EPA Publishes 60-day ICR Notice for RMP Revisions

The EPA published a 60-day information collection request notice (ICR) in Monday’s (available on line yesterday) Federal Register (87 FR 52764-52765) for a new ICR for “Accidental  Release Prevention Requirements: Risk Management Programs Under Section 112(r) of the Clean Air Act, as Amended; Safer Communities by Chemical  Accident Prevention”.

The ICR notice does not provide any details about the proposed changes to the RMP regulations beyond noting:

“The proposed revisions seek to improve chemical process safety, assist in planning, preparedness, and responding to RMP accidents, and improve public awareness of chemical hazards at regulated sources. To accomplish this, these proposed provisions include several changes to the accident prevention program requirements, enhancements to the emergency preparedness requirements, increased public availability of chemical hazard information, and several other changes to certain regulatory definitions or points of clarification.”

The notice does provide the following burden estimate information without any supporting explanation:

• Estimated number of respondents - 14,226,

• Frequency of response – on occasion,

• Estimated hourly response burden - 797,642 hours (per year)

• Estimated burden cost - $79,248,522

EPA is soliciting public comments on the ICR. Comments can be submitted via the Federal eRulmaking Portal (www.Regulations.gov; Docket # EPA-HQ-OLEM-2022-0174). Comments should be submitted by October 28^th, 2022.

Commentary

I suspect that this ICR will be supporting an EPA notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) that was recently approved by the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. That NPRM has not yet been published in the Federal Register, but there is a page on the EPA website the outlines the rulemaking and provides a link to a pre-publication version of the NPRM.

Typically, these initial ICR requests supporting new rulemakings are included in the NPRM. It will certainly be difficult for anyone to intelligently comment on this ICR notice until the NPRM is published. The pre-publication version of the NPRM does include such a section on pages 188-9, but it does not provide any additional information about how the EPA arrived at these burden estimates numbers. I will not be submitting a copy of this post complaining about that lack of information, as I do not expect that either the EPA or OIRA will do anything to correct the issue. Part of the reason for that is that it is too early in the regulatory process for the estimates to have any real meaning.