Is This Legal and Transparent?
Is any of this illegal?
That questions final answer is actually determined by a court in which EGLE has the huge advantage of a taxpayer funded attorney with a full staff of investigators and assistant’s, there is no downside to EGLE management to do whatever they wish, it’s all taxpayer money being spent.
Some facts on this permit denial;
When initially notified the permit may be denied our permit agent said fine, please furnish a EGLE no jurisdictional letter as needed to get a federal permit (USAC) as Shore Savers can be installed above the ordinary high water mark, preliminary communications he had with the federal permit agent indicated a USAC permit would be granted in a timely manner.
EGLE then indicated they needed to communicate with USAC, when asked why such communications were necessary EGLE declined and to this date have refused to furnish any such answers. (FOI filed) Actually EGLE staff was trying to figure out what actions they could take as a state agency to block any Shore Savers permit issuance by USAC, who typically reviews permit applications in a fair and unbiased manner based on their merits according to a criteria based on applicable law and environmental regulations.
EGLE could not find a valid reason under their existing permit review criteria (FOI filed) to deny permits for a Shore Savers installation. The solution EGLE arrived at to stop any USAC permitting and the installation of Shore Savers anywhere in the State of Michigan was to refuse to grant a completely non applicable EPA 401 water discharge certification that they routinely waived or granted to all erosion control structures and most other marine construction permits, do seawalls discharge water that might not meet EPA standards? (FOI filed)
That action effectively met their goal of blocking any USAC permitting.
The EPA 401 standard (https://www.epa.gov/cwa-401) is designed to force states to provide review and input on any potential hazardous large scale waste water discharges with negative environmental benefits such as from municipal sewage treatment plants or power generation facilities.
As you will see in the permit denial letter (see below) the EGLE district office permit agent, John Baya, who appears to have very limited actual practical marine construction experience (FOI filed) struggled mightily to create and express reasons why Shore Savers modules were actually going to discharge liquid waste hazardous to Lake Michigan that would exceed the EPA’s 401 water quality standards.
Most of the issues as indicated in the denial letter are actually very common to rock revetments and steel sea walls and exactly what Shore Savers was designed to eliminate.
Is this illegal?
A common legal standard is malicious and intentional, how would you vote if you were sitting on a jury?
Below is the denial letter we received from EGLE.
Click on an image to open the PDF file.
