History

ASLF founding:  In the early 1980s, while I was still working for the Sierra Club, several of us observed that local citizens usually wasted resources — their own time and money – in their attempt to defeat unwise development.  The culminating project was a proposed Marriott Corporation development in the Shawangunks at the old Catskill Mountain House (I believe; my memory is getting rusty!). My colleague Christopher Denton, an attorney in Elmira, NY, proposed and did the legal work that resulted in filing for corporate status for Atlantic States as a New York Not-for-profit in the Spring of 1982 (filing receipt is 29 June 1982).  At the end of that year,  I left the Sierra Club employment and worked full time for ASLF until recently.  Although my memory is not the best, I believe that Chris’s wife (Leora Amir-Denton) was the third founding BOD member.  After getting our charter approved by NYS Supreme Court, we then further organized with a BOD that in June 1984 included Steven W. Kulick, Christian G. Spies, Sylvia Cukan, and myself — all from NYS. By 1990, the exact date uncertain, we had expanded beyond NYS with Shirley Taylor (FL) and Vivian Newman (MD) both on the BOD.

At the end of my tenure with the Sierra Club, we were involved with citizen suit litigation under Section 505 of the Clean Water Act.  When I left to work at ASLF, we, in essence, took over citizen enforcement nationally.  Although hard to recall now, many of these actions were cutting edge at the time, although they now do not appear so consequential by now.   I will try to highlight some.

In 1982 while I was still with the Sierra Club, several organizations received a grant from the MacIntosh (sp?) Foundation to see if Section 505, the Citizen Suit Provision, of the Clean Water Act allowed enforcement lawsuits.  We had the money for up to 25 cases in NY and NJ. These suits were very successful.  As I remember, the very first was against a color TV tube manufacturer in Seneca Falls.  Another settlement was against Alcoa on St. Lawrence, and that case resulted in what was then the record penalty against a polluter — a measly $70,000!  By 1983 ASLF was bringing cases, the first in NY and LA, followed by a PA’s heavy dose.  Soon we were invited by the Isaac Walton League in Indiana to work there, and after extensive research, we filed over a hundred actions; there were a very few months.  This work led to the Syracuse Post Standard doing a full-page article about me.  When asked for an “enemy” for them to speak
with, I suggested the Indiana Lt. Governor, and he responded perfectly to the article.

Some cases were pretty much routine, and others set significant precedents.  A few that come to mind:

Al Tech Specialty Steel (Watervliet):  Standing issues

Conrail:  Second Circuit appeal over bad district decisions — first appellate decision.

Tyson Foods:  Twelfth Circuit appeal over the case in Alabama, and this detailed the method of calculating penalties after chastising the District Court’s dismissal

Koch Refining (Minnesota):  Over a $3,000,000 fine which mushroomed over the years to over $13,000,000

Onondaga County (NY):  Suit initially filed in 1988, joined by NYS as co-plaintiff with us.  This led the County to install upgrades to the sewage treatment plant and take care of combined sewer overflows.  Many agreed to settlements with the latest amendment to the agreement in October 2010. As of November 2019, the settlement was reached between Onondaga County and the Atlantic States Legal Foundation. ASLF has file cases in many states with many different
partners.  Over the years, we had offices in Gary, IN, Tucson, AZ, Seattle, WA, and Puerto Rico.  We have worked in some capacity in over 40
states, PR, VI, American Samoa (could not file there for lack of standing).

Following this work with the Clean Water Act, ASLF also premiered work under EPCRA (Emergency Planning Community Right to Know). This was part of the amended US Superfund law passed after Bhopal to enable the public and local government to know better what chemicals are being used by local industries.  The significant outcome of these suits was the reduction of chemicals being released into the environment.  Many of them required the defendant corporation to work with our technical team and develop waste reduction schemes that, in many cases, benefited them greatly by forcing them to do pollution prevention and thus better utilizing their conversion of materials into profit-making products.  In this work, the NYS Disaster Preparedness Commission awarded ASLF their top award in 1993.

By the nineties, changes in both the Courts and corporate sophistication put a damper on citizen suits, and for the most part, we stopped bringing them.  By that time, ASLF had moved away from the strictly legal arena by providing more technical assistance at home and abroad.  At this time, we began to concentrate our attention on international issues.  Two of these will serve as examples of what we were doing then.  In the first of these, we joined partners in working on trying to alleviate solid waste problems in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay. 

