ACP Pubs

Loren Faulkner

If You Are Not Angry After Reading This…
October 23, 2008

Then, you have a lot more patience than I have. AGC of California just this morning sent the following information. What is maddening is that California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulations being forced upon the construction industry will cause many businesses to fail—that’s bad enough. Many jobs will be lost.

But what is equally bad, is that a reasonable process for a fair hearing about all of this is being sidestepped by these bureaucrats. Apparently, they could care less.

Read the following note from ACG of California (www.agc-ca.org).  How fair is it that CARB continues to get away with this?

Last week, we reported that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had announced plans to act on California's request for federal approval of its new-road diesel emission standards in very great haste and without holding hearings in California. 

We urged you to write to EPA, requesting the agency to extend its overall timeframe for review of California’s request, urging the agency to hold at least two hearings in California - and making it clear that California contractors could not drop everything and almost immediately fly to Washington, DC, for a hearing that EPA had tentatively scheduled for that location on Monday, October 27.

In response, more than 100 of you did write to EPA. And on Monday, October 20, AGC of America, AGC of California and the San Diego Chapter of AGC wrote to the agency. Since then, we have learned:

• Only one party requested EPA to go ahead and hold a hearing in Washington, DC, on Monday, October 27.
• That one party was the California Air Resources Board (CARB).
• On the strength of that one request, and without any means of notifying the parties who wrote to the agency, much less the public, EPA has decided to grant CARB's request for that hearing. 
• EPA is still in the process of deciding whether to extend its overall timeframe for review of CARB's request for a waiver, or to hold hearings in California.

In response to this information, AGC of America, AGC of California and the San Diego Chapter of AGC have now sent a second letter to EPA, a copy of the letter is attached. The bottom line is that the association is not going to dignify EPA's effort to pretend that it can hold a genuinely public hearing on such extraordinarily short notice, 3,000 miles away from the affected business community and without notifying the public that the hearing is actually going to occur. 

The association's legal counsel has made it clear that the industry has nothing to gain from showing up for the hearing. A "presiding officer" will conduct the hearing, and it is far from certain that EPA's key decision-makers will even attend. In the worst case scenario, the industry will still have another month to submit information and comments for the record. Written submissions on the state's request for a waiver are not due until November 28. 

In the coming weeks, the association will continue to press EPA to extend its overall timeframe for review of California's request and to hold hearings in California. The association will also petition CARB to reopen its rulemaking in light of substantial economic and technical changes in circumstances that invalidate assumptions underlying CARB's new engine emission standards.

Thank you for lending your voices to the effort to bring some measure of reason to the debate over these standards. Your letters are clearly having an impact! 

Posted by Loren Faulkner on October 23, 2008 | Comments (0)