Background
The City of Brunswick sued Honeywell International and Georgia Power in Georgia state court for continuing nuisance and continuing trespass. The City alleged that mercury, PCBs, and other hazardous substances from a former industrial plant site had entered City property and that the defendants continued to fail to remove the pollution adequately.
The site is a federal Superfund site. Under an EPA-approved consent decree implementing a CERCLA cleanup plan, Honeywell and Georgia Power undertook remediation subject to EPA oversight and control. The defendants removed the City’s suit to federal court on several grounds, including the federal-officer removal statute, but the district court rejected those grounds and remanded the case. The parties then litigated in state court while the defendants’ appeal was pending.
The Court’s Holding
The Eleventh Circuit held that it had jurisdiction to review the remand order. Applying the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Coinbase, Inc. v. Bielski, the court held that a notice of appeal from a remand order reviewable under 28 U.S.C. § 1447(d) automatically stays all district-court proceedings, including the remand order, when federal-officer removal is at issue. The intervening state-court proceedings therefore had no legal effect for purposes of the appeal, and neither those proceedings nor the City’s amended state-court complaints mooted the appeal.
The court also held that removal was proper under 28 U.S.C. § 1442(a)(1). The defendants were “acting under” EPA because their cleanup work performed a governmental task that EPA otherwise would have had to perform, rather than merely complying with regulation. The City’s continuing-tort claims were closely connected to that EPA-directed remediation, and the defendants raised a colorable federal defense that CERCLA and the consent decree preempted potentially conflicting state-law remedies. The court denied the City’s motion to dismiss the appeal and reversed the remand order without reaching the defendants’ other asserted grounds for removal.
Key Takeaways
- An appeal of a remand order reviewable under § 1447(d) automatically stays the remand order when federal-officer removal is at issue.
- Parties conducting a CERCLA cleanup under an EPA-mandated consent decree may be “acting under” a federal agency because they perform remediation EPA otherwise would undertake itself.
- At the removal stage, a plausible CERCLA conflict-preemption defense is sufficient; the court did not decide whether that defense ultimately succeeds on the merits.
Why It Matters
The decision permits federally directed Superfund remediation disputes to proceed in federal court when state-law claims are closely connected to cleanup work delegated and controlled by EPA. It also creates an Eleventh Circuit rule that automatically stays reviewable federal-officer remand orders upon appeal, preventing parallel state-court activity from defeating appellate review.
The ruling addresses forum and appellate jurisdiction only. It does not resolve the City’s nuisance and trespass claims, determine the adequacy of the cleanup, or finally decide whether CERCLA preempts the requested state-law remedies.