FRA 60-day ICR Notice for Oil Train Reporting Order

Today the DOT’s Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) published a 60-day information collection request (ICR) renewal notice in the Federal Register (79 FR 36860-36861) to cover the reporting of crude oil unit train routing information under DOT Secretary’s emergency order published May 7^th, 2014. The OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) provided a 180-day emergency ICR to cover that order. This renewal would provide for the public comment period not afforded under the emergency ICR process.

Today’s notice provides the same regulatory burden data [Word® download link] submitted to OIRA in the original request for the emergency ICR. That annual data is summarized in the table below.

	Respondents	Responses	Time/Response	Burden
Initial notification to SERCs	47	120	30	3600
Updated notifications	47	25	4	100
Notifications to FRA	47	10	1	10
Requests by SERCs	47	60	1	60

The number of initial notifications seems to be low to me. The only way that the number makes any sense is if there are only 120 possible routes that these crude oil unit trains could possibly take out of the Bakken oil loading region. That would mean that each of the listed responses would be addressed to multiple states along that route. That may be a reasonable way of accounting for the burden, but I doubt that that would be the method by which the notification would be compiled and delivered.

The FRA is soliciting public comments on this ICR. Comments may be submitted to Mr. Brogan at Robert.Brogan@dot.gov. Public comments should be submitted by August 29^th, 2014.

BTW: There is a major error in OIRA’s listing of the current emergency ICR. It shows two Federal Register citations for the submission of the original request. The first citation is for a totally unrelated ICR and the second citation is for an issue of the FR that has yet to be published. The only FR notice that mentions this oil route reporting requirement was the one published on May 13^th, 2014 (79 FR 27363) and it contains no mention of an ICR.