In 2007, Michael and Chantell Sackett decided to build a house on what an appeals court later called “a soggy residential lot” near Priest Lake in Idaho. The EPA objected, claiming the lot was a protected wetland subject to the Clean Water Act. The Sacketts sued and the case has been up to the US Supreme Court and back again previously. This week, five of the so-called justices of the Supreme Court decided to overrule long established precedent and allow the Sacketts to build their dream home.
In a majority opinion, Judge Samuel Alito wrote, “We hold that the CWA extends to only those wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are ‘waters of the United States’ in their own right, so that they are ‘indistinguishable’ from those waters.” The nub of the controversy is that some parcels of land are wet part of the year and dry at other times.
The…
Read the full article originally published at cleantechnica.com.