BILL ANALYSIS
SB 983
SENATE COMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY
Byron D. Sher, Chairman
1999-2000 Regular Session
BILL NO: SB 983
AUTHOR: Bowen
AMENDED: August 18, 2000
FISCAL: Yes HEARING DATE: August 31,
2000
URGENCY: No CONSULTANT: Arnie Peters
SUBJECT : ILLEGAL DRUG LABS: CLEANUP STANDARDS
SUMMARY :
Existing law , the State Superfund law:
1) Distinguishes between two types of cleanup action --
removal actions and remedial actions. Removal actions are
interim, emergency cleanup measures that clean up the
aspects of a hazardous substance release site that present
an immediate risk to public health or safety or an imminent
threat to the environment. The removal of containers of
flammable, explosive or volatile chemicals from a site, for
example, is a removal action. Remedial actions are the
cleanup measures that, when fully implemented, make up the
long-term, permanent solution to a release that ensures
that it will not pose a significant threat to health or the
environment in the future.
2) Requires the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC),
using General Fund appropriations, to take removal actions
at sites of illegal drugmaking operations whenever law
enforcement authorities notify the department of the need
for cleanup.
3) Requires DTSC to notify the local environmental health
officer whenever it takes a removal action at an illegal
drug lab site if the environmental health officer has
requested such notification.
This bill requires DTSC to:
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1) Notify the agency designated by the local jurisdiction when
it takes a removal action at an illegal drug lab site if
the local jurisdiction does not have an environmental
health officer and the local agency requests the
notification.
2) Adopt, by January 1, 2002, regulations establishing
procedures and standards that can be used by public health
agencies at the state and local levels for taking remedial
actions at illegal drug lab sites. The regulations must be
developed in consultation with the Office of Environmental
Health Hazard Assessment and must ensure that, when
followed, remedial action at a drug lab site will result in
a level of cleanup that will protect the health and safety
of future occupants of the site.
COMMENTS :
1)Purpose of Bill . Under existing law, when a law enforcement
agency closes an illegal drug lab, DTSC is required to take
removal action as necessary to eliminate immediate threats
to public health or the environment caused by chemical
storage, dumping and spills at the site. Removal action
usually consists of hauling away and disposing of
containers of chemicals and laboratory equipment, excavating
waste sumps and cleaning up other obvious problems of this
type. Removal actions can cost anywhere from several
hundred dollars to as much as tens of thousands of dollars.
Removal action does not include complete decontamination of
the illegal lab site or the building in which it was
located. Under existing law, complete cleanup - remedial
action - is the responsibility of the property owner and is
carried out under the supervision of the local public health
and housing authorities.
The main purpose of this bill is to establish procedures and
standards that local authorities may use to ensure that
complete cleanup of illegal drug lab sites takes place. The
bill does this by requiring DTSC, working together with the
Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, to develop
standards for investigating and remediating illegal drug lab
sites and to adopt the standards and procedures as
regulations.
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2)CalEPA Opposition . DTSC and its parent agency, CalEPA, are
opposed to this bill. Their opposition is not, however, to
the purpose of the bill: creating a set of standards or
guidelines for remediating illegal drug lab sites. Rather
their opposition is to the "mechanics" of the bill. DTSC
and CalEPA make these points:
a)Funding. The bill requires a rather extensive regulatory
effort, an effort DTSC estimates will require eight
personnel years and an expenditure of $3 million/year for
three years. The bill itself contains no funding to do
the work it mandates.
b)Timeline. The bill requires DTSC to adopt the illegal
drug lab cleanup regulations within one year of its
effective date. DTSC believes that the work will take at
least three years. While that estimate may be
conservative, it is almost surely the case that a
one-year timeframe is not realistic. The typical
experience of regulatory agencies that are required to
follow the rulemaking procedures in the Administrative
Procedure Act is that, even if everything goes perfectly,
regulations take about nine months to adopt, once they
have been developed and are ready for proposal.
c)Regulations vs. "guidelines". DTSC believes that in the
ever-changing world of illegal drug lab cleanups,
regulations specifying cleanup procedures and standards
are not good practice and will be unnecessarily
restrictive and inflexible. According to DTSC, a better
approach would be develop guidelines that would outline
investigative and analytic procedures and a set of "best
management practices" that would describe the most
productive and cost-effective approaches to cleaning up
drug lab sites. Local agencies would use these
investigative procedures and best management practices as
guidelines for what should be done in particular
situations to remediate a drug lab site.
The basis for this DTSC view is not readily apparent.
Regulations are not necessarily more or less flexible
than guidelines. The best confirmation of this may be
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the fact that state Superfund cleanups generally are
required to comply with a lengthy and extensive set of
regulations -- the so-called federal National
Contingency Plan -- which establishes the procedures for
investigating toxic waste sites, evaluating the methods
for cleaning them up and determining the cleanup
standards that apply to them. It might also be pointed
out that DTSC, in other areas, has not found regulations
to be an improper format for guiding cleanup procedures
and standards. In the last year of the previous
administration, DTSC proposed a detailed set of
regulations for carrying out corrective action, i.e.,
cleanup of hazardous waste facilities operating pursuant
to permits. Indeed, the department adopted a variant of
those regulations as a means of retaining jurisdiction
over state Superfund cleanups during the first five
months of 1999, when the state Superfund program was
sunsetted and had not been reauthorized. Those
regulations were allowed to lapse in April 1999 when SB
47 (Sher) reauthorized the state Superfund program.
SOURCE : Senator Bowen
SUPPORT : California Association of Environmental Health
Administrators
California District of the American Academy of
Pediatrics
California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation
Hazpak, Inc.
Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office
Riverside County Department of Environmental
Health
Western Center on Law and Poverty
OPPOSITION : California Environmental Protection Agency
Department of Toxic Substances Control