Senate Standing Committee on Environmental Quality

And the Assembly Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials Committee to order. We're continuing to welcome the public. We provided access to both in person and teleconference participation for public comment. So those folks that want to provide public comment via the teleconference service, please use our toll free number, which is 877-226-8163. The access code is 736-2832. So we're going to be hearing all of the panels before taking public comment.

And once we've heard all the witnesses, we're going to then have public comment for those who wish to comment on the topics on today's agenda. So we're going to be providing updates today on work happening with regards to the policy and fiscal reforms that have been happening at the Department of Toxic Substance Control, DTSC. We all know that the Department has a critically important mission to protect public health and the environment from toxic substances.

I don't think it's any secret to the folks here that the Legislature has been looking very closely at DTSC. We started that work about a decade ago in response to concerns raised about transparency, accountability, and fiscal issues at the Department. And we have heard many concerns about how DTSC implements its programs from communities living near hazardous waste and contaminated sites, those that operate hazardous waste facilities and clean up contaminated sites.

And in response to those concerns, and following years of legislative hearings and policy changes, many of them held by our respective committees, SB 158 was passed and signed into law in 2021 to implement several reform measures. Now, this was a really important milestone. The legislation gave the Department some important tools and funding to course correct and help them better do their work in ensuring that we have cleaner and safer communities. There were several policy changes in the Bill.

There was also an increase in updating of the DTSC's fees. The Bill and some of the relating budget work stabilized funding created the Board of Environmental Safety, which we'll be hearing from today, which sought to improve DTSC's transparency, accountability, and fiscal stability. So we're eager to hear about the work that's been happening at the Department and the Board implementing these reform measures and any challenges that need our attention.

In fact, the Bill specifically required this gathering, an annual gathering to hearing here to really ensure that the Legislature does a deep dive into the various issues that were raised by the debate over DTSC. So the first progress report on these reforms was given to us last August. This is a one year update from that progress report. So we're going to hear from the recently created Board of Environmental Safety, the Director of DTSC. We've got a really good stakeholder panel at the end.

We all know the states made some really important investments into these reforms to set DTSC up for success. The Legislature is eager to ensure that we protect our progress in this important mission. We're going to address fees collected by DTSC from producers of hazardous waste and the status of permits issued by DTSC. I'm particularly eager to hear about the success of improvements that have been made to the Safer Consumer Products Program to enable it to more efficiently regulate harmful chemicals and the progress you use.

That's an area that I've been spending some time Members of the Legislature I know also have some really serious concerns about how well the public's being protected from products from chemicals in consumer products, as evidenced by many bills that we've been seeing in our committees that seek to ban a whole number of chemicals. Certainly PFAS has been one that's gotten a lot of attention, chemical bans like that.

I think it's always been my strong feeling that it would be better if we had a stronger, Safer Consumer Products program to really do deep dive into these chemicals and make determinations over there. But we know that that program had its challenges. I'm certainly hoping here today that the efforts that we've made to support the program are yielding some results. I'm also looking forward to updates on specific concerns raised in the press earlier this year.

We had an LA Times article back in February that raised a lot of serious questions about the efficacy of DTSC's cleanup effort in residential areas surrounding the Excite site in southeast Los Angeles County. And it's been a real topic of conversation, especially those of us that represent parts of Los Angeles. And I'm glad Senator Doras was here, and certainly I know she's going to be asking some questions about that topic.

In addition to many of the rest of us, we're also really eager to hear about how DTSC is ensuring that the residents of these communities around the Exide site are being adequately protected from lead contamination and what additional actions may be needed. There was then another story that came out about the fact that half of our toxic waste is being disposed of out of state, where we may know less about environmental regulations.

In fact, one of the explicit reasons is that their environmental regulations are weaker than ours. And that raises a whole set of concerns and questions for us too, about are we doing enough to ensure that the conditions are right for us to be able to handle our own waste here in the state as opposed to exporting it elsewhere. The DTSC also released its first legislative mandated hazardous waste management report last month. I'm certainly looking forward to those discussions about the reasons for this.

