# Enforcement cases on a sewer permit, and the date that is not in the table

URL: https://municorn.us/data/sso-enforcement-cases/
Updated: 2026-09-21
Tags: data, sewer, enforcement

> **Cite as:** Municorn.us, "Enforcement cases on a sewer permit, and the date that is not in the table", https://municorn.us/data/sso-enforcement-cases/ (updated 2026-09-21).
> **Licence:** CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ — reuse and redistribution are permitted with attribution to Municorn.us and a link to this URL.

Whether a federal civil enforcement case names a permit, with its case number, and why no compliance date is published beside it.

A consent decree or an administrative order puts a named utility on a compliance
schedule with a capital budget attached. That is usually why anybody goes
looking for its overflow history at all. So the record carries one more column:
whether a federal civil enforcement case names this permit.

EPA's weekly export of federal civil enforcement cases, retrieved on 15
September 2026, is an 80,706,865 byte download of 22 files holding 136,420
activities, of which 32,673 cite the Clean Water Act. Of the cases under that
act, 5,372 are water and sewer cases.

## What gets published

A case exists, and here is its number. A reader takes the number to the decree
document itself.

A permit with no case gets a stated answer: no federal civil enforcement case in
this export names this permit. Somebody sorting a list can use that. A blank
would leave them unable to tell it apart from a permit nobody checked.

## Matched on the permit number only

The defendant's name is not used, nor a city, nor a close match of either. Two
utilities in two states share a name often enough that a name match would put an
order against a utility that is not under one.

## No deadline

The compliance schedule lives in the decree document, case by case. No milestone
on any of the 5,372 water and sewer cases is dated later than 2026, so the table
has nothing later to report. Reading urgency into a case's presence would
overstate what the export says about a named public agency.

The published record has no field for a date, which is deliberate. A shape with
nowhere to put one cannot carry one onto a page by accident.

_Municorn.us · https://municorn.us/data/sso-enforcement-cases/ · CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ · updated 2026-09-21_

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