For years, the Marianna Outdoorsmen Association watched riprap from a state road project sit in Ten Mile Creek while the permits, inspections, and remediation orders came and went. Last week the Washington County group stopped waiting and took PennDOT and DEP to Commonwealth Court.
The Marianna Outdoorsmen Association filed suit in Commonwealth Court on September 17, alleging that a 2016 PennDOT hillside stabilization project along Main Street in Marianna sent riprap and fill into Ten Mile Creek in violation of Pennsylvania’s Clean Streams Law, and that DEP failed to make PennDOT fix it. The group wants the creek restored and its lost event income repaid.
How a road project emptied a creek of its biggest day
The trouble started with a hillside stabilization project PennDOT began in 2016. According to the complaint, the slope failed in the winter of 2016 and again in the summer of 2017, sliding riprap and other material into Ten Mile Creek. PennDOT removed some of the excess rock but never fully remediated the channel.
The damage had a very specific cost. The association’s Anything That Floats race, a homemade-vessel event that had grown into the group’s signature fundraiser, could not survive a degraded creek. The last race ran in 2018.
What the Anything That Floats race raised in a year at its peak, with about 250 participants, before creek damage ended it.
An inspection, an order, and then nothing
The suit does not spare the regulator. DEP inspected the site in April 2025 and ordered a remediation plan, but according to the complaint no plan was ever developed. The association filed its notice of intent to sue in July 2025, waited out the statutory clock, and filed on September 17. The complaint asks the court for declaratory judgment and injunctive relief: fix the creek, take corrective action, and reimburse the group for the income its events lost.
“When this situation happened, PennDOT did not follow their approved permits.”
Jason White, Executive Director, Marianna Outdoorsmen Association
White has also pointed to inconsistency in how such damage gets handled around the state, telling the Observer-Reporter that enforcement is not uniform from one place to the next. That unevenness is the quiet theme of the case: the Clean Streams Law reads the same everywhere in Pennsylvania, but whether it gets enforced can depend on where you live and who did the damage.
Why it matters for the rest of us
Most watershed groups in our network will never sue anybody, and that is fine. But this case is worth watching because it tests the citizen-enforcement route when the alleged polluter is a state agency and the regulator has not acted. If a volunteer sportsmen’s club in Washington County can hold PennDOT to its permits, that precedent belongs to every group in the basin with a creek and a grievance. And if the creek gets fixed, Marianna might one day again host the noble spectacle of its neighbors racing homemade watercraft, which is the kind of watershed indicator no monitoring protocol captures.
Based on reporting by the Observer-Reporter and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, both September 24, 2026, on the Marianna Outdoorsmen Association’s Commonwealth Court complaint filed September 17, 2026. Current as of September 25, 2026.
