HR 2868 Hearings Next Week

Yesterday afternoon wallmond (William Almond, Washington, DC) posted the following Tweet on Twitter yesterday afternoon:

“House Energy & Commerce Cmte likely to hold CFATS hearing next week. Enviro'lists & labor unions (not security experts or industry) to star” Note: please forgive the abbreviations but Twitter does have a 140 character message limitation.

I have looked at the Energy and Commerce Committee web site for next week’s schedule and HR 2868 does not show up yet. They do have three days (Mon, Tue, and Wed) scheduled for a full committee mark up of HR 3200 (America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009). That is a full hearing schedule that is likely to get delayed by floor votes, etc. I’ll be slightly surprised if HR 2868 get a hearing next week and I suspect that if it does occur it will be before the Energy and the Environment subcommittee. That would be appropriate since they handle water issues. Remember, this is the committee that essentially killed HR 5577 last year because they did not want to give up authority over water treatment facilities. Dingell was the chairman then, not Waxman, but the Committee is still going to try to retain some oversight responsibility for CFATS at water treatment facilities. This Committee has not had a full court press by the pro-IST people yet, so it is probably fitting that they start off with those folks. Besides the pro-IST people have not had a chance to testify this year. And they really want to shut down the chlorine gas use at water treatment facilities. The AWWA will also be present in some form to ‘balance’ the presentation. We shouldn’t expect to see non-water related industry at these hearings. They were covered at Homeland Security.