The report actually deals with some of the reasons why we have this significant waste export, how we might be able to promote better responsible handling of toxic waste here. And then just yesterday, Calm Matters reported on the importance of ensuring hazardous waste facilities are operating safely and some of the challenges communities in the state are facing. So there's a lot of topics for us to get through today. We're going to hear from two panels followed by a public comment period.

So our first panel, we've got Gene Rizzo, who's the chair of the board for environmental safety, and then Meredith Williams, the Director of the Department. Then we're going to hear from some stakeholders who've been participating in the DTSC reform efforts for quite some time. So we've got Ingrid Brostrom, who's the climate sustainability program Director at UC Merced Community Labor Center, who's also got some considerable environmental justice experience. And Don Kepke from Kepke Pedrone was on behalf of the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance.

And then we're going to have time for public comment. So I really appreciate everyone being here today. So many matters of import and interest for our Members. And I'd like to let my good colleague and friend who's also been such an important leader in this space, Alex Lee, who's Chair of our ESTM Committee over in the Assembly.

Good morning and thank you so much Chair Allen, and thank you for welcoming us onto the red seats, so it's fun for us to be able to see on the red seats for once. I want to thank all the witnesses and experts today for appearing and going to be looking forward to hearing all the updates and the testimony you have to share with us. I've met with some of you all in the past.

However, I'd like to emphasize that when it comes to these environmental policies, I am concerned about how people are protected, especially those people in communities who are overburdened with pollution. I realize that the changes that were made in SB 158 and the funding that went out with it will not solve all these problems overnight. So I understand that there will be a process with some successes and of course, some room for improvement, which is what we want to hear.

My overall ask for the Department is that while you are implementing reforms and hiring on staff, please keep one thing in mind communication. Communication with communities impacted by contamination and hazardous waste, and communication with the Legislature, with us, of course, and communication with those that manage hazardous waste for the Board Chair, who we're going to hear from shortly.

I realize that SB 158 give you a significant number of duties and however, at the same time you're likely being asked to do things that were not specifically covered in the legislation. I ask that you also communicate with the Legislature. If stakeholders are asking things that may go beyond your scope, you could be the convener.

Get both those stakeholders and the Department at a hearing or workshop to work on those issues and also commute to Legislature so that we are always aware of what is being asked of you, so we can think about any changes to make in the future. And of course, in the line of the communication, we always want to be hearing from our impact to communities and how we could be better servicing those folks.

Lastly, I just want to mention that there are a lot of policies under Dtse's authority and we likely won't be able to cover all of them today, although, of course, I'm sure some of my colleagues will be asking about some of those recent stories or some of those things that impact their communities. But in the future we can look at further oversight hearings or potential briefings on specific issues as well.

So before we start again, I want to thank all the witnesses and all the folks for appearing today and of course all the public comment that will come after all our great panels. So I'll hand it back over to you, Chair Allen.

Thank you so much. I just want to give the opportunity, if any other Members want to make some opening...Member.

Thank you, Mr. Chairs, and thanks for convening. This is good to see you. Director Williams and others. I know in my five years in the Legislature sitting on Estm, I've had the privilege of sitting through many of the hearings discussed in the opening remarks and I think we've moved far from those first discussions. Hopefully I see the Director smiling and it really was, I think, a joint effort. And I want to give credit to many people who came before those of us sitting here.

Secretary Blumenfeld really pushed very hard for the reforms and was a great partner in that Assembly Member Garcia, Christina Garcia, who absolutely stood up for her community and the communities that Chair Lee was mentioning that have really been hurt by some of these toxic substances and were not getting the reforms they so desperately needed to be healthy and safe. And many more colleagues who saw these changes come into fruition.

