In response to President Obama’s Executive Order (EO) 13563, Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review (76 FR 3821), EPA published a Federal Register notice on February 23 (76FR 9988) asking for public input on how to design its regulatory review plan. EO 13563 directs each federal agency to review all its existing regulations to see if any are too costly or have outlived their usefulness. The EO asks each agency to consider “how best to promote retrospective analysis of rules that may be outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome.”
EPA also has a website with additional information about the effort, and allows for public comment through the website. EPA recently extended its comment period until April 4. With assistance from the Regulatory Committee, AMWA has drafted a comment letter to EPA on this issue, which is available online under “Documents Open for Comment.” Comments on AMWA’s draft letter are due by April 1 to Erica Brown.
AMWA’s comment letter makes several recommendations to EPA, such as:
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Consider its Retrospective Review process in a broad, multidisciplinary way, looking across programs, and considering the agency’s bigger environmental goals that go beyond the demarcation of program offices.
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Work across federal agencies to consider whether any of the regulations (or lack of regulations) of other industries jeopardizes the ability of drinking water utilities to provide safe drinking water to customers in a reliable manner.
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Continue to leverage other statutes as noted in the drinking water strategy, including the nexus between the CWA and SDWA.
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Develop a guideline or metric for what constitutes the requirement for a revised regulation under the SDWA to “maintain, or provide for greater, protection of the health of persons” (also known as the anti-backsliding provision).
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Perform a cost retrospective of EPA drinking water rules to compare estimated costs with actual rule implementation costs. This recommendation will be illustrated with several examples from AMWA members about the cost of the Stage 2 DBPR and arsenic rules.