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CS de­feats City of Hou­s­ton in dis­pute over il­leg­al shut­down of CES waste treat­ment plant

November 9, 2009

On Sat­urday, Oc­to­ber 31, 2009 — Hal­loween — the City of Hou­s­ton sent sev­en city vans with a po­lice es­cort to ter­min­ate wastewa­ter ser­vice to a waste treat­ment plant owned by C&S cli­ent CES En­vir­on­ment­al Ser­vices Inc. The City gave neither no­tice of its in­tent to ter­min­ate wastewa­ter ser­vice nor an op­por­tun­ity for CES to con­test the ter­min­a­tion in a pre-ter­min­a­tion hear­ing. The ef­fect of the ter­min­a­tion was to shut down CES’s Hou­s­ton plant en­tirely.

In­stead, the City gave CES a post-ter­min­a­tion hear­ing on Novem­ber 4 presided over by a City em­ploy­ee ad­vised by As­sist­ant City At­tor­neys and at which the City re­lied on wit­nesses who it re­fused to pro­duce and evid­ence that it did not dis­close un­til the hear­ing. At this hear­ing, C&S cross-ex­amined the City’s one wit­ness, who ad­mit­ted that the City had no evid­ence at all that wastewa­ter dis­charges from CES posed an “im­me­di­ate danger” to the pub­lic or a city em­ploy­ee. Down­load a copy of the hear­ing tran­script here.

CES filed suit un­der 42 U.S.C. 1983 in the United States Dis­trict Court for the South­ern Dis­trict of Texas on Novem­ber 6, al­leging that the City of Hou­s­ton had denied CES pro­ced­ur­al due pro­cess un­der the Four­teenth Amend­ment by shut­ting down CES’s plant without pri­or no­tice or a hear­ing and by sub­ject­ing CES to a blatantly un­fair post-ter­min­a­tion hear­ing. Down­load a copy of the com­plaint here. CES sought a tem­por­ary re­strain­ing or­der (TRO) and sched­uled a hear­ing for Monday, Novem­ber 9, at 4:00 p.m.

In the courtroom, im­me­di­ately be­fore the TRO hear­ing was sched­uled to be­gin, the City of Hou­s­ton agreed to re­store wastewa­ter ser­vice to CES im­me­di­ately. C&S is pleased to have ob­tained a fa­vor­able out­come in this emer­gency save-the-com­pany case so quickly: ten days from en­gage­ment and four days from fil­ing un­til res­ol­u­tion.

K.A.D. Ca­mara, Timothy Nyberg, Kent Rad­ford, Robin Morse, and Noah Rad­b­il handled the case for CES. K.A.D. Ca­mara and Robin Morse ar­gued the ad­min­is­trat­ive hear­ing. K.A.D. Ca­mara and Kent Rad­ford draf­ted and ar­gued the com­plaint and tem­por­ary re­strain­ing or­der.