Water testing confirmed that on August 8, 2022, and again on October 14, 2022, the water surrounding Dragon Springs’ property in Deerpark, New York contained 2,419.6 parts of fecal coliform bacteria per 100 milliliters — that is 12 times the legal limit of 200 parts per 100 ml, the kind of contamination level associated with raw sewage.

The Setup: A Compound on a Slope Above a River

Dragon Springs Buddhist, Inc. is a nonprofit organization operated by the Falun Gong movement, which describes itself as promoting traditional Chinese philosophies. The organization built what court documents call a “large compound” on property in the Town of Deerpark, New York — functioning as the world headquarters of the Falun Gong movement and the headquarters for the Shen Yun music and dance companies.

The compound includes a performing arts center, schools, residential housing, temples, and its own wastewater treatment plant. That last detail matters enormously. The site generates fecal coliform bacteria because people live and work there — and the treatment plant exists specifically to prevent that bacteria from reaching nearby waterways.

The problem is geography. The northeast side of the property sits on a steep slope that drops directly to the Basher Kill and the Neversink River. Court documents describe “numerous gullies and pathways from the Property that empty into” those waterways. The Basher Kill feeds the Neversink River. The Neversink feeds the Delaware River. Every contaminated drop that escapes the property does not stay local.

The People Downstream From This

Three named plaintiffs — Robert Majcher, Grace Woodard, and Alex Scilla — own property nearby and use the Basher Kill and Neversink River for recreation and for clean water. They are members of NYenvironcom, a local nonprofit whose mission is to support thoughtful land use and environmental protection. These are not professional activists or litigation tourists. These are neighbors who noticed something was wrong with the water next to their homes.

They hired a licensed laboratory to test the water. The results were worse than they likely expected. And when they tried to do what the law specifically allows ordinary citizens to do — hold a polluter accountable under the Clean Water Act — they got dismissed. Twice.

The Numbers They Cannot Explain Away

Every single one of the nine test dates recorded by the plaintiffs and submitted in their Notice of Intent showed fecal coliform levels above the legal limit of 200 parts per 100 ml. Six of the nine exceeded that limit by more than 70%. Two of those dates recorded readings more than 12 times the legal limit. The readings span from July 2020 through July 2023 — a full three years of consistent, documented exceedances.

Court documents note that elevated levels appeared specifically in waters immediately adjacent to the Dragon Springs property, while areas upstream did not show elevated levels. That is the evidentiary difference between “water quality is generally bad” and “we traced this back to one source.”

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Gets Lost When a River Smells Like a Sewage Plant

Robert Majcher, Grace Woodard, and Alex Scilla did not buy property next to the Basher Kill and Neversink River expecting to watch a corporation dump sewage bacteria into it for three years. Court documents describe them as people who “enjoy the area for recreational purposes and for its clean water.” That phrase — clean water — is doing enormous work in this story. When the water is no longer clean, it is no longer the place they chose to live near.

The Basher Kill is a tributary of the Neversink River, which runs through the southern Catskills and Shawangunk Mountains — an area court documents describe as providing “recreational resources to residents and visitors alike” and constituting “an integral part of the rural beauty of the area.” The people who fish, swim, kayak, or simply walk along those banks as part of their everyday lives did not receive a notice that the water was compromised. There was no public health advisory in the court record. There was no documented warning to downstream communities. There was just the water, and whatever was in it.

Fecal coliform is not a theoretical pollutant. It is bacteria that originates in human and animal waste, and its presence in surface water at high concentrations signals the potential presence of other dangerous pathogens including E. coli, Salmonella, and viruses capable of causing serious illness. The legal limit of 200 parts per 100 ml exists because scientists and regulators determined that number represents the threshold above which water contact poses measurable health risks. Dragon Springs’ water exceeded that threshold every single time it was tested — for three consecutive years.

The betrayal embedded in this story is structural. The Clean Water Act exists precisely because communities downstream from polluters are otherwise powerless. The law created citizen suit provisions specifically so that ordinary residents — not just government agencies — can compel compliance when a corporation poisons a shared resource. Majcher, Woodard, and Scilla used exactly that mechanism. They hired a licensed laboratory. They documented the violations. They sent the required notices. They waited the legally required 60 days. They filed suit. And they were told, twice, that their paperwork was not quite right. The pollution continued. The water stayed contaminated. The corporation stayed in business. The neighbors kept losing their river.

