Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Inc. v. County of Henrico

Two environmental groups and the County of Henrico reached a settlement to resolve the groups’ Clean Water Act citizen suit concerning alleged violations at the Henrico County Water Reclamation Facility. In April 2022, the federal district court for the Eastern District of Virginia denied in part the County’s motion to dismiss, finding that there were “reasonable doubts as to future compliance,” including because of trends such as more frequent severe weather events and increased amounts of precipitation. The settlement agreement obligated the parties to make a joint request to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to add certain requirements to a December 2021 consent order that was intended to resolve sanitary sewer overflow violations from the sewage collection system. If DEQ declines to modify the consent order, the parties will confer regarding the status of the litigation. The court stayed all proceedings in the case until December 31, 2022.

The federal district court for the Eastern District of Virginia allowed two environmental organizations to proceed with claims for injunctive relief in a citizen suit alleging violations of the Clean Water Act at the Henrico County Water Reclamation Facility. The court found that the plaintiffs “sufficiently alleged a state of intermittent violation” at the facility over a period of almost three decades and noted that the County and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality “themselves appear to express doubt that the effluent limit violations remain wholly in the past.” In particular, the court cited the County’s acknowledgement that certain violations coincided with “wet weather conditions” and the County’s assertion that this challenge was “compounded by the recent effects of climate change, including more frequent severe weather events and increased amounts of precipitation.” The court wrote that “[s]uch trends suggest to the Court that Henrico may yet violate its effluent limitation limits in the intervening years” before completion of required upgrades to manage increased precipitation. The court found that these “reasonable doubts as to future compliance” were sufficient to conclude that violations were not “wholly past” and that the County remained in violation of Clean Water Act standards.