February 13, 1997
Honorable Fred Hansen
Deputy Administrator
Environmental Protection Agency
401 M St. S. W.
Washington, D. C. 20460
Subject: Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Reporting Requirements for Gasoline Stations
Dear Mr. Hansen:
We are writing to ask the Environmental Protection Agency to take expeditious action to propose regulatory relief for several hundred thousand small business owners subject to reporting requirements under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know (EPCRA) Act of 1986. We have, in the past two years, written two letters (attached) to Assistant Administrator for Solid Waste and Emergency Response Elliot Laws, but no formal rulemaking proposal has yet been issued.
We believe that the regulations which require gasoline station owners with petroleum underground storage tanks over 10,000 pounds to file annual EPCRA inventory reports are burdensome and unnecessary. The information provided on the EPCRA Emergency and Hazardous Chemical forms (Tier II) is similar and comparable to information submitted to state underground storage tank offices on the underground storage tank (UST) notification form under section 9002 of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Currently, these small businesses are responsible for submitting basically the same information to three separate regulatory entities: state and local emergency planning commission offices , local fire departments and state UST offices. Filing the additional EPCRA reports results in estimated unnecessary costs of over 25.3 million dollars per year to small businesses. Moreover, the Office of Advocacy believes that these reporting requirements unnecessarily burden about 200,000 retail gasoline outlets nationwide; annual paperwork savings could easily exceed 400,000 annual paperwork hours.
Elimination of the duplication between the EPCRA reports and UST forms is not only a viable option for EPA, but it also makes good sense. A 1996 study completed by Advocacy contractor Policy Planning and Evaluation, Inc. of Herndon, Virginia, notes that most LEPC, SEPC, and local fire officials surveyed are in favor of the elimination of the EPRCA forms for these facilities. Not only do state UST forms contain chemical information equivalent to the Tier II form (the Tier I form is less detailed), albeit in a different format, the state UST form also contains specific information about the mechanical and operational safety of the tanks, information relevant to EPCRA standards goals for community awareness of potential dangers. Furthermore, all of the tanks in question singularly store petroleum, a chemical that SEPCs, LEPCs, and local fire officials know how to handle in the event of an emergency, while the Tier I and II forms seem designed for firms handling more that one chemical. Most of the officials surveyed stated they used state UST information, not Tier I or II information, in emergency response. In sum, the EPCRA forms are not needed because the UST offices, not the EPCRA offices, effectively perform emergency preparedness and response functions for hundreds of thousands of gasoline facilities.
The Office of Advocacy has been calling for the elimination of these EPCRA reporting requirements for gasoline stations since 1987. As recently as last April, the Office of Advocacy contacted Mr. Laws, seeking prompt action on the proposed substitution and sending a copy of the PP&E report, which included several regulatory alternatives for achieving this paperwork reduction.
According to EPA's semiannual regulatory agenda, published Nov. 29, 1996, a notice of proposed rulemaking was scheduled to be to be issued in December of last year concerning Section 311 reporting requirements, but thus far, no rule has been published.
In January, Office of Management and Budget Director Franklin D. Raines published OMB Bulletin No. 97-03, which outlined President Clinton's call to regulatory agencies to "conquer the mountain of paperwork that is crushing our people and wasting a lot of time and resources." The bulletin instructs agencies to achieve, by the end of 1998, a 25 percent reduction in paperwork requirements from 1995. SBA believes that this proposal is a positive step towards the president's goal.
Thank you for you efforts to help small business, and I look forward to speaking with you concerning this matter. Please feel free to call me or Damon Dozier of my staff at (202) 205-6936.
Sincerely,
Jere W. Glover
Chief Counsel for Advocacy
cc: Elliot Laws
David Gardiner
Margaret Schneider
Karen Brown