BILL ANALYSIS
AB 833
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Date of Hearing: April 25, 2007
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS
Mark Leno, Chair
AB 833 (Ruskin) - As Amended: April 9, 2007
Policy Committee: Environmental
Safety & Toxic Materials Vote: 5-0
Urgency: No State Mandated Local Program:
No Reimbursable:
SUMMARY
This bill requires CalEPA to establish the California Toxic
Release Inventory Program (CalTRIP) to impose the same
requirements as the federal Emergency Planning and Community
Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA), as that Act, and regulations adopted
under the Act, existed on January 1, 2006.
FISCAL EFFECT
1)Moderate potential GF costs, perhaps $2.5 million primarily in
2008-09, to CalEPA to establish the CalTRIP as a separate
reporting and database program from the federal EPCRA.
2)Minor ongoing costs, probably less than $150,000 annually
starting in 2009-10, to CalEPA to administer CalTRIP. These
costs are likely to be covered by revenue generated by fees
imposed on businesses and other entities required to report
hazardous material inventories to CalEPA. (Reimbursements.)
COMMENTS
1)Rationale . The author wants CalEPA to establish and
administer CalTRIP, separate from federal EPCRA, because he is
concerned that recent US EPA relaxations of EPCRA regulations
result in less information being available to communities in
which hazardous materials are stored and used in nearby
facilities. By establishing CalTRIP, businesses that have to
report under EPCRA at established intervals, as the federal
act and related regulations existed on January 1, 2006, would
continue to report under CalTRIP. This results in CalTRIP
being more stringent than federal EPCRA.
AB 833
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2)EPCRA was enacted in 1986 to inform communities and residents
of chemical hazards in their area. The federal Toxics Release
Inventory (TRI) was established under EPCRA (and expanded
under the federal Pollution Prevention Act of 1990) and
requires businesses to report the locations and quantities of
chemicals stored on-site to state and local governments in
order to help communities prepare to respond to chemical
spills and similar emergencies. The goal of TRI is to empower
citizens, through information, to hold companies and local
agencies accountable in terms of how toxic chemicals are
managed. There are currently about 650 chemicals that must be
reported under TRI and several industrial sectors are required
to report.
In September 2005, the US EPA announced its intent to relax
the TRI reporting requirements, both in terms of reporting
frequency and the volume threshold of hazardous materials that
triggers the reporting requirement. On December 18, 2006, US
EPA announced its changes to TRI regulations. These changes
allow more businesses to use the less detailed Form A when
reporting on hazardous materials stored or released instead of
the more detailed Form R. Under the changes made by US EPA,
reporting facilities are allowed to use Form A for persistent,
bioaccumulative, or toxic (PBT) chemicals, as long as there
are no releases or other disposal, and no more than 500 pounds
of other waste management.
Environmental organizations and community right-to-know groups
are opposed to this relaxation in TRI reporting, while several
industrial and manufacturing organizations support it.
3)Fiscal Concerns . CalEPA and the Department of Toxic
Substances Control (DTSC) indicate that duplicating the
federal TRI reporting requirements, as they existed before the
December 2006 US EPA rule relaxations, requires a substantial
devotion of resources to gathering a large volume of data and
making that data available to the public. Because a large
portion of this data would still be available to the public
through the federal TRI program, much of the initial fiscal
resources and work would be devoted to establishing a
relatively duplicative CalTRIP.
It would be substantially less costly to limit the parameters
of proposed CalTRIP to provide the information to California
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communities that would no longer be provided under the TRI
reporting process.
4)Prior Legislation . AB 2490 (Ruskin) of 2006, virtually
identical to this bill, was vetoed by the governor, who stated
that the bill was "overly broad, premature and duplicative."
As a result of US EPA's December 2006 action, the effort to
establish a separate CalTRIP is no longer premature.
Analysis Prepared by : Steve Archibald / APPR. / (916)
319-2081