Circle Oak East, LLC took heavy machinery to 20 acres of protected Georgia wetlands and 100 feet of a living creek, buried them under bulldozed fill and crushed granite, and the federal government’s response was a fine of $35,000 (roughly the annual salary of a full-time fast food worker).

They Didn’t Ask. They Just Buried It.

Starting in or around January 2019, Circle Oak East, LLC sent excavators and bulldozers onto a parcel of land north of Gay, Georgia in Meriwether County and began piling fill material, earthen soil, and crushed granite stone directly into Shoals Creek and the 20 acres of wetlands connected to it. They did this to build a dam, called an “impoundment,” that would flood the land into a private pond. They did it without a Section 404 permit. They did it without any authorization whatsoever.

Shoals Creek is not some anonymous drainage ditch. The EPA’s own enforcement documents identify it as a “relatively permanent tributary” that flows into White Oak Creek, which the agency classifies as a “traditional navigable water.” When you dam a tributary, you don’t just kill the stream; you cut off every downstream ecosystem that depends on that water’s flow, chemistry, and biological function.

The berm they built across Shoals Creek consisted of fill soil and crushed granite stone, fitted with flashboard risers and a culvert, according to Circle Oak East’s own written admission. These are not accidental acts. These are deliberate engineering choices, made by a company that knew it was operating inside federally protected waters and did it anyway.

Five Years of Illegal Fill Still Sitting in a Federal Waterway

By the time the EPA filed this enforcement action in June 2024, the fill material had been sitting inside a protected waterway for over five years. The EPA’s own document states plainly: “Currently, the unauthorized dredged and/or fill material remains in waters of the United States.” Five years of a dead creek. Five years of destroyed wetlands. A $35,000 fine.

The EPA did not discover this on their own. The agency sent an Information Request to Circle Oak East on March 21, 2021, more than two full years after the bulldozers first rolled in. The company responded on May 5, 2021, essentially confirming everything: yes, they used excavators; yes, they built a berm; yes, they filled a creek.

An EPA inspection followed on November 30, 2021, and the agency documented exactly what had been reported. The inspection report confirming the illegal discharge was sent to Circle Oak East’s legal representative on February 8, 2022. The company responded not with a remediation plan but with more paperwork arguing they deserved an exemption.

The Non-Financial Ledger

What Money Cannot Measure

Wetlands are often called the kidneys of the landscape. That metaphor understates the reality. A single acre of functioning wetland filters pollutants from surface runoff, stores floodwater that would otherwise drown downstream neighborhoods, absorbs carbon from the atmosphere, and sustains the complex web of insects, amphibians, fish, and migratory birds that depend on shallow, vegetation-dense water environments. Circle Oak East destroyed twenty of these acres in Meriwether County, Georgia. Not by accident. With excavators and bulldozers on a planned construction timeline.

The wetlands connected to Shoals Creek are not generic open fields. The EPA’s own governing regulations define wetlands as areas “inundated or saturated by surface or groundwater at a frequency and duration sufficient to support, and that under normal circumstances do support, a prevalence of vegetation typically adapted for life in saturated soil conditions.” These are specialized biological communities, built over decades or centuries of natural succession. You cannot replant them the way you replant a lawn. Even the best restoration plans take years to achieve partial ecological function, and many never fully recover.

The 100 linear feet of Shoals Creek that Circle Oak East buried under fill material and crushed granite was not an abstraction. It was a living corridor. Creek tributaries serve as migration pathways for aquatic species, breeding habitat for amphibians, feeding grounds for wading birds, and the primary vector through which water, nutrients, and biological material travel between upland and lowland ecosystems. Cutting that corridor with a stone berm does not pause the ecosystem. It severs it. Everything downstream that depended on what came through those 100 feet is permanently altered.

The communities around Meriwether County, Georgia are predominantly rural and working class. Residents in areas like Gay, Georgia rely on the health of local waterways for fishing, agriculture, and, in many cases, well water quality. When an LLC builds an illegal impoundment that disrupts the hydrology of a tributary leading to a traditional navigable water, the people who depend on that water’s downstream function absorb costs that never appear in a penalty agreement. Those costs are not compensated by a $35,000 fine paid to the federal government. They are invisible in the legal record. They live in the soil, in the water table, and in the diminished natural systems that the people of that county have no say in losing.

