D.C. Circuit Rules Off-Site Truck Shop Is a "Mine" Under Federal Safety Act

Writing for the panel in Secretary of Labor v. KC Transport, Inc., Circuit Judge Robert L. Wilkins concluded that KC Transport's facility in Emmett, West Virginia, is a "mine" under 30 U.S.C. § 802(h)(1)(C) because it is "necessarily connected with the use and operation of extracting, milling, or processing coal and other minerals."

The panel, reviewing the question de novo, said the Secretary's functional reading of the statute was closer to the text than the narrower locational construction urged by KC Transport and the dissent. "The text of subsection (C) imposes no strict adjacency or 'on location' restriction," Wilkins wrote.

KC Transport operated the facility about 1,000 feet from a haulage road — public for part of its length, restricted past the facility's gate — roughly a mile from Ramaco Resources' Elk Creek Preparation Plant and four to five miles from Ramaco's deep mines. According to joint stipulations, 60% of the services KC Transport provided there supported Ramaco's mines, and the trucks cited by MSHA "were regularly used to haul coal from the five Ramaco mines to the Elk Creek prep plant."

An MSHA inspector cited the company in March 2019 after finding two trucks raised and unblocked during maintenance, with a worker standing on the frame of one. The Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission later vacated the citations, ruling that a repair or parking facility "not located on or appurtenant to a mine site" is not a mine within the statute.

The D.C. Circuit rejected that reading. Wilkins said interpreting subsection (C) to require adjacency to an extraction site would render the provision largely duplicative of subsection (A) and would exclude retention dams and tailings ponds that Congress expressly intended to cover. He noted that the Buffalo Creek, West Virginia dams whose 1972 collapse prompted the 1977 Mine Act were more than 0.6 miles from the coal preparation plant they fed.

The court also rejected KC Transport's Article II objection that the petition improperly asked a federal court to resolve an intra-executive dispute between the Secretary of Labor and the Commission. Wilkins called the objection a "tempest in a teapot," writing that the Commission had "bowed out of this dispute" and that "this is an intra-Executive dispute in name only." The panel pointed to statutes enacted by the First, Second, Third and Fourth Congresses authorizing intra-executive suits, and to the Supreme Court's decisions in Newport News Shipbuilding and Ingalls Shipbuilding, which said Congress "could have conferred standing upon the Director without infringing Article III of the Constitution."

To "obviate the constitutional issue," the court struck the Commission as a respondent, following its 1982 decision in Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers International Union v. OSHRC. The panel reasoned that the Commission, like OSHRC, is an adjudicator with "no duty or interest in defending its decision on appeal."

In a concurrence, Circuit Judge Florence Y. Pan wrote that "a purely adjudicatory body — like the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission — is not a proper party when this court reviews one of its decisions," and said that by striking the Commission from the caption, "the jurisdictional arguments raised by the dissent are largely academic."

Circuit Judge Justin R. Walker dissented. The majority addressed his argument that the statute required the Secretary to name the Commission as a respondent, writing that "no such explicit mandate appears in the text" of 30 U.S.C. § 816(b) and that the canon of constitutional avoidance, together with Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 2, supplied ample basis to proceed.

The parties had stipulated that if the Mine Act applies, KC Transport owes $3,908 on one citation and $4,343 on the other. The court vacated the Commission's decision and affirmed the citations.

Susannah M. Maltz of the Department of Labor argued for the Secretary. James P. McHugh and Aditya Dynar argued for KC Transport. West Virginia and 19 other states filed an amicus brief supporting the company; the AFL-CIO supported the Secretary.