EPA Publishes 2nd Methyl Bromide ICR Notice

In today’s Federal Register (published on-line Saturday) the Environmental Protection Agency published their 30-day information collection request (ICR) renewal notice (76 FR 65721-65722) for their methyl bromide phase-out program. The original 60-day notice was published back in March (76 FR 11447).

I didn’t address this ICR when the 60-day notice was published because there were other more pressing items to report on (FY 2011 continuing resolution and the introduction of three CFATS bills). Besides it was a fairly straightforward renewal, the program is winding down (slowly to be sure) and there just wasn’t much to write about.

I almost passed it by again except one thing caught my attention; this notice mentions the fact that there was a comment posted. So I read the notice more carefully looking for a comment about the public-comment and the EPA’s response. There wasn’t one so I checked the burden information included in the notice and found that it had changed since the 60-day notice.

BTW: The one public response had nothing to do with this change. It was an anonymous (J. Public) rant against the continued provision of the exceptions to the phase out of methyl bromide. In a more perfect world the folks at the EPA would have provided a brief response to this comment, even if it was nothing more than the bureaucratic ‘this issue is beyond the scope of the current action’.

Changes in the Burden Calculations

The original 60-day notice provided a pretty detailed accounting of the ‘burden’ imposed by this program. It included the following information:

• 52 Applicants – 1976 hours

• 4 Producers – 188 hours

• 75 Distributors – 975 hours

• 2000 End Users – 575 hours

• Total reported burden – 3714 hours

• Total respondents – 2131

Today’s notice doesn’t go into anywhere near the detail (typically the 30-day notices don’t) but it does provide the total burden and respondent numbers and they don’t match the 60-day notice. The new numbers, along with the change from the 30-day notice, are listed below. The notice does not explain (or even mention) the change.

• Number of Respondents 1919 (212 Change)

• Total Reported Hours 3258 (456 Change)

Now I suspect that the decrease is due to recent changes in the program where the EPA canceled some registrations for the use of methyl bromide since there were now ‘technically and financially feasible’ alternatives available. It certainly would have been nice, however, if the drafters of this notice had deigned to mention this fact. The whole purpose of this ICR exercise is to provide both the public and OMB a full accounting and justification for the reasons that the public is being required to provide information to the ‘Guvmint’.

Care always must be taken to prevent the arrogancy of bureaucracy from getting to be too great.

Public Comments

Public comments are being solicited by EPA on this notice. The EPA continues to allow the use of the Federal eRulemaking Portal (www.Regulations.gov; Docket number EPA-HQ-OAR-2011-0085) for these submissions. All comments need to be posted by November 23, 2011.

NOTE: A copy of this blog posting will be added to the public docket on this ICR.