DC court: Water Authority never justified how it bills master-metered condos
DC court: Water Authority never justified how it bills master-metered condos
2026-09-09 · District of Columbia · Courts
A District of Columbia condominium association has won a ruling that DC Water never adequately explained why individual metering decides how much a property pays in stormwater charges. The Court of Appeals vacated summary judgment against the association and remanded, holding: “D.C. Water has not provided a sufficient explanation to show that there is a rational connection between metering and the CRIAC.”1
Capitol Park IV Condominium Ass'n, Inc. v. District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority, No. 24-CV-0504, was argued May 29, 2025 and decided September 18, 2025. Judge McLeese wrote for a panel of Judges Beckwith, Easterly and McLeese.
The classification at issue
Capitol Park IV is a 50-acre condominium of more than 200 townhomes in Southwest DC. Because the units share master-metered service lines, DC Water classifies it as a multi-family customer rather than a residential one for purposes of the Clean Rivers Impervious Area Charge.
The distinction is expensive. Residential customers are billed through a six-tier Equivalent Residential Unit system that discounts actual impervious area. Multi-family customers are billed on total impervious square footage with no tiering. The association explored individually metering each townhome and found it would cost between $10 million and $20 million.
What the court held
The constitutional claims failed and that portion of the judgment was affirmed. The arbitrary-and-capricious claim did not.
Applying the ordinary standard — that an agency must give an adequate explanation including a rational connection between the facts found and the choice made — the court found DC Water had not supplied one for using metering as the classifying factor. The association had pointed out, among other things, that the manner of metering bears no direct logical relation to the amount of impervious surface on a property, which is what the charge is supposed to measure.
DC Water argued metering is only one of several factors. The court's answer is the part that travels: “sometimes, as in the present case, metering can be a dispositive factor. If that factor is arbitrary, the agency's overall determination based on that factor can be arbitrary even if other of the applicable factors are not arbitrary.”
The court declined to direct entry of judgment for the association, leaving the remedy to the trial court on remand.
Why this reaches far beyond one condominium
Master metering is the norm, not the exception, in District common-interest housing. Nearly every mid-rise and high-rise condominium and nearly every housing cooperative in DC is master-metered, and townhouse communities with shared service lines are in the same position. All of them are classified the same way, under the same regulations — 21 DCMR §§ 4101.4 to 4101.6 and § 4104.1 — that the Court of Appeals has now held were not adequately justified.
This is therefore a live challenge to a recurring line item on association budgets District-wide, not a one-building dispute. Three practical points for a board.
Know your classification. Pull the DC Water account and find out whether the association is billed as residential or multi-family, and on what impervious-area figure. Many managers have never looked, because the charge arrives inside a water bill rather than as a separate assessment.
Understand what the ruling does and does not do. It does not refund anyone. It vacates a judgment and sends the question back, with instructions that the agency's explanation was insufficient. The remedy — a better explanation, a revised methodology, an adjustment, or something else — is not yet decided.
Budget for the charge as it stands. Until a remedy issues, the classification and the bill are what they were. A board that lowers its budget line in anticipation of relief is budgeting on a hope.
How it sits alongside the rest of DC's stormwater law
Two other developments run on the same track and pull in different directions.
The District has legislated, on its temporary and emergency track, an express impervious-area charge that names athletic courts, swimming pools and private streets as chargeable surface and makes non-payment a lien on the property without further notice — covered separately in our report on that statute. The court in Capitol Park cited that legislation's predecessor among the authorities before it.
Meanwhile DC Water has paused the re-measurement programme that would have reset properties' impervious-area figures. So the methodology is under judicial criticism, the measurement is frozen, and the statutory enforcement mechanism is being strengthened — all at once.
What to watch next
The remand. Whether DC Water supplies a fuller justification for metering as a classifying factor, revises the regulations, or is ordered to reclassify will determine whether this becomes a rate story for every master-metered association in the District or stays a docket entry.
Watch also for whether other associations file. A published appellate holding that an agency failed to justify a classification is an invitation, and DC has a great many master-metered communities paying under it.
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