And I think under the Director's leadership, one of the things that I have been most excited about, if you will, although it's clearly very nerdy to be excited about this is the transparency. When we came into this, getting the information we needed was not as easy as hopefully we will hear it is today. And I think that I'm excited to hear today whether that transparency has translated into real change.

And so I want to thank you all for being here and eager to hear how we're cleaning up California.

Fantastic. Well, let's get started with our panel. So we're first going to have Ms. Rizzo, who's the chair of the Board of Environmental Safety, which we all created in the Bill, and then Director Williams will present. And then we'll have a chance for some robust discussion. We'll start with you, Ms. Frizzo.

Allen, Lee and Members, my own Member Connolly, I'm in your district. Good to see you. On behalf of the four halftime Members of the Board of Environmental Safety, we want to thank you for the opportunity to present our work today. Vice Chair Alexis Hacker, who is here today, and Sushma Bhatia and I were all appointed by the Governor. Lizette Ruiz was just reappointed to a four year term by former speaker of the Assembly Anthony Rendon. Georgette Gomez is a Senate appointee.

Vice Chair Hacker is here with us today. Also here today are our Executive officer Swathi Sharma, staff attorney Greg Forrest, administrative liaison Sheena Brooks. Senior Staff engineer Linda Ocampo is tuning in from LA. As is our newest Member, Evelyn Nuno. I am really pleased to join Dr. Williams today to report on the implementation of SB 158, our progress, successes and challenges, and it is truly an honor to serve the State of California.

Members of the second panel, Don Kepke and Ingrid Brostrom, have remained dedicated contributors, engaged and representing stakeholders in our development as a board. They have been relentless and present for our entire tenure, and I thank them. As we reported to this Joint Committee last August, our mission is complex and yet elegantly simple to diligently, contribute and oversee the transformation of DTSC envisioned by the development of SB 158.

Our North Star is to ensure the future of all Californians is ultimately free of the burden of toxic exposures, with a clear focus on writing the historic wrongs borne by vulnerable communities. We prioritize transparency in all we do, accountability to the Legislature, to the Administration, and all of our stakeholders, those who are regulated by DTSC and the public that expects and relies on DTSC to effectively carry out its mission to protect the health and safety of every community.

I'll now report on our execution of 158 mandates as we have come to understand them and work with them over the last year and a half. Last January 26, Dr. Williams presented her priorities to the full board in an open forum board hearing. She accepted recommendations from the board and augmented the objectives and priorities for this year, and they were approved by the board.

There was public comment, there were board questions, and she will report out on the four overarching objectives and priorities within each of those, and she does that at every single board meeting and fields questions and comments from the board and the public. We have seen determined progress in all these areas, as well as openness to board and stakeholders.

We will provide a formal evaluation of the Department and the Director in February of 2024, marking a year since the adoption of the priorities to your overarching question on the progress of the Department. We better now understand the challenges the current leadership of DTSC inherited and are attempting to address.

The good news is that Director Williams and the current senior leadership in the Department and Calipa share our impatience with a greater understanding of the challenges to the pace and progress of the work that has to be done. Director Williams continues her work to reset the culture. And I always think of culture from the Latin word Kultara, which is about tending the fields, about sifting, about really bringing together the best that you have.

And I think she does that, she's been filling critical positions that have been challenged by recruitment for expertise and, in some instances, non competitive salaries the challenge of ramping up hiring in key positions across all departments and services and simultaneously raising the bar for community stakeholder engagement. That challenge cannot be overstated.

In the last year, we see significant progress as being made, as will be evidenced when Dr. Williams reports another mandate is holding a minimum of six public hearings, and we do that with simultaneous translation, full Ada compliance, and three of the meetings must be outside of Sacramento. This is an area we have prioritized and invested in heavily, as it serves to inform our work and allows for expansive community engagement.

