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Strategic Objective
Enforce Environmental Laws to Achieve Compliance.
Strategic Objective
Overview
Effective targeting of compliance monitoring and vigorous civil and criminal enforcement play a central role in achieving the goals EPA has set for protection of health and the environment. Targets for most of the enforcement measures will remain steady over the life of this Strategic Plan. For some other measures, the strategic direction outlined in this Plan will affect the targets, as described in the “Strategic Measurement Framework” section of this Plan. What remains constant is EPA’s focus on the cases that have the highest impact on protecting public health and the environment.
- Addressing Climate Change and Improving Air Quality: EPA will continue to take effective actions to reduce air pollution from the largest sources, including coal-fired power plants and the cement, acid, glass, and other sectors, to improve air quality. Enforcement to cut toxic air pollution in communities improves the health of communities, particularly communities that are disproportionately affected by pollution. EPA will work to assure compliance by the energy extraction sector, where violations can lead to air and water impacts that pose a potential risk to human health. EPA will also work to ensure compliance with climate change standards, including the greenhouse gas reporting rules.
- Protecting America’s Waters: EPA has been working with states and cities to make progress on the most important water pollution problems. The Agency will continue to focus on getting raw sewage out of water and reducing pollution from stormwater runoff, using common sense and affordable approaches to tackle the most important problems first and incorporating green infrastructure for cost-effective reduction of pollution while enhancing communities. EPA is committed to working with communities to incorporate green infrastructure, such as green roofs, rain gardens, and permeable pavement, into permitting and enforcement actions to reduce stormwater pollution and sewer overflows where applicable. EPA, together with the states, continues to implement the Clean Water Act Action Plan[1] by ensuring the implementation of fundamental changes to the national pollutant discharge elimination system (NPDES) program, such as coordinated permitting, compliance, and enforcement programs to protect and improve water quality. The enforcement program continues to address pollution from animal waste, take enforcement action to reduce pollution in large aquatic ecosystems like the Chesapeake Bay, and assist in revitalizing urban communities by protecting urban waters.
Enforcement also supports the goals of assuring safe drinking water for all communities, including in Indian country, and improving the quality of drinking water data reported by states to ensure compliance.[2]
- Cleaning Up Communities and Advancing Sustainable Development: EPA protects communities by requiring responsible parties to conduct cleanups, saving federal dollars for sites where there are no other alternatives. Aggressively pursuing these parties to clean up sites ultimately reduces direct human exposures to hazardous pollutants and contaminants, provides for long-term human health protection, and makes contaminated properties available for reuse.
- Ensuring the Safety of Chemicals and Preventing Pollution: Reforming chemical management and reducing exposure to pesticides and other toxics will help protect human health. Enforcement reduces direct human exposures to toxic chemicals and pesticides and supports long-term human health protection.
Criminal enforcement underlines our commitment to pursuing the most serious pollution violations. EPA’s criminal enforcement program will focus on cases across all media that involve serious harm or injury; hazardous or toxic releases; ongoing, repetitive, or multiple releases; serious documented exposure to pollutants; and violators with significant repeat or chronic noncompliance or prior criminal conviction. EPA's criminal enforcement program will continue to work collaboratively with its state and local law enforcement counterparts, as well as the U.S. Department of Justice. Many successful and important EPA criminal investigations result from enhanced coordination among all levels of government. An example is the prosecutions surrounding the Deepwater Horizon explosion, which led to the death of 11 people and was the largest marine oil spill in United States history. EPA's criminal enforcement program worked with multiple federal and state agencies and the U.S. Department of Justice, resulting in the single largest criminal resolution in the history of the United States as of 2013.
EPA shares accountability for environmental and human health protection with states and tribes. We work together to target the most important pollution violations and to ensure that companies that do the right thing and are responsible neighbors are not put at a competitive disadvantage. The Agency also has a responsibility to oversee EPA-authorized state and tribal implementation of federal laws to ensure that the same level of protection for the environment and the public applies across the country.
Enforcement can help to promote environmental justice by tackling noncompliance problems that disproportionately impact low-income, minority, and tribal communities. Ensuring compliance with environmental laws is particularly important in communities that are exposed to greater environmental health risks. EPA fosters community involvement by making information about compliance and government action available to the public. In addition to ensuring compliance and promoting environmental justice, EPA enforcement actions also result in companies investing in actions and equipment to control pollution, mitigating harm from past violations, and undertaking additional projects that benefit the environment and public health (known as supplemental environmental projects, or SEPs). EPA will continue to use all of these tools to protect communities.
In addition to vigorous enforcement of environmental laws, EPA is investing in Next Generation Compliance to take advantage of advances in pollution monitoring and information technology in order to reduce pollution and improve results. By building compliance drivers into regulations and permits, and using them across our compliance programs, these tools will enable EPA, states, and tribes to focus on the most serious environmental problems and to better protect communities.
Through the increased use of new information and monitoring technologies and other compliance strategies, Next Generation Compliance will allow us to identify pollution issues and will assist both government and industry to find and fix pollution and violation problems. Next Generation Compliance supports EPA’s new E-Enterprise initiative by promoting electronic reporting, advanced monitoring, and transparency. Electronic reporting allows for more accurate and timely information on pollution sources, as well as public access to pollution and compliance information. A new collaborative state-EPA effort, the E-Enterprise Leadership Council, is working to establish a joint approach on information technology and program management infrastructure issues. Confirming the accuracy and completeness of existing and future data that are collected and protecting confidential business information remain priorities for EPA, states, and tribes. In collaboration with states and in consultation with our tribal partners, E-reporting and advanced monitoring technologies will ultimately lead to better, more timely data for decision making and public transparency.
