Nearly four years ago, Potomac Riverkeeper along with the Environmental Integrity Project notified Mirant (now GenOn), owner of the Morgantown coal-fired power plant, that unless it cleaned up and stopped polluting the waters around its coal ash dump site in Faulkner, Maryland, the matter would be taken to court.  As it turned out, the Maryland Attorney General’s Office used its legal prerogative to take over the case and sued the owner for its violations.  What happened next was a string of procedural complications that ended up moving the case out of the State Court and into Federal Court, where it now sits.

While the case was still in state courts, a State Circuit Court judge decided to not let us intervene in this case on the side of the state, event though the state of Maryland wanted us to intervene on its side.  Our attorneys felt this decision was so incorrect that it was necessary to appeal it to Maryland’s highest court if necessary - and this is what we did.

So our attorneys requested that the seven judges on the Maryland Court of Appeals hear this case, hoping that they would overturn the lower courts.  The judges granted permission to hear the case and the lawyers submitted their written briefs and began preparing their oral arguments.  On January 6th, Maryland’s top court heard the arguments and their decision was - well that’s where the story gets a little strange.

The judges decided that they never should have taken the case!  This is after our lawyers spent many, many hours of writing briefs and preparing for the oral arguments.  It’s hard to imagine why the seven judges did this.  As a non-lawyer, I could guess that this saved a busy court from having to write up a decision that might have been long and complicated; Deciding one way would rule against the Circuit Court and Court of Special Appeals judges, and deciding the other way would rule against the State’s preference to have us intervene.  Whatever their reasons, it’s unfortunate that the judges decided not to take the case until after they heard the case.  It’s all rather curious.

For us, this pollution issue is still very much alive because the State’s case has been moved to Federal Court.  We expect to be able to intervene at the Federal level where the rules seem clearer.  There's still much to be done to clean up the pollution caused by the Faulkner coal ash dump.