•  
  •  
 

Publication Date

5-7-2026

Document Type

Survey Article

Abstract

In 2025, in a Clean Water Act (“CWA”) citizen-suit challenge to a landowner’s filling of a tract of land on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, under a nationwide dredge-and-fill permit issued by the United States Army Corps of Engineers (the “Corps”), the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that the landowner did not waive its right to challenge whether the tract was a wetland by virtue of submitting a form to the Corps in connection with its obtaining coverage under the permit that stated that the landowner accepted that the tract at issue was a jurisdictional water of the United States. The court also held that under the Supreme Court of the United States’s decision in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency,  the plaintiffs’ complaint failed to state a claim on which relief could be granted because it failed to allege facts that plausibly showed the tract at issue had a “continuous surface connection to a water of the United States.”

In another case, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Alabama, in an issue of first impression, held that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (“FWS”) acted arbitrarily when it concluded that a geographical area that included the plaintiff landowners’ land was occupied by the black pine snake, a listed threatened species under the Endangered Species Act (“ESA”), based on evidence that the land was suitable habitat for the pine snake but without evidence that the pine snake actually occupied the land. Also, in an issue of first impression, the court concluded that the FWS must consider all economic impacts of a critical habitat designation to the land at issue, rather than just the costs to the landowner attributable to the designation itself, and, in particular, the FWS must consider economic injury caused by “negative perceptions of the land due to the critical habitat designation.” Because the FWS had not considered “negative perceptions” injury in determining that the designation caused no economic impact to the plaintiffs’ land, the FWS’s failure to exclude plaintiffs’ land from the designation for economic reasons was arbitrary.

Finally, the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida ruled that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s regulations that governed wastewater discharges into the North Indian River Lagoon allowed for excess nutrients to enter the Lagoon, ultimately resulting in an ongoing “taking” of endangered manatees under the ESA. Therefore, the court required that the agency obtain an incidental take permit in connection with its continued regulation and remediation activities in the Lagoon.

Download

Share

COinS