This led to much work, some of it continuing into the present, protecting biodiversity, responsible tourism, and ensuring that local indigenous people were getting their fair share of profits.  The second example involves Central and Eastern Europe.  After the demise of communism, ASLF felt that this area was an appropriate one to bring modern pollution control technologies and help government personnel do things such as the use of geographic information systems and geographic modeling.  Besides, both the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea presented similar problems to the US-Canadian Great Lakes, where we had become one of the leading organizations involved.  Highlights of this work included being the NGO representative in a US EPA sponsored conference on watershed planning held in Latvia, training Polish National Parks people on using GIS and modeling. We worked with Romanian activists on combating Black Sea coast solid waste and developing and implementing a pollution prevention plan for a company in Romania.

By the beginning of the new millennium, ASLF tried to rethink its mission and short-term goals and objectives.  The political situation had changed quite a bit. The US courts were becoming increasingly pro-business, and the general public was overwhelmed with technical argon and increasingly indifferent to the
environment.  This resulted in much discussion and rethinking of our mission and activities.  Our new mission statement is shown here:

Mission Statement as of 2020:  Atlantic States Legal Foundation (ASLF) was established in 1982 to provide affordable legal, technical and organizational assistance to individuals, community groups, and other Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to remediate threats to the natural environment effectively.

Along with our new mission, we reorganized and strengthened the board of directors, brought in a new executive director, and I retired.  ASLF recognizes that much more hard work is needed to convince the public to get their hands dirty, working to protect their futures and the planet.  As an example of this, ASLF has moved on with our work with Onondaga County and is now actively developing strategies for controlling increasing amounts of stormwater. 

Perhaps more comment is needed regarding ASLF’s efforts on Onondaga Lake and our lawsuit against Onondaga County.  This effort that converted the nation’s most contaminated lake into an asset for the community took decades to accomplish and continues as a significant effort today.

ASLF’s most significant success is the initiation of its groundbreaking lawsuit against Onondaga County in 1988 for its violations of the Clean Water Act by both allowing excessive untreated combined sewer overflows (CSO) to be released to tributary streams and by exceeding its permit to discharge directly to Onondaga Lake. This lawsuit resulted in a settlement whereby the County was obligated to fix those problems; water quality in the lake- arguably at one time the most polluted in North America- has improved to approach swimmable levels.

However, the initial CSO abatement program was not successful. After many years of controversy about CSO abatement strategies, in October 2010, the Federal Court approved an amendment to our settlement order that has enabled Green Infrastructure (GI) as a new approach to remediating the CSO issues. Onondaga County and the City of Syracuse have become national leaders in using Green Infrastructure to deal with stormwater and CSO issues. ASLF has been collaborating with the County to provide technical assistance in developing and implementing GI plans. We have become the lead agency in:

•     Planning and implementing the Vacant Lot Program where these underutilized spaces will become orchards, gardens, and forests to absorb and slow the flow of stormwater, thereby demonstrating the worth of these technologies so to earn community buy-in and support for CSO remediation and further augment participation by residents of the community

•     Developing education materials along with outreach and instructional programs for GI projects

•     Providing general overall assistance as requested in projects for the vacant lot program

•     Urban forestry

As a grassroots organization, ASLF has always worked closely with underserved populations.

ASLF completed an Environmental Justice grant in collaboration with the Dunbar Association (Dunbar) in Syracuse, NY, for an environmental education program.
ASLF helped Dunbar install a rain garden and delivered ten environmental sessions to school kids regarding stormwater management and rain garden maintenance. ASLF has also assisted the Spanish Action League (La Liga) with implementing GI projects on their property and adjacent vacant lots. Both Dunbar and La Liga are committed to working with young people and neighborhood residents to educate them about their communities’ environmental benefits through the thoughtful application of green infrastructure technologies for stormwater management.  

We have accomplished a great deal here in Syracuse and around the United States and the world. There is much to be done.  As the world destroys itself from human-induced climate change, time is getting shorter and shorter.  The planet is too small for many of its constituents, and often they are getting out in the human population as their home in the forest gets chopped down for palm oil, soybeans, cattle, etc.  And the oceans get depleted of fish and contaminated with plastic debris.  Humans have put blind faith in technology while at the same time negating scientific reason.  Our problems should have workable solutions, but the political, economic, and social fabric refuses to deal with any of these issues sensibly.