. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed that lawsuit in March 2019. In this lawsuit, the plaintiffs sued the Army Corps of Engineers to challenge its Clean Water Act Section 404 permit for the project. The court upheld the Corps’ determination that the locally preferred alternative was the LEDPA. The court ruled that the Corps’ alternatives analysis was sufficient in light of the prior NEPA process and the scale of the project’s impacts. The court held that the administrative record did not support the plaintiffs’ argument that another alternative (involving bus rapid transit without bridge widening) was the LEDPA and should have been identified and analyzed by the Corps. As of January 2021, an appeal was pending.
Key Holdings
Standing
The court held that one of the plaintiffs had standing to bring the lawsuit. To have standing, at least one plaintiff must show that it suffered an actual or threatened injury, that the injury is caused by the defendant’s action, and that a favorable court ruling would redress the injury. In addition, a plaintiff must show that its injury falls within the “zone of interests” that a statute protects. Here, the court held that the plaintiff established an injury because construction of the Purple Line would affect the aesthetic features of a trail that he used, and this injury was within the zone of interests that the Clean Water Act protected. The court explained that the primary purpose of the Clean Water Act was to protect waters, and its zone of interests could include aesthetic and recreational interests in protected waters. The plaintiff testified that in addition to the general aesthetics of the trail, he particularly appreciated certain streams and wetlands that would be affected by the Purple Line. Finally, the court held that the injuries to the plaintiff’s aesthetic interest in those wetlands and streams was caused by the Corps’ permit and could be redressed by a favorable decision, because vacatur of the permit would prevent the effects to those waters (even if it would not lead to restoration of the trail).
Clean Water Act Section 404
The plaintiffs argued that the Corps should have evaluated alternatives that were not analyzed during the NEPA process. In particular, the plaintiffs asserted that the Corps should have analyzed a bus rapid transit option that did not involve widening existing roads, citing a statement in the EIS that most wetlands impacts were related to road widenings. The court held that this alternative “is not at all the obvious LEDPA Platiniffs claim, and the Corps cannot be faulted for failing to independently identify it.” The court explained that the plaintiffs took a single paragraph in the EIS out of context. The administrative record as a whole (including more comprehensive analyses by the Corps after publication of the EIS) did not show a connection between road widenings and wetland impacts. Rather, wetland impacts were distributed throughout the project’s length and were principally associated with road encroachments and vegetation removal, not bridge construction. In addition, the administrative record did not support the plaintiffs’ claim that bus rapid transit was superior to light rail in terms of aquatic impacts. Thus, the Corps’ failure to identify and analyze a new bus rapid transit alternative that did not involve widening bridges was not arbitrary or capricious. The court concluded that the Corps’ analysis of alternatives was sufficient in light of the prior NEPA process and the scale of the project’s impacts:
“Here, by the time the [Clean Water Act] permitting process began, agencies with more expertise than the Corps in transit matters had already undertaken years of work identifying the best options for the Purple Line project, in a NEPA analysis whose sufficiency has been affirmed by the D.C. Circuit. Further, while the overall cost, economic impact, and environmental footprint of the Purple Line may all be large, the permanent aquatic impacts to less than half an acre of wetlands and less than a linear mile of streams are quite minor. Given these facts, it was not at all unreasonable for the Corps to incorporate the NEPA alternatives analysis and focus on those alternatives the FTA and MTA had found potentially feasible, rather than trying to ‘reinvent the wheel’ by proposing or demanding novel alternatives that no party has yet clearly outlined.”
File Attachment