Draft:City and County of San Francisco v. EPA

City and County of San Francisco v. Environmental Protection Agency is a pending Supreme Court of the United States case in which the court will determine whether or not the Clean Water Act allow the Environmental Protection Agency (or an authorized state) to impose generic prohibitions in National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits that subject permit-holders to enforcement for violating water quality standards without identifying specific limits to which their discharges must conform.

Background
The city of San Francisco has a combined sewege system that collects both sewege and stormwater runoff, when the system exceed its capacity during heavy rains, the combined sewer overflows (CSOs) discharge pollutants into the Pacific Ocean.

The Clean Water Act requires cities to acquire a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) for such discharges. The city of San Francisco, has been implemented a CSO plan since the late 1960s and the construction of current CSO controlfacilities in 1997.

In 2019, the Environmental Protection Agency and the California Regional Water Quality Control Board issued a new National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit for San Francisco's Oceanside treatment facility. The city of San Francisco appealed to EPA's Environmental Appeals Board, arguing that these provisions were incosistent under the Clean Water Act and Environmental Protection Agency regulations, but the board denied the administrative appeal. The city of San Francisco appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, but the court denied San Francisco's petition for review, arguing that Clean Water Act authorizes EPA to include in the Oceanside NPDES permit the challenged provisions, and that EPA's decision to do so was rationally connected to evidence in the administrative record.

Supreme Court
The Supreme Court granted the cetiorari and the case will be heard in 2024 October term.