The Procedural Trap: Dismissed Twice Before Anyone Looked at the Evidence

Here is the mechanism that allowed three years of documented fecal coliform exceedances to go unaddressed in court. Under the Clean Water Act, a citizen who wants to sue a polluter must first send a Notice of Intent to the alleged violator, the state, and the EPA — at least 60 days before filing. This window gives regulators the chance to act instead. That is the theory. In practice, it gave Dragon Springs a procedural weapon.

The first lawsuit, filed in January 2022, was thrown out because the initial notice did not specify which exact standard was violated or provide specific test result numbers. The court acknowledged the notice “might have been sufficient” had it included those test results — but it did not include them. Case dismissed.

The plaintiffs then sent a second notice in January 2023. This one included specific test results with dates, specific numerical limits, specific permit identification, and a geographic description placing the discharge “600 to 1,000 feet southwest of the bridge at Galley Hill Road.” The second lawsuit was filed. Dragon Springs moved to dismiss again. The second court dismissed it again — this time finding the notice “illogical on its face” because, according to that court’s reading, the identified permits did not technically prohibit direct surface water discharge of fecal coliform in the way the plaintiffs described.

The Appeals Court Finally Calls It Out

The federal appeals court that reversed both dismissals found the lower courts’ reasoning unpersuasive. The appellate opinion determined that the second notice met every requirement in the relevant EPA regulation. It identified the pollutant (fecal coliform). It identified the standards allegedly violated (Clean Water Act Sections 301(a) and 402). It provided nine specific test results with corresponding dates. It described the geographic location of the discharge with enough specificity for Dragon Springs — which owns the property and has full access to it — to investigate.

The appeals court also resolved a separate legal question that had been left open in this circuit for years: whether the notice requirement is a “jurisdictional” requirement (meaning courts have no power to hear a case without it) or simply a condition of the claim (meaning a deficient notice is a fixable problem, not an automatic court-closing barrier). The court ruled it is the latter. That ruling matters enormously for every future environmental citizen suit in the Second Circuit. No corporation can now get a CWA case thrown out entirely based solely on notice technicalities; the door stays open.

Legal Receipts: The Words That Cannot Be Walked Back

Direct quotations from the source document — U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, Docket 24-2451

“Since around 2020 and continuing to this day, Dragon Springs has been discharging polluted wastewater and storm water containing Fecal Coliform from point sources at the Property into the Basher Kill and Neversink River. And the discharges are well beyond the limits of Dragon Springs’ permits and applicable law.” — Court of Appeals, citing Plaintiffs’ Amended Complaint (accepted as true for purposes of the appeal)

“The amount of Fecal Coliform in the surrounding waters in August 2021 contained a daily mean of 726 parts of Fecal Coliform per 100 ml, over three times the permitted amount. . . . In addition, the Fecal Coliform amounts in the surrounding water were on August 8, 2022, 2419.6 parts per 100 ml; on October 14, 2022, 2419.6 parts per 100 ml; on November 9, 2022, 344.8 parts per 100 ml; on December 13, 2022, 1396 parts per 100 ml; on April 18, 2023, 1050 parts per 100 ml; and on July 27, 2023, 517.2 parts per 100 ml.” — Court of Appeals, quoting specific water testing results from Plaintiffs’ complaint, Amended Complaint ¶ 50

“Such regulations should reflect simplicity, clarity, and standardized form. The regulations should not require notice that places impossible or unnecessary burdens on citizens but rather should be confined to requiring information necessary to give a clear indication of the citizens’ intent.” — U.S. Senate Report No. 92-414 (1971), quoted by the Court of Appeals to establish Congressional intent behind the Clean Water Act’s notice requirement

“Plaintiffs identified exactly where the Fecal Coliform was escaping the Property, thereby providing sufficient information to allow Dragon Springs to identify its own violations and bring itself into compliance voluntarily, thus making a costly lawsuit unnecessary. That’s the purpose of the notice requirement.” — Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, September 16, 2025 (internal citation omitted)

“This discharge is the result of construction activity and an improperly maintained and operated wastewater treatment plant at the Property.” — Court of Appeals, quoting Plaintiffs’ Amended Complaint ¶ 5 — the core factual allegation that has still never been adjudicated on its merits

Societal Impact Mapping: Who Pays When a River Gets Poisoned

Public Health: The Bacteria That Follows the Water Downhill

Fecal coliform bacteria at the concentrations documented here — peaking at 2,419.6 parts per 100 ml against a legal ceiling of 200 — represent a level of contamination that health agencies use to close beaches, post swimming advisories, and suspend recreational water contact entirely. The legal limit exists because at 200 parts per 100 ml, exposure through swimming creates a statistically measurable increase in gastrointestinal illness. At 12 times that level, the risk is substantially higher.

