Posted on May 2, 2017 by David Van Slyke
The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) was enacted in 1993 to improve governmental performance by requiring federal agencies to (1) develop five-year strategic plans containing long-term, results-oriented goals; (2) prepare annual performance plans and goals; and (3) prepare annual performance reports that review the agency’s success or failure in meeting its goals.
Relative to U.S. EPA’s responsibilities under RCRA’s corrective action efforts, GPRA has been implemented through the “RCRA 2020” program under which EPA established (via a 1999 guidance document) two Environmental Indicators (“EIs”) to measure its progress in achieving national cleanup goals:
- Current Human Exposures Under Control – Ensures that people near a particular facility are not exposed to unacceptable levels of contaminants.
- Migration Of Contaminated Groundwater Under Control – Ensures that contaminated groundwater does not spread and further contaminate groundwater resources.
The RCRA 2020 Corrective Action Baseline List currently includes 3,779 RCRA facilities. Initially introduced by EPA in 1999, that initial list (much smaller — only 1714 facilities) became the basis for EPA’s 2005 GPRA performance goals. The list has been updated in 2008, 2010, and most recently in April 2013. The Baseline List includes properties that are heavily contaminated, others that were contaminated but have since been cleaned up, and properties awaiting full investigation that may require little or no future corrective action.
EPA’s overall “aspiration goal” is to “largely implement[ ] final remedies at 95 percent of facilities requiring corrective action by the year 2020.” While it is not at all clear what “largely implement” means, in addition to that goal the following GPRA goals for 2015apply to the 2020 Baseline list (in percentages of facilities meeting those goals):
- human exposures under control
- migration of contaminated groundwater under control
- final remedy construction
- performance standards attained
It is now unclear, however, whether EPA is actually on track to meeting its 2020 goals. While the Agency has published national EI results for the 2005 and 2008 baseline lists, including then-current statements for each facility as to whether or not the two key EIs have been met, EPA appears not to have generated (or at least not made publicly available) similar compiled results for the much more expanded 2010 or 2013 lists of facilities.
Further, EPA’s March 21, 2017 memorandum regarding the President’s 2018 budget for the Agency would reduce the Headquarters and Regional program office resources for the RCRA corrective action program by 33.4 FTEs. That budget memo also reduces the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance’s (OECA) civil enforcement and compliance monitoring budget by a total of 262 FTEs; some unknown portion of that cut will fall on the RCRA corrective action program. (In an ironic and perhaps inadvertently amusing entry, that same budget memo proposes to increase the OECA budget by 10 FTE “to provide 24/7 security detail for the Administrator.”)
At best, given today’s state of play, the current vision for RCRA 2020 is blurry. At worst, well…, um…, the year 2020 is only 975 (more or less) days away.
Tags: RCRA Corrective Action