States are crying foul over the Obama administration’s latest attempt to regulate the coal industry, demanding that new water rules be scrapped and re-proposed on the grounds of sound science.
The coal industry is flagging a letter sent to the Department of Interior’s office of surface mining earlier this month by a state official who says the agency is making it impossible for states to understand the rule by blocking their access to hundreds of key documents.
The problem is deterring states from commenting on the rule, called the Stream Protection Rule, before it is made law.
The rule would impose new restrictions and stringent water testing for coal mining and related operations, adding new layers of regulations and cost to the industry and states, while undermining states’ primacy over water issues.
The rule is seen as one of the more far-reaching regulations devised by the administration and has become a target of attack by congressional Republicans. They argue that the rule would make it nearly impossible to continue coal operations in certain parts of the country.
The letter from the director of Wyoming’s department of environmental quality, Todd Parfitt, said he and other states have been struggling to understand the effects of the regulation because the agency has blocked documents from being accessed or has provided broken links and files.
“The inability to access many of the reference documents and [the agency’s] failure to provide copies of these reference documents has negatively impacted our ability to provide meaningful review and input,” he wrote in the letter to Interior’s head of surface mining and reclamation.
Without access to the documents, states cannot effectively comment on the draft regulation that has gone to the White House for final review.
Other states are also voicing concerns over Interior’s poor support documents. Last month, Parfitt said, a coalition of states including Wyoming, Ohio, Virginia, Indiana and Illinois sat down with the White House Office of Management and Budget to raise the document concerns.
Parfitt wrote “our ability to provide meaningful review has also been impacted by [the agency] not honoring the congressional mandate to provide all reference documents for review.” He said 32 documents have not been uploaded or are unavailable, while 493 are copyrighted and have not been made available.
Parfitt said many of the problems underscore a host of other issues his state has had with Interior throughout the rule’s development.
“As you know, Wyoming has continued to be critical of [the agency’s] failure to engage Wyoming throughout the rule development process,” he wrote. “There was no engagement by [the mining office] from January 2010 until the draft rule was released for public comment in July 2015.”
As a result, many of the rule’s provisions are impossible to implement in Wyoming, home of one of the nation’s largest coal beds, because the agency failed to take into account the western region’s differences in topography and mining techniques.
“Many provisions under the proposed rule cannot be implemented in Wyoming or implemented under any circumstance,” he wrote. “Many provisions are incorrect or provide no substantiated basis for those changes to be implemented.”
“To attempt to impose such standards intrudes on the authority of Wyoming,” which is granted primacy to manage water under the Clean Water Act, he said.
He is recommending that the final rule, being considered for release in July, be withdrawn and the agency directed to engage states “in a truly meaningful and robust manner to ensure that any final rule is based upon sound science.”