Court documents describe the Basher Kill and Neversink River as recreational waterways actively used by local residents and visitors. The contamination was documented across three years and nine specific test dates. There is no record in the source material of any public health warning being issued to the people using those waterways during that period. The three plaintiffs who live near the property knew because they paid for laboratory testing themselves. Everyone else who fished, swam, kayaked, or let their kids play near the water during those years did not know.

The downstream chain matters: the Neversink River feeds the Delaware River, a water system that provides drinking water to Philadelphia and surrounding communities — one of the most densely populated metropolitan areas on the East Coast. The source material does not document downstream impacts reaching that far, but the physical geography is documented in the court record. Fecal bacteria do not stop at county lines.

Environmental Degradation: Three Years Is a Long Time for a River to Wait

The contamination documented here began, according to the plaintiffs, around 2020. The second federal lawsuit was not filed until 2023. It was dismissed. The appeals court did not issue its reversal until September 2025. That means the earliest this case can now reach a merits hearing — where a court actually examines whether Dragon Springs violated the Clean Water Act — is late 2025 or 2026. Five-plus years after the contamination allegedly began.

The source of the discharge, according to court documents, is construction activity on the property combined with an “improperly maintained and operated wastewater treatment plant.” Construction activity at the compound has been ongoing since at least spring 2021. The court record does not document any remediation, voluntary compliance, or improvement in the treatment plant’s performance during the period covered by the litigation. The gullies and pathways described in the court record as “point sources” that carry contaminated water from the property to the Basher Kill are not engineered outfalls that can be capped with a valve — they are topographic features of a steep slope on private land that has been under active construction for years.

Economic Inequality: The Cost of Getting Permission to Sue

The plaintiffs here are individual property owners and members of a local nonprofit. They paid for laboratory water testing. They hired attorneys. They filed suit twice. They perfected an appeal. All of that costs money — money that most working people do not have. The Clean Water Act’s citizen suit provision exists to democratize environmental enforcement, but the procedural gauntlet that Dragon Springs successfully ran for three years demonstrates how easily that democratization can be reversed when a well-resourced defendant has every incentive to fight on process rather than facts.

Dragon Springs is a nonprofit, but it operates a major performing arts organization — Shen Yun — with a global touring schedule, a dedicated performing arts center, and sufficient resources to retain a corporate law firm (Cuddy & Feder LLP, White Plains, NY) to litigate two rounds of federal motions and a federal appeal. The plaintiffs are neighbors with a water testing report and a cause. The asymmetry in legal firepower is not incidental. It is the story. The mechanism that let this pollution continue for years was not a loophole in environmental law — it was the cost of legal combat, and one side had far more ammunition.

The Math of Impunity

The figures above are not abstractions. The 200 parts per 100 ml limit exists because scientists established it as the level above which people who swim in, kayak through, or fish from a waterway face measurably elevated risk of illness. At 2,419.6 parts per 100 ml, that risk is not marginally elevated. The community that uses the Basher Kill and Neversink River for recreation absorbed that risk for three documented years — because two courts decided that the format of the warning letters mattered more than the content of the water.

What Now: The Case Isn’t Over — And Neither Is the Discharge

The appeals court vacated both dismissals and sent the case back for further proceedings. This means a court will, for the first time, examine whether Dragon Springs actually violated the Clean Water Act on the merits. That determination has not yet been made. Dragon Springs has also reserved the right to argue that the plaintiffs’ complaint fails to state a valid claim — the appeals court explicitly declined to address that argument, leaving it for the lower court. This is far from over.

Who To Watch and Who To Pressure

What You Can Do

• Contact the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) directly and ask for the current status of Dragon Springs’ SPDES permit and any enforcement actions taken since 2020. Public records requests (FOIL in New York) are free and powerful.
• Support NYenvironcom and organizations like it. Local environmental nonprofits are the only reason this evidence exists at all. Without three neighbors and a nonprofit paying for lab tests, this contamination would have no public record.
• If you live downstream of the Neversink or Delaware River systems, contact your local water utility and ask whether they test for fecal coliform at intake points and what their most recent readings show.
• Attend local government meetings in the Town of Deerpark. Construction permits and land use decisions are made at the local level. Show up when those decisions are made for this property.

The appeals court gave the community its day in court. Whether that day produces accountability depends entirely on who keeps applying pressure between now and the next hearing. Mutual aid here means neighbors sharing water testing resources, legal aid organizations supporting environmental plaintiffs who cannot afford years of federal litigation, and local organizing that makes the human cost of this contamination impossible for regulators to keep ignoring.