Steps EPA can take during the rule-making process

[Anne Pamperl <anne.pamperl@hhss.state.ne.us>]

I've been out of the office for 2 days, so I'm just now able to comment on Tuesday's topic, Permits & Rules. I'm particularly interested in the Rules portion of the topic.

EPA has been issuing proposed drinking water rules in the last 1.5 years and requesting comments on these rules. My comments and suggestions are based on my experience with two of these proposed rules, the proposed radon and radionuclide rules. I was responsible for preparing comment letters on each of these proposed rules. That entailed reading the supporting documents, the proposed rules, gathering State-specific data, and talking with other State agencies and/or sections within my department that had pertinent information or would be affected by the new rules when they take effect, and limited contact with my counterparts in other States. I've also tried to get the word out to the public (radionuclide rule, uranium in particular), though that wasn't particularly successful.

Lack of time is by far and away the largest problem that I have encountered. I had 60 days to comment on the Notice of Data Availability (i.e., proposed revisions) for the 1991 proposed radionuclide rule. This was way too little time for all that I needed to do. I have the following suggestions:

EPA states in its draft policy that it can't do anything about the length of time alloted for a comment period because this is mandated by Congress in its statutes. Not true - EPA can got to its Congressional contacts and explain that more time is needed for the public to comment on technical issues. EPA can also enlist States, Tribes, and Stakeholders to lobby Congress for changes that will allow more time for comments on proposed rules. Members of Congress do not comment on proposed rules so consequently don't understand what is required and the amount of time it takes to accomplish these tasks. If the need for time is explained and we all let Congress how important that is to us, we might be able to get some changes made for future comment periods.

EPA needs to start its efforts to educate the public about forthcoming proposed rules before the proposed rule is published in the Federal Register. I realize that the details of the proposed rules sometimes aren't decided until the last minute, but some information - such as health effects, risk assessments, cost/benefit analyses, characteristics of the substance that will be regulated, areas that are more likely to have a problem with the substance - could be made public in advance of publication of the proposed rule. Supporting documents and fact sheets with this information could be made available in advance. EPA could also issue press releases to national and local media stating that within the next few months a proposed rule will be issued and that in the meantime supporting documents for the rule-making are available. Information could be included in the release on how to obtain these documents. EPA could contact States, etc prior to issuing the releases to find out which areas are most likely to be impacted by these proposed rules so that the releases could include this information (local media are far more likely to pick up something if they know it directly pertains to the area served).

The supporting documents need to be available via Internet and as hard copies either at local libraries or via mail. While many small, rural communities have Internet access (not high speed),some do not; also not all interested citizens have Internet access, which is why the documents need to be available in more than one media. As for Internet access, searching for technical documents by keyword may be difficult for some members of the public, so the media release should include an Internet address for a web page that has the documents.  Making the documents accessible at a centralized library is of limited help in central and western Nebraska where towns are many miles apart and larger towns (> 10,000 population) are few and far between. People will find it difficult to drive 100 miles or more to the nearest town with a large library (large enough, that is, to have a trained librarian, which is what folks in this dialogue seem to think you have to have in order to have a document repository). Perhaps EPA could, upon receipt of a request, make a set of supporting documents and fact sheets available to each small town that wants information on forthcoming proposed rules. The copies would have to have only a nominal fee for copying and shipping/handling, but it seems that this could fall under environmental justice efforts by EPA - almost all of the small towns that are being impacted by these new rules have mean household incomes below the poverty line. EPA also needs to provide in its media release some sort of contact phone number (& perhaps an Internet address) where folks can to ask questions (e.g., the Safe Drinking Water Hotline).

Public education takes time because technical information is not absorbed easily by people without a technical background. However, in my experience people without a technical background are quite capable of understanding the issues if we only take the time to make that information available (needs to be written in a more understandable form) and then are available to answer questions that folks have after they complete their reading. Here's an example: earlier this year I did an 11-page write-up on uranium in drinking water and the issues that some communities in Nebraska will face after the rule takes effect and one or more their municipal wells can not meet the new uranium limit for drinking water. At the beginning of July I sent this document to the utilities superintendent of a small, western Nebraska town. He read it and then supplied his city council members with the document. He answered some of their questions and then invited me to come out for their July city council meeting so that I could answer the rest. This group of people did an excellent job of grasping the facts and issues presented to them. They asked excellent questions and discussed issues based on what they had learned. They plan to have the engineering firm that they use for Village projects come to their next meeting so that they can ask system-specific questions on the potential solutions to their uranium problems. Counting the intial conversations that I had with the Village clerk and the utilities superintendent through the meeting with the engineering firm, this education process will take more than a couple of months, not including the time that I spent writing up the document. That exceeds the comment period for most proposed rules. (& the bad news about this example - the radionuclide rule is already final, these folks are getting bad news without ever having had an opportunity to comment on the proposed rule. Needless to say, they are very angry that no attempt was made by EPA to let the public know that a proposed radionuclide rule was forthcoming.)

At the State level, we are willing to do public outreach, but need time to do so. A 60-day comment period period is not sufficient for public education on top of all that we need to do to prepare a good comment letter.

Yet another reason for a longer comment period - two of the supporting documents that I wanted to review could not be found on EPA's web site. I contacted the Safe Drinking Water Hotline in case I wasn't looking in the correct location on the web site. The Hotline responded after a week that they had been unable to locate the documents anywhere except in the proposed rule docket. The folks at the docket were quite nice and made copies of the 2 documents and mailed them to me. This took just over 2 weeks of a 60-day comment period (& I still had to read and digest the information in the docket). These documents were used extensively in the preparation of comments by our engineering staff and myself. I also used information from these documents in my write-up on uranium in drinking water that I've been giving out. I believe that I've read somewhere that in the future EPA hopes to have all docket information available over the Internet. I hope that this is true as that will save time for folks like me who have Internet access and increase the availability of docket information to those of us who don't live anywhere near Washington, D.C.

For the moment I've run out of ideas so will close this e-mail. If anyone has any ideas or experiences with getting proposed rule information out to the public, please let me know. I'm still relatively new at this.