The Supreme Court has given Idaho couple Chantell and Mike Sackett a massive victory in their years-long fight with the Environmental Protection Agency, whose agents claimed their residential building land in Priest Lake was protected “wetlands” even though it wasn’t wet, wasn’t attached to navigable waters and was surrounded by homes on other lots.
It was the second straight victory at the high court for the Sacketts, who earlier had to go all the way to the top because the EPA said they couldn’t even challenge the decision in court.
Their land, on which they proposed building a home, is 300 feet from a lake in rural Idaho.
The unanimous ruling said the couple’s land does not, in fact, fall under jurisdiction of the 1972 Clean Water Act. So they do not have to have a federal permit to build, nor will the hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties the EPA threatened against them apply.
The justices reached the same conclusion based on various precedents, but the majority ruling from Justice Samuel Alito said that Clean Water Act jurisdiction applies only when there are wetlands that are “indistinguishable” from larger bodies of water by having a “continuous surface connection.”
Alito said the “wetlands” on the Sacketts’ property are “distinguishable from any possibly covered waters.”
Alito said the law had been applied by the EPA so broadly to was being used “to criminalize mundane activities like moving dirt.”
The Sacketts earlier won at the Supreme Court in 2012. That case focused on whether the Sacketts could even challenge an EPA order in court.