C & A Carbone, Inc. v. Clarkstown, 511 U.S. 383, 4 (1994)

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386

C & A CARBONE, INC. v. CLARKSTOWN

Opinion of the Court

are expending significant resources to develop trash control systems that are efficient, lawful, and protective of the environment. The difficulty of their task is evident from the number of recent cases that we have heard involving waste transfer and treatment. See Philadelphia v. New Jersey, 437 U. S. 617 (1978); Chemical Waste Management, Inc. v. Hunt, 504 U. S. 334 (1992); Fort Gratiot Sanitary Landfill, Inc. v. Michigan Dept. of Natural Resources, 504 U. S. 353 (1992); Oregon Waste Systems, Inc. v. Department of Environmental Quality of Ore., ante, p. 93. The case decided today, while perhaps a small new chapter in that course of decisions, rests nevertheless upon well-settled principles of our Commerce Clause jurisprudence.

We consider a so-called flow control ordinance, which requires all solid waste to be processed at a designated transfer station before leaving the municipality. The avowed purpose of the ordinance is to retain the processing fees charged at the transfer station to amortize the cost of the facility. Because it attains this goal by depriving competitors, including out-of-state firms, of access to a local market, we hold that the flow control ordinance violates the Commerce Clause.

The town of Clarkstown, New York, lies in the lower Hudson River Valley, just upstream from the Tappan Zee Bridge and by highway minutes from New Jersey. Within the town limits are the village of Nyack and the hamlet of West Nyack. In August 1989, Clarkstown entered into a consent

ard, and Clifton S. Elgarten; for the Town of Smithtown, New York, et al. by W. Cullen MacDonald, Richard L. Sigal, Eric S. Petersen, and Jon A. Gerber; for the Solid Waste Disposal Authority of the city of Huntsville, Alabama, by Charles H. Younger; for the Clarendon Foundation by Ronald D. Maines; for the National Association of Bond Lawyers by C. Baird Brown, Robert B. McKinstry, Jr., and Brendan K. Collins; for the National Association of Counties et al. by Richard Ruda; for Ogden Projects, Inc., by Robert C. Bernius and Jeffrey R. Horowitz; and for the Solid Waste Association of North America et al. by Barry S. Shanoff, B. Richard Marsh, and Robert D. Thorington.

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