The Impoundment Nobody Asked For

Circle Oak East’s own documentation confirms the purpose of the illegal construction: to create a private impoundment, essentially a pond on their property. A luxury water feature, built at the expense of a federally protected waterway. The company argued it qualified as a “farm pond” under a Clean Water Act exemption. The EPA reviewed that claim twice, received additional documentation and legal arguments twice, held a Show Cause meeting, and rejected the exemption twice. The attempt to use a farm agriculture carve-out to justify what was built on a private land parcel off Covered Bridge Road tells you exactly what kind of operation this was.

While Circle Oak East pursued paperwork strategies to legitimize the construction retroactively, the fill material stayed in the creek. From January 2019 through the June 2024 filing of the Final Order, that material remained in the water. Every single day it sat there constituted a separate violation of the Clean Water Act, according to the enforcement document itself. That is over 1,900 days of daily violations. The company paid $35,000 (approximately what it costs to lease a mid-range pickup truck for a year).

Legal Receipts

Straight From the Government’s Mouth

“Commencing on or about January 2019, Respondent, and/or those acting on behalf of the Respondent, discharged dredged and/or fill material into jurisdictional waters within the Discharge Area using earth moving machinery including, but not limited to, excavators and bulldozers, during unauthorized activities associated with the construction of an impoundment. Currently, the unauthorized dredged and/or fill material remains in waters of the United States.” — EPA Consent Agreement, Finding of Fact #16

“Respondent’s unauthorized activities in the Discharge Area impacted approximately 20 acres of wetlands that have a continuous surface connection to Shoals Creek. In addition, the Respondent placed fill material into approximately 100 linear feet of Shoals Creek, which is a relatively permanent tributary to White Oak Creek, a traditional navigable water.” — EPA Consent Agreement, Finding of Fact #17

“The EPA sent the Respondent a Notice of Violation and Opportunity to Show Cause… Therein, the EPA notified the Respondent that after reviewing Respondent’s Report of Water Needs Assessment, it determined that the Respondent did not qualify for an exemption under Section 404(f)(2)(C) of the CWA… and thus, the Respondent violated Section 301(a) of the CWA for discharging dredged and/or fill material into waters of the United States without the required permit under Section 404 of the CWA and without a valid Section 404 exemption.” — EPA Consent Agreement, Finding of Fact #24

“At no time during the discharge of dredged and/or fill material at the Discharge Area from January 2019 to present, did the Respondent possess a permit under Section 404 of the CWA, 33 U.S.C. § 1344, authorizing the activities performed by Respondent.” — EPA Consent Agreement, Alleged Violation #34

“Each day the material discharged by the Respondent remains in waters of the United States without the required permit under Section 404 of the CWA… constitutes a day of violation of Section 301(a) of the CWA.” — EPA Consent Agreement, Alleged Violation #36

Societal Impact Mapping

Environmental Degradation

The numbers in the EPA’s enforcement document represent a specific, measurable environmental catastrophe. Twenty acres is not a small patch of dirt. For context, a standard American football field, including end zones, covers roughly 1.32 acres. Circle Oak East’s illegal fill operation destroyed the equivalent of more than fifteen football fields of protected wetland. These are not “degraded” wetlands or marginal land; they are jurisdictional waters of the United States with a documented continuous surface connection to a navigable waterway.

The 100 linear feet of Shoals Creek buried under fill material represents a physical blockage in a hydrological system that stretches far beyond the property line. Shoals Creek flows into White Oak Creek, which the EPA identifies as a traditional navigable water. Dredging, damming, and filling a tributary disrupts sediment transport, water temperature, dissolved oxygen levels, and the movement of aquatic organisms across the entire watershed. The downstream effects of an illegal impoundment on a headwater tributary are not confined to the parcel on which the dam sits.

