A federal judge denied a request by the owner of Point Buckler Island in the greater San Francisco Bay for a new trial in an almost eight-year dispute with the U.S. Justice Department over his illegal “repair” of the levee surrounding the island. John Sweeney argued that the 2020 ruling that, after a bench trial, had found him liable for violating the Clean Water Act was no longer sustainable in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision last year in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, which had curtailed the federal government’s authority to regulate wetlands. In that decision, the nation’s top court found that the reach of the Clean Water Act extends to only those “wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are ‘waters of the United States’ in their own right, so that they are ‘indistinguishable’ from those waters.”