Supreme Court sides with San Francisco in its fight over EPA clean water rules

"...this case involves provisions that do not spell out what a permittee must do or refrain from doing; rather, they make a permittee responsible for the quality of the water in the body of water into which the permittee discharges pollutants. When a permit contains such requirements, a permittee that punctiliously follows every specific requirement in its permit may nevertheless face crushing penalties if the quality of the water in its receiving waters falls below the applicable standards. For convenience, we will call such provisions 'end-result' requirements.

The permittee in this case is a wastewater treatment facility owned by San Francisco. For the past five years, the facility’s permit has included two end-result requirements, and if those provisions are upheld, the City could be heavily penalized even though it was never put on notice that it was obligated to take any specific step other than those it undertook."

Thank god. Sense in government. (The WPCA history makes the opinion worth the read.)