Agency to submit rule-making plan
New administrative practices for the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality will be sent out for legislative and public consideration after a vote of the department's regulatory and appellate commission.
The Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission approved starting the rule-making process for adopting the rewritten Regulation 8 on a voice vote without dissent Thursday.
According to supporting documents, the changes to administrative procedures include adding definitions, lengthening the amount of time an entity has to respond to a notice of violation from 20 days to 30 days, and allowing the department administrative law judge to issue warning orders.
Commissioner Wesley Stites thanked the department for the proposed rule-making, the status of which he had been asking about for months.
"This is a vast improvement on what we had before," he said.
Commissioner Doug Melton, during a separate report on updating air regulations, added that he would like to see within Regulation 8 a provision requiring regular updates of the department's rules to avoid mismatches between the regulations and what's encoded in state law.
He said the "staleness" of rules has caused anxiety for years and could cause confusion for someone trying to find out what's required of them.
Also Thursday, the department pulled the consideration of changes to Regulation 1 -- pollution prevention regulations for wastes produced by saltwater and oil-field wells -- which would have updated definitions, changed the name of the program, made typographical changes and eliminated the second permit for owners of disposal wells that are not high-volume or commercial disposal.
The changes as written were not approved by the governor and would be tweaked and ideally presented to the commission in June, said Caleb Osborne, associate director in charge of the Office of Water Quality.
LR training event to target pollution
A two-day training session will teach businesses better practices for pollution prevention, efficient operations and environmental management.
The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality and the University of Texas at Arlington's Environmental Training Institute are partnering to host the training session July 31 and Aug. 1 at the Cox Center in downtown Little Rock, according to a news release from the department.
Trainers will go over items including industry case studies, "lean business practices" and updates on the environmental management standard called ISO 14001, according to an event flyer.
Lean business practices are a set of five steps for efficient business management outlined by the Lean Enterprise Institute. ISO 14001 is an international standard for environmental management systems that implement environmental policies and regulations at an organization.
Thomas Vinson of the Environmental Training Institute will be a keynote speaker.
Individuals can attend for $125. More information is available on the department's website, adeq.state.ar.us.
Metro on 05/27/2018