Next Generation Compliance also includes tools to help EPA design regulations and permits that will result in higher compliance and improved environmental outcomes. Regulations and permits are more likely to be implemented and compliance is likely to be higher when rules and permits are clear and easily understood, are provided in a user-friendly format, and contain built-in approaches that drive better compliance, such as improved monitoring, self- and third-party certifications, public disclosure/transparency, and easily monitored product designs or physical structures in facilities. EPA is also building on recent, measurable successes in innovative compliance efforts, such as the drinking water enforcement approach launched in 2010 that required public water systems with serious violations to return to compliance within 6 months or face an enforcement action by states or EPA. Use of this approach resulted in a decrease of approximately 75 percent in the number of public water systems classified as serious violators between January 2010 and October 2013. EPA is enhancing its ability to find and document violations through new targeting tools and data analysis to better identify, publicize, and respond to the most serious violations.
The Agency is also exploring innovative enforcement approaches such as providing electronic responses to electronically reported violations, and expanding the use of Next Generation Compliance tools in enforcement settlements. Through these and other Next Generation Compliance efforts, EPA will design the compliance programs of the future and work to maintain strong enforcement and improve compliance. EPA, states, tribes, and other partner agencies are beginning to invest in this transformation together–and anticipate realizing both efficiencies and cost savings while protecting human health and the environment. If implemented as proposed, the proposed NPDES Electronic Reporting Rule, as one example, will save money for states, tribes, and territories as well as EPA and NPDES permittees, while resulting in a more complete, accurate, and nationally consistent set of data about the NPDES program. The proposed rule would provide states with regulatory relief from reporting associated with the Quarterly Noncompliance Report (QNCR), the Annual Noncompliance Report (ANCR), the Semi‐Annual Statistical Summary Report, and the biosolids information required to be submitted to EPA annually by states.
External Factors and Emerging Issues
Advanced monitoring technology and information technology are rapidly evolving fields. Until recently, for example, air pollution measurement was primarily left to trained scientists and technicians employing sophisticated instruments and methodologies to evaluate data quality. New breakthroughs in sensor technology, as well as advances in smart phone, GPS, and other information technology, have made inexpensive, portable monitoring and measurement of air pollution possible today, not only for government regulators, but for the public as well. In promulgating rules, developing policies, and targeting compliance monitoring and enforcement, EPA has always welcomed and considered relevant data from all sources. EPA will need to work closely with states, tribes, and the public to help interpret and provide context for data derived from such new technologies, and to ensure that EPA uses data of high quality.
End Notes:
- Information on the Clean Water Act Action Plan can be accessed at: http://www2.epa.gov/enforcement/clean-water-act-cwa-action-plan.
- An FY 2011 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report highlighted the seriousness of under-reporting Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) data. EPA followed up and will continue to take action to improve the quality of data reported by states.
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Progress Update
Under this strategic objective, EPA has focused nationally on the worst environmental problems, highest risks, and most significant areas of noncompliance where federal enforcement can have a significant impact. The Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA) also uses injunctive relief and supplemental environmental projects as tools to achieve beyond-compliance results and benefit the public. For example, in FY 2013, EPA pursued justice for Gulf Coast residents through litigation of the Deepwater Horizon cases in coordination with the Department of Justice. Transocean Deepwater Inc. agreed to pay $1.4 billion in civil penalties, criminal fines, and court-ordered environmental projects for violating the Clean Water Act, as well as substantial injunctive relief to improve the safety of oil drilling practices, spill response, and preparedness. MOEX Offshore, LLC has agreed to pay $70 million in civil penalties and spend $20 million for supplemental environmental projects. BP Exploration and Production Inc. was sentenced to pay $4 billion in criminal fines and court-ordered environmental projects and the civil case against BP PLC continues. Since 2010, enforcement actions have reduced, treated, or eliminated about 7.3 billion pounds of pollution and required about $60 billion in injunctive relief and about $138 million in supplemental environmental projects.
OECA identifies and focuses on priority environmental risks and significant noncompliance problems through the NEIs. The six initiatives address some of the more complex pollution problems in our nation. To date, we have inspected approximately 59 percent of mineral processing facilities, addressed 92 percent of large combined sewer systems with untreated sewer overflows, inspected over 1,700 concentrated animal feeding operations, conducted over 2,600 energy extraction evaluations, evaluated over 1,700 air-toxic-emitting facilities, and controlled over 600 coal-fired electric utility units.
EPA has designed and is now implementing Next Generation Compliance efforts, which should yield: 1) regulations and permits with built-in compliance drivers; 2) more use of advanced emissions/pollutant detection technology; 3) a shift toward electronic reporting; 4) expanded transparency, which drives compliance; and 5) innovative enforcement approaches, such as fenceline monitoring and third-party certification/verification tools. As part of this work, EPA has trained hundreds of its staff and managers to design effective rules with built-in compliance drivers; developed rules that would require fenceline monitoring to provide emissions data; incorporated advanced monitoring technology into enforcement settlements; and proposed an electronic reporting rule for the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System that would modernize environmental data reporting for thousands of facilities. To increase transparency, EPA has enhanced its Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) website, which allows the public to get information about the compliance record of over 800,000 facilities. EPA is also advancing other innovative projects in partnership with the states as part of the E-Enterprise for the Environment initiative.
To help municipalities meet their Clean Water Act obligations, EPA developed an integrated planning process that allows municipalities to optimize the benefits of their infrastructure improvement investments through the appropriate sequencing of work. This approach can also lead to more sustainable and comprehensive solutions, such as green infrastructure, that improve water quality and enhance community vitality. EPA has also developed tools to better target facilities for inspections and enforcement actions. For example, the Safe Drinking Water Enforcement Targeting Tool has helped to reduce by over 70 percent the number of public water systems with serious violations.