To date, we have convened 14 open board meetings all over the state, and three more are scheduled just in this calendar year, well in excess of the annual minimum. The next one is September 7 in Sacramento here. So you are all always invited to attend and address the Board and meet the Board Members.

All of our meetings are hybrid in person, as well as interactive zoom with significant allocation of time for public forum, public comment, and Q A, as well as providing a forum for community groups to present to the Board on Issues, sites, and facilities of deep concern to them. We've invited and accepted requests for presentations and extended public comment section segments afforded community groups on exide Brookside Kettleman.

At our last meeting in El Cerrito, over 50 community activists provided public comments on those sites, as well as North Richmond, Baby Hunters Point, and Button Willow. At our September 7 Board meeting, Parents Against Santa Susanna Field Lab will present in an open forum in terms of their responses to the Peir. At that same meeting, DTSC will present on the Peir, so there'll be an opportunity for an open dialogue between DTSC's presentation and the community's response.

Further, we anticipate multiple permit appeal hearings and site specific hearings in the next 18 months. We'll schedule as many as are practicable and affordable next year, we averaged over 100 attendees per meeting, including a wide range of DTSC staff Members and NGOs. The engagement, I will say, is robust to say the least, and it further provides an opportunity for DTSC to hear from the community and for the staff of DTSC who are also tuning in and present for them to hear from the community.

BES The Board captures all public comments made at meetings by email or info at through our ombuds, and it provides DTSC with questions and concerns raised and posts their responses as received in person. Meeting With Stakeholders In order to continue to engage with the public and business community, it is imperative that we are accessible and present in their communities and at their convenings. We have presented twice to the Chemical Industry Council of California and the California Council of Environmental and Economic Balance.

To keep the regulated community up to date, we met with citizen groups, including Neighbors Against Fiber, Tech, East Yards, Communities for Environmental Justice, Richmond Shoreline Alliance, Communities for Better Environment, physicians for Social Responsibility, LA. Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment healthy Contra Costa County and others. DTSC is revamping its public engagement strategy to be more expansive, inclusive, and interactive. We have partnered with the Department deputies, providing open public meetings, on site visits, community meetings, and workshops.

As I said, from Brookside to Exide, from PTI to SSFL, and it does make a difference. This level of engagement, transparency, and accountability goes a long way to building trust. Holding site specific hearings permitted, and remediated combining our travel for board meetings with community meetings and site tours has been most illuminating. We've conducted several site visits, including Buttonwillow, Kettleman, Fiber, Tech, brookside Zenica Exide kips School North Island navy Base in San Diego, corteva Agroscience in Pittsburgh chevron El Segundo Refinery and World Oil Terminal site.

And that's just all we could manage in the first year and a half and remediated dry cleaner site so that we could understand what the issues were in remediating that site. But we also addressed and visited a wet cleaner site to better understand the level of investment, equipment and training needed to transition from chemical cleaning to wet cleaning. We've been on community sponsored bus and walking tours in LA and Bakersfield.

DTSC senior leadership, including Dr. Williams and Deputies, have joined us on many of these visits, and they include us now in site visits that they arrange. So the partnership is working. We're connecting, we're talking about what we're doing, we're inviting each other, and we have different perspectives as we visit those sites. Of particular note is our engagement around the Xide cleanup. Last year, we hosted Region Nine EPA at a board meeting in Montebello to discuss the process of MPL.

To inform the public of what it would take to make that listing, we conducted an open forum capturing citizen and worker concerns. At that very meeting, which Region Nine was present for, we have toured residences and met with a broad range of community group and residents. Given the magnitude of the issues, the board now has an Excide Subcommittee assigning board Members to participate in the Excide Working group, as well as sitting on the panel to approve applications for the site cleanup contract going forward.

Community concerns around the cleanup reported to the board were shared with DTSC, and those responses are posted. I joined Dr. Williams and her deputies on another tour of the cleanup site with local elected officials and attended a meeting with the USC researchers to better understand their study that many of you have referenced. So the question you raised what do we hear at all these public meetings and how are they being addressed?

