With the election season coming to an end, things are also getting ready to move faster on the drinking water regulatory front. Updates on several drinking water regulatory initiatives, such as Lead and Copper Rule Revisions, Carcinogenic Volatile Organic Compounds and Regulatory Determinations, are long overdue, with updates promised for late 2012 or early 2013 (i.e., after the elections). The Revised Total Coliform Rule (RTCR) was due for promulgation in October, but has yet to clear Office of Management and Budget (OMB) review, which officially started on May 29 and has now significantly overrun its typical 90-day review window. Though no official status has been given on the reason for OMB’s delay in clearing the RTCR rule package, speculation is that election year politics are also behind the delay, with very little clearing OMB in the run-up to the elections. Thus, promulgation of RTCR looks most likely for early in 2013.
Although the final RTCR is expected to closely follow the Agreement in Principle developed by the Total Coliform Rule/Distribution System Advisory Committee convened under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, a requirement for inspecting finished water storage facilities will be proposed as a separate rulemaking. EPA’s Regulatory Development and Retrospective Review Tracker indicates that RTCR Finished Water Storage Facility Inspection Requirements are scheduled for proposal in June of 2013. To date, EPA has released very little information on potential finished water facility inspection requirements but EPA program staff have indicated that some form of public outreach on the effort could commence early in 2013.
EPA has moved forward more definitively with public meetings on several initiatives, including perchlorate, Consumer Confidence Reports, and the Long Term 2 Enhanced Surface Water Treatment Rule (LT2). Perchlorate and CCRs are discussed in separate items below. For LT2, EPA will be holding a public meeting as part of its Retrospective Review Plan under Executive Order 13563 and the third Six-Year Review under the Safe Drinking Water Act on November 15, 2012 (8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Eastern Time). This is EPA’s third meeting held to discuss LT2 under these processes and will focus on binning requirements in the context of round 1 monitoring results and analytical method changes, the use ofEscherichia coli as a screen to identify small PWSs that need to perform Cryptosporidiummonitoring and potential credits assigned to different risk mitigation tools. The meeting will be held at EPA headquarters in Washington, DC, but interested parties will also be able to participate via teleconference. Registration information is available in the Federal Registernotice announcing the meeting at: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2012-09-18/pdf/2012-23014.pdf.
Look for additional updates on all of these drinking water regulatory processes in theMonday Morning Briefing or future Regulatory Reports as we get additional post-election clarity on the path forward for each.