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Source: http://www.ag.state.la.us/Article/2380

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2380 2017-03-16 Attorney General Landry Leads Petition to Scrap EPA's Risk Management Plan Rule

BATON ROUGE, LA – Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, leading a coalition of 11 states, filed a Petition for Reconsideration with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt regarding the Risk Management Program Rule – a last-minute promulgation by former President Obama to supposedly reduce accidental releases at chemical facilities and improve emergency response activities for those releases. 

“The 11th hour finalizing of this rule was neither well thought out nor safe,” said Attorney General Landry. “Not only did this ill-advised decision subject facilities to even more burdensome, duplicative, and needless regulation; but it also makes all of us more vulnerable to security threats.”

The petition filed by Attorney General Landry and the chief legal officers from Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and West Virginia requests that the EPA reconsider the Rule, expand its review, and revise it entirely for numerous reasons, including:
  • It creates extensive new requirements that will burden emergency responders as well as state and local governments without commensurate benefit.
  • It requires unprecedented public disclosure of facility information that could threaten local communities and homeland security.
  • It requires no screening process for requesters, nor limitations on the use and/or distribution of the information
  • There is a potential conflict with the express of implicit restrictions contained in other anti-terrorism laws.
  • It ignores the numerous comments submitted by State Attorneys General, the Department of Homeland Security, and other stakeholders regarding public safety and security risks in requiring unfettered public disclosure of sensitive information.
  • It is a deeply flawed approach that is detrimental to chemical safety and to the safety of communities as a whole.

“For the sake of protecting both public safety and jobs, I hope Administrator Pruitt will honor our request,” added Attorney General Landry. “After all, industries’ resources should be spent on what truly matters: making facilities safe and secure, not responding to unnecessary and redundant regulation enacted only for regulation’s sake.”

This petition, comes on the heels of Administrator Pruitt’s Monday issuance of a three-month stay of the rule. It also follows a comment letter written by Attorney General Landry and Texas Attorney General Paxton voicing concerns on the Rule. Administrator Pruitt, then Attorney General of Oklahoma, authored a letter of support for the Landry-Paxton letter.  

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