The D.C. Council passed the Illegal Dumping Enforcement Act of 2023 earlier this month, voting unanimously to codify the D.C. attorney general’s power to bring civil suits — rather than solely criminal cases — over illegal dumping violations. The new amendment, which passed its final reading on Nov. 12, also explicitly identifies additional items categorized as “solid waste,” including tires and mattresses.
“From a law enforcement perspective, you want to have every tool in your toolbox,” said Assistant Attorney General Wesley Rosenfeld, who works on environmental litigation for the District Office of the Attorney General (OAG). “You want to have the civil lawsuit component, [and] that authority wasn’t clear before this bill. So it really just gives us the full range to address a problem that District residents have been experiencing for a while.”
The law specifies that the D.C. Attorney General — rather than the federal U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. — holds primary authority to prosecute illegal dumping cases, and can bring civil actions for damages, civil penalties, cost recovery, attorney and expert witness fees, and injunctive relief. Rosenfeld pointed to injunctive relief, where a court requires a business or individual to take action to address ongoing issues, as a particularly useful tool.
“If this is a business that is facilitating the illegal dumping, we would have the ability to leverage those penalties to get the business to change its practices and not do that illegal activity in the future,” Rosenfeld said.
As The Informer reported earlier this year, illegal dumping — particularly of items that can be costly to dispose of, like tires — is widespread in the District and disproportionately harms Black and low-income neighborhoods. Between Oct. 19 and Nov. 17, D.C. residents submitted more than 1,600 illegal dumping cleanup requests to 311.
Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, who chairs the Committee on Public Works and Operations, said that the bill would provide a “critical enforcement tool” that has been underutilized in addressing illegal dumping issues.
“Right now, DPW can issue fines and the OAG can bring misdemeanor or felony charges. But sometimes, criminal charges are not appropriate or feasible, and fines may be insufficient to address the harms and deter future misconduct,” Nadeau said in an emailed statement. “The legislation allows the OAG to seek an injunction to require or prohibit certain actions… With an injunction, the OAG can later move more quickly to go after companies not following the requirements of the injunction.”
But some community members, like Barry Farm resident Eric Hayes, remain skeptical. For years, Hayes has diligently picked up trash every week. Litter and illegal dumping are persistent issues both on his own street and on a stretch of land he regularly cleans up around the Suitland Parkway exit near his home.
Fines and penalties, Hayes said, can only help if someone actually gets caught.
“From what I’m hearing, there isn’t really any enforcement, at least not on the police department side,” Hayes told The Informer. “There’s nobody who is out there trying to catch people.”
With Criminal Penalties Still on the Books, Racial Equity Concerns Remain
Abel Amene, a Ward 4 resident and an ANC Commissioner near Brightwood, was the only public witness to submit testimony during hearings about the bill.
“It’s not a very sexy issue, is it?” Abel, who uses his first name formally due to his Ethiopian background and tradition, said.
But the true focus of his testimony wasn’t really waste disposal — it was justice reform. Abel pulled data from the D.C. Sentencing Commission about the 198 criminal charges filed for illegal dumping between 2013 and 2022. Of the 41 total people convicted of the crime, 40 of them were Black.
Illegal dumping in D.C. can be prosecuted as a felony, with a sentence of up to five years. But in the last decade, all convictions have been for misdemeanors, with sentences less than 60 days. Abel urged Councilmembers to add language to the bill to lower sentence maximums—reducing the possibility of unfairly harsh criminal penalties in the future.
Of those convicted of illegal dumping since 2013, few have actually needed to serve more than a few days. But Abel noted that high maximum sentences — for all kinds of crimes, not just dumping — increase pressure on defendants to plead guilty and can lead judges to hand down harsher sentences than they might if the ceiling was lower.
“I saw this as an opportunity, just to fix one piece of law, because the bill was [already] addressing a piece of law that has some sentencing in it,” Abel said.
The final bill did not include any of the changes to the criminal code that Abel was seeking. A racial equity impact assessment by the Council Office of Racial Equity concluded that the “addition of new civil enforcement measures will likely exacerbate racial inequity in the District,” even though illegal dumping tends to happen disproportionately in Black neighborhoods.
In her statement, Nadeau said that changes to sentencing and criminal penalties weren’t added to the bill because they “were never the focus of this legislation.”
Still, Abel said he was pleased that there would be more tools for enforcement that do not involve the threat of incarceration.
“I’m happy the law passed,” Abel said. “I just wish they had taken the opportunity as well to lessen the penalties, or even decriminalize it and make it more of a civil offense.”
Both Abel and Hayes said they wanted to see more focus on going after the companies—such as auto shops and construction companies—that increase their profit by violating dumping laws on a larger scale.
Attorney General Charles Schwalb has secured penalties from polluting companies in several environmental lawsuits over the last year. Most recently, the Attorney General’s Office announced that AltaGas will pay over $2 million in penalties for failing to develop the solar power installations it agreed to create when it merged with Washington Gas in 2018.
Outside of punishing polluters, Hayes said he wants to see more information spread about where the problem spots are and how litter can harm communities, including by collecting water that provides breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
“I really believe that if kids knew that [information], and were exposed to [problem spots due to littering and pollution], that would change their behaviors,” Hayes said. “So I would rather see that first — an education program, and some kind of process to kind of inspect and detect these areas and have them on a map somewhere.”
