HR 6147 Introduced – FY 2019 IER Spending

Earlier this week Rep. Calvert (R,CA) introduced HR 6147, the Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2019. The only thing of note for the purposes of this blog is that the bill continues funding for the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) and that would not be news except for continued budget suggestions from the Administration that the CSB be disbanded. Water treatment facility security is briefly addressed in the Committee Report.

CSB Funding

The bill funds the CSB at $12 million dollars. This is $1 million above last year’s spending and $3.5 million above the amount recommended in the President’s budget to close out the agency. The Committee Report notes that (pg 84):

“The Board has the responsibility of independently investigating industrial chemical accidents and collaborating with industry and professional organizations to share safety lessons that can prevent catastrophic incidents and the Committee expects this work to continue.”

Water Treatment Facility Security

There is a brief note in the Report on funding for a Water Security Test Bed. No specific funding is allocated, just the note that:

“For both fiscal year 2019 and future budget requests, the Committee recommends that EPA include adequate funding for advancing full scale applied research and testing capabilities to address threats to drinking water and drinking water infrastructure.”

Moving Forward

The Report does not include any record of the votes in Committee on this bill, but the Dissenting Views portion of the Report (pgs 217-20) makes it clear that there are serious concerns about many items included in the bill. There will not be any significant bipartisan support for this bill when it makes it to the floor of the House. With the Republicans firmly in control in the House, this will not stop the bill from moving forward.

Again, as with all spending bills this may not be an impediment to the bill’s consideration in the Senate. We have yet to see the Senate version of the bill, but if we continue to have the strong bipartisan activity that we have seen to date in the Senate Appropriations Committee, the bill coming out of that Committee (which will form the basis for substitute language for this bill) will allow the Senate to take up this bill without regard to the Democrats documented objections to this bill.

Commentary

I am certainly glad to see the Committee’s continued strong support for the CSB. The on-going effective activity of this organization is still, however, in the President’s hands. With the resignation of the CSB Chair Sutherland, the President can slow kill the agency by failing to appoint a new chair. While Dr. Kulinowski, the Interim Executive Authority, is fully capable of overseeing the day-to-day operations of the Board, the solving of endemic morale issues and the long-term growth of the Board will have to await the next Chair.

While I was encouraged to see the Committee support a Water Treatment Facility Test Bed, I was disappointed to see the lack of specific funding being earmarked for such a facility or any guidance on what type of activities the facility should target. The EPA has a history of providing support for physical security protections of water treatment facilities to protect the safety of the water quality. The history on providing support for hazardous chemical security or cybersecurity is not quite as strong. This would have been a good place for the Committee to expand the scope of water treatment facility security oversight. At the very least, I would have expected to see a requirement to report to the Committee on the progress being made on the Test Bed.

Congressional Bills Introduced 01-23-13

Yesterday there were 62 bills introduced in the Senate and 66 bills introduced in the House. Of those 128 bills only two were potentially of specific interest to readers of this blog; both dealt with chemical facility security matters.

Chemical Security at Water Treatment Facilities

S 67 was introduced by Sen. Lautenberg (D,NJ). It would establish regulations for the security of chemicals at water treatment facilities. I’m assuming that it will be patterned after last sessions S 711. This bill was referred to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Last session there was one hearing at that Committee that addressed S 711, but no action was taken.

CFATS Modification

S 68 was also introduced by Lautenberg and it would modify the current CFATS program, probably along the lines of last session’s S 709. This bill was referred to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. That Committee took no action on S 709 last session as they only addressed the bill by Sen. Collins. I expect that Sen. Carper will have a CFATS bill introduced this session that this Committee will deal with instead of Lautenberg’s bill.

EPA ICR Renewal Notice

Today the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a 60-day notice of their intent to renew the information collection request (ICR) that allows them to collect information about vulnerability assessments (VA) and emergency response plans for water treatment facilities. The current ICR (2040-0253) approval expires on February 28, 2011.

There are no material changes to the ICR outlined in this renewal. The EPA notice explains that they expect the average respondent to this information collection request to require 237 hours to complete the information collection-submission process. EPA notes that (75 FR 52326):

“There is no decrease in the total estimated respondent burden compared with that identified in the ICR currently approved by OMB. This reflects EPA's continued need to collect documents that were included in the original estimate, but still have not been submitted to the Agency.”

Since the VA submission requirement applies to all water treatment facilities that serve 3,300 customers it seems that the EPA must have severely underestimated the number of covered facilities since the number of facilities that have yet to submit their VA has not changed in three years. This also points out the lack of authority to impose sanctions for not following this regulation.

I can’t help but note once again that this EPA program, in full accordance with Congressional direction, does not require water treatment facilities to have a security program to protect the facilities against terrorist attack. They must simply have an emergency response plan to respond to the results of such attacks. Congress just can’t seem to get it right; the CFATS program requires the establishment of a site security program to prevent an attack but no emergency response plan to respond to an attack. Maybe they ought to combine the two programs.

Public comments on this ICR renewal notice may be submitted at the Federal Rule Making Portal (Docket Number EPA-HQ-OW-2003-0013). Comments need to be submitted by October 25, 2010. EPA will respond to any comments received when they subsequently publish their 30-day notice.

EPA Water Security Guidance Documents

Last week over on the HSDL.Org blog site Ijakaijan posted some links to newly released EPA documents related to water system security. As you would expect from an EPA mandate point of view, these documents were directed at deliberate water system contamination events rather than onsite water treatment chemical releases. Now I have made my opinion clear (see: “Water Supply Security”) about what I think of the realistic possibility of a terrorist significantly contaminating a municipal water supply, but the EPA has an institutional and Congressional mandate to address such a remote possibility. The system they outlined in the guidance document mentioned in Ijakaijan’s post seems to identify a reasonable set of procedures for municipal water systems to use. My main complaint with that document is its total failure to recognize that many of the water treatment chemicals used at a large number of water treatment facilities are, in and of themselves, a legitimate threat for terrorist attack. For example, figure 1-2 shows the ‘relationship structure’ of a water treatment facility emergency response plan. It identifies fire, water-main breaks, natural disasters, and water system contamination as the incidents that would require incident-specific action plans. There is no mention of an action plan for hazmat release on-site. This is just another indication of the lack of concern at the EPA for security of high-risk chemicals like chlorine, sulfur-dioxide, anhydrous ammonia, and even industrial bleach at water treatment and waste-water treatment facilities. This is one more reason that Congress must act to transfer responsibility for overseeing the security of these chemicals to the federal agency that does take this chemical security risk seriously, DHS.