Pennsylvania State Sen. Gene Yaw (R-23) said the state’s Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee that he chairs opposes pending regulation that would limit manganese levels in waterways.
In a letter to the Independent Regulatory Review Commission (IRRS), Yaw said the committee felt the state Department of Environmental Protection had overstepped its bounds by lowering the amount of manganese discharged into the state’s streams and waterways.
“The Department of Environmental Protection is way beyond its authority and is clearly attacking industry through yet another regulatory scheme,” Yaw said. “The absurdly low limit the state wants to establish serves only to punish mining operations and industrial sites while giving itself and environmental groups a pass.”
On August 9, the Environmental Quality Board voted 16-3 to limit the amount of manganese discharged into the state’s waterways to 0.3 mg/L – far below, the legislator said, of any limit placed on mining, coal, and industrial operators. Yaw said the DEP does not meet those standards at more than 75 percent of the reclaimed sites it oversees.
The committee said it believed DEP violated the law by finding a way to advance a new rule that would never have passed through the legislature.
“DEP… does not have the statutory authority to promulgate the regulation being considered for approval by the Independent Regulatory Review Commission (IRRC),” the letter said. “In this instance, DEP effectively provided itself a multiple-choice scenario and ultimately advanced its preferred choice for a vote by the EQB and IRRC. We believe this is a violation of the RRA, as the proposed regulation could never be promulgated as a final-form regulation, nor is this the sort of regulatory process contemplated by the General Assembly within the RRA and certainly not the sort of regulatory process that IRRC should encourage state agencies to follow.
Yaw call the standard illogical and said it would discourage private investment into systems that limit and repair legacy water discharges while unnecessarily raising treatment costs.
“It’s the same old story from this administration,” Yaw said. “More overreach justified by questionable science and forced through by abusing the regulatory process to cut out the legislature.”