California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, et al. v. Adam Nickels, Acting Regional Director, United States Bureau of Reclamation, et al.

Whether the Clean Water Act exempts from its National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (“NPDES”) permitting program “discharges composed entirely of return flows from irrigated agriculture” as the statute expressly provides (33 U.S.C. § 1342(l)(1)), or instead exempts “irrigation return flows that do not contain additional point source discharges from activities unrelated to crop production,” as the Ninth Circuit interpreted the exemption to mean in this case? (App. 21-a.)

Whether the Clean Water Act’s exemption from its NPDES permitting program of “discharges composed entirely of return flows from irrigated agriculture” (33 U.S.C. § 1342(l)(1)) exempts dispersed pollutants from non-farm sources that are collected and commingled with agricultural return flows before their discharge to waters of the United States?

Whether this Court’s ruling that under the NPDES permit program “a point source need not be the original source of the pollutant; it need only convey the pollutant to ‘navigable waters’” (South Florida Water Management Dist. v. Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, 541 U.S. 95, 105 (2004)) applies to the Clean Water Act’s exemption of “discharges composed entirely of return flows from irrigated agriculture”?