Prior to the U.S. Supreme Court's Apr. 23 decision, two courts ruled in favor of Earthjustice and its clients. In 2016, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also agreed with the courts that Maui County was acting illegally.

The county doesn’t dispute that its wastewater pollution reaches the ocean.

Instead, it argued that the discharge of pollution from the facility’s wells does not require Clean Water Act permits because the pollutants do not flow directly into the Pacific Ocean, but indirectly through groundwater. Both the district court and the Ninth Circuit appeals court rejected the county’s claims.

“At bottom, this case is about preventing the county from doing indirectly that which it cannot do directly,” the Ninth Circuit ruled in 2018.

The District of Hawaiʻi court added in its 2014 ruling on the same issue that: “[Maui County’s claim] would, of course, make a mockery of [the Clean Water Act’s regulatory scheme] if [the] authority to control pollution was limited to the bed of the navigable stream itself. The tributaries which join to form the river could then be used as open sewers as far as federal regulation was concerned. No less can be said for groundwater flowing directly into the ocean.”

But Maui County wasn’t giving up. In Feb. 2019, it successfully petitioned the United States Supreme Court to hear the case, an act which now endangers clean water protections writ large.

On Sept. 20, 2019, the Maui County Council voted to settle County of Maui v. Hawaiʻi Wildlife Fund, a decision intended to avoid a standoff at the U.S. Supreme Court that could jeopardize clean water across the United States. But the County of Maui had to officially submit the paperwork to settle the case.

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