The late Justice Crooks once wrote for a majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court that “general standards are common in environmental statues . . . [and] the fact that [they] are broad standards does not make them non-existent ones.” That principle is about to be tested in both the United States Supreme Court and the Wisconsin Supreme Court. General standards (or, as their opponents often call them, vague standards) may be “common in environmental statutes,” but they are also becoming extremely controversial, as demonstrated in a pair of current cases. The first is a federal matter, City and County of San Francisco v. Environmental Protection Agency, in which the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari on May 28. The case concerns regulatory agencies’ authority under the Clean Water Act (CWA) to issue “narrative” standards, or statements that describe a water quality goal when numeric standards are too difficult to quantify. The permit provision at issue prohibits a wastewater treatment facility from “causing or contributing to” a violation of water quality standards, and from discharging substances that “create pollution, contamination, or nuisance.” The appellant municipalities say those standards are too vague, because they create no specific numerical requirements that provide a yardstick as to when the water has been sufficiently treated to avoid running afoul of the CWA—no way to know “how much is too much” pollution. In other words, the argument is that the municipalities cannot design treatment technologies without more definite standards. Last term in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Court struck down EPA’s broad interpretation of the term “waters of the United States” in the CWA, sharply curtailing the agency’s authority to regulate discharges into wetlands. And in the meantime, the court overruled its longstanding principle of deferring to agencies’ legal interpretations of statutory terms, known as Chevron deference. Together, those decisions may not bode well for EPA’s position in the San Francisco case. The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s endorsement of “general” standards described at the beginning of this post came in response to a challenge of the Department of Natural Resources’ general authority under the Wisconsin statutes and the public trust doctrine to “protect, maintain and improve” the waters of the state. In the case, Lake Beulah Management District v. DNR, the court held that the DNR could rely on general legislative grants of authority such as that to place conditions on permits issued for the operation of high-capacity wells. The court reached a similar conclusion a decade later in 2021, in two decisions relating to DNR’s authority to regulate Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and high-capacity wells, both captioned Clean Wisconsin v. DNR. In the Clean Wisconsin cases, the court held that agency authority that is stated in broad terms nevertheless qualifies as actionable, “explicit” authority within the meaning of Wis. Stat. § 227.10(2m), which prohibits the agency from implementing or enforcing a permit condition not “explicitly required or explicitly permitted” by statute or by rule. That position will be tested again should the court accept the…