As of the filing of the Final Order in June 2024, Circle Oak East had agreed to submit a restoration plan. The company signed an Administrative Compliance Order on Consent in 2023 committing to remove the impoundment infrastructure, stabilize the streambank, and replant within the impacted areas. What the document does not address is a timeline for confirmed completion, an independent ecological assessment of recovery, or any mechanism to hold the company accountable if restoration fails to return the wetlands to pre-violation conditions. The EPA’s own regulations acknowledge that restoration is not the same as recovery.

Public Health

Wetlands serve as natural water quality infrastructure. They trap and process agricultural runoff, heavy metals, pathogens, and excess nutrients before those contaminants reach downstream drinking water supplies. Meriwether County, Georgia is a rural community where private wells and small municipal systems depend on watershed health. When 20 acres of wetland filtration capacity is removed from a tributary system and replaced with a private impoundment, the water quality function those wetlands provided disappears with them.

Standing impoundments created by illegal dams can also become breeding grounds for harmful algal blooms, mosquito populations, and the disruption of natural temperature cycles that regulate fish and amphibian health. The EPA’s enforcement action focuses entirely on the permitting violation, not on any downstream public health assessment. There is no record in the source document of any water quality sampling, any health impact analysis, or any notification to downstream residents that the hydrology of their watershed was illegally altered for over five years.

Economic Inequality

The penalty structure of this enforcement action illustrates a fundamental inequity in how environmental law operates in practice. Circle Oak East, LLC paid $35,000 (roughly the median annual household income in some of the poorest counties in Georgia) for destroying 20 acres of federally protected wetland and blocking 100 feet of a navigable tributary for over five years. A working-class individual who illegally discharged fill material into a protected waterway would face the same statutory framework but would be far less likely to afford the legal counsel that produced multiple rounds of exemption arguments, a formal Show Cause meeting, and ultimately a negotiated consent agreement that allowed the company to neither admit nor deny the facts.

The communities downstream of an illegal impoundment on Shoals Creek in Meriwether County, Georgia have no formal role in this enforcement process. The consent agreement was negotiated between the EPA and Circle Oak East. The penalty was paid to the U.S. Treasury. No compensation flows to the rural residents, farmers, or ecosystems that absorbed the costs of five years of illegal impoundment. The $35,000 penalty does not fund wetland restoration in Meriwether County; it disappears into the federal general fund. The people who live near Gay, Georgia get nothing but a promise that the company will file a restoration plan.

The Cost of a Life Metric

What Now?

Names on Record

Clarence Nalley, IV is identified in the Certificate of Service as the principal of Circle Oak East, LLC. The company is represented by counsel Wyatt Kendall of the law firm whose contact is wkendall@mmmlaw.com. These are the individuals directly associated with this enforcement record.

Watchlist: Who’s Supposed to Be Watching

• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 4 (Atlanta, GA) — primary enforcement body on this action; Enforcement Officer Joel Strange is on record.
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Savannah District — the USACE received and reviewed Circle Oak East’s Farm Pond Verification Exemption request and is a co-regulator under Section 404.
• Georgia Environmental Protection Division — the State of Georgia was given “prior opportunity to consult” per the enforcement document. Their decision to act or not act is a matter of public record.
• U.S. Department of Justice — the EPA retains the right to refer this to DOJ for civil enforcement if Circle Oak East fails to comply with the restoration plan.

Restoration Plan: The Promise on Paper

Circle Oak East agreed in writing to remove the impoundment, stabilize the streambank, and replant the wetland areas. That plan was submitted in May 2023. The Final Order was signed in June 2024. There is no publicly available independent audit confirming that restoration has been completed or is succeeding. If you live in Meriwether County or anywhere downstream of Shoals Creek and White Oak Creek, you have the right to request monitoring data and restoration status from EPA Region 4.

What You Can Do

Contact EPA Region 4 at 61 Forsyth Street SW, Atlanta, GA 30303, and demand a public status update on the restoration plan for the Circle Oak East site. Contact your local watershed council, Meriwether County environmental groups, or Georgia Water Coalition to connect with neighbors watching this waterway. Support organizations like Wetlands Watch and the Southern Environmental Law Center that litigate on behalf of communities when agencies stop watching. Local organizing, public comment periods, and direct pressure on state regulators are the tools that turn a $35,000 fine into an actual restoration story. Use them.