I'll start by saying the Director and deputies, those with the on the ground responsibilities, especially site mitigation, permitting, and environmental equity, are collaborating closely with the board to identify and navigate the issues that are raised. The communications team is working across issues to provide support. So what do we hear? Frustration at the pace of cleanups and engagement with community all along the way. Through the process, we see marked improvement in community engagement around some of the most controversial sites.

One of the significant culture shifts that the Director has made a priority for all sites where there is public interest and concern. We're tracking the progress on that. We've seen it when it's fully developed and how effective it is, and we know that there's a lot more work to do in that area. Another issue we hear about is delays in issuance of permit appeals from both regulated businesses and communities. Progress is being made and you'll hear from Dr. Williams on that.

And in the community view allowance of facilities to operate with serious violations, resulting in further lengthy process of appeal. While they remain exposed to the toxics in their community. Citizens located near hazardous sites want hazardous waste removed from their communities. Others don't want it moved or transported through their communities or disposed of near or where they live. That's why the Hazardous Waste Management Report and Plan are going to be vital to correcting that.

There's an obvious public concern that California exports a high percentage of hazardous waste, as Chair Allen referenced out of state with mixed views on the solutions. The development of the hazardous waste plan again is critical to that. There's widespread push for the state to make significant investment in science and technology to remediate hazardous materials on site, reducing the amount of soil that has to be transported again, that is something that will be addressed in the plan.

Regulated businesses don't want fees raised again, and they want the process of permitting to be streamlined. They and others voice concern that the Department must rely on fees to expand its operation and benefit that benefit all Members and citizens in the state. While there's in General, but not universal agreement on polluter pays, there is not agreement on how that should be effectuated. Citizen advocates want the Board to hold and exercise greater governance authority over DTSC, and they urge our growth and expansion over time.

While the first round of ECRG grants did not meet community expectations, it is being revamped under the new site, mitigation Deputy Todd Sachs, and it'll be further developed with the new Deputy Celine Grant. There's broad support for restoring and investing in a modernized P Two pollution prevention program, which is something I worked on 20 years ago when I was with Breast Cancer Fund and Breast Cancer Prevention Partners.

The violation scoring procedure, which you will hear and have heard about, there's significant concern with that procedure and DTSC is revisiting VSP this year, including the divisor which we've heard complaints about, which are violations divided by the number of inspections. And of course, that lowers the score and some feel that that's an unreasonable lowering of the score. DTSC has engaged local community partners in North Richmond to pilot a cumulative impact project.

The learning from this project, in partnership with EPA, will inform and strengthen the 673 framework. At our July board meeting, both EPA and DTSC teams provided a detailed update and fielded questions and comments on that pilot. Another mandate adopting permit appeal regulations and hearing permit appeals. While two permit appeals were filed literally days after our tenure started, we issued a stay until such time as we could organize staffing and reorganize staffing to be fully briefed and prepared on calendar.

October 27 is Lighting Resources, and at this point Ecobat is scheduled for November 30. Through our Emergency Rulemaking Authority, we adopted permit appeal. Regs. Thank you for that authority. We hosted three permit appeal workshops to inform the development of the regs responding to both community and facility input and concerns. Our board Subcommittee, Strauss Hacker and Lizette Ruiz, and our staff completed the approval process in six months.

Community organizations and appellant representatives have pushed for us to expand permit appeal authority to hear sequa on appeal, advising that it is a burden for them to seek sequa appeals through the courts whilst appealing the core permit permit mod or temporary authorization issued by DTSC through the appeals process through the board. We do not have the staff nor critical expertise to take that on at this juncture.

We made that clear at an open board meeting, but we also agreed to look into this over the course of a year and report back on what would be required and whether it's advisable to consider advocating for that change. We anticipate several more appeals in the coming months, including major hazardous waste sites and others that are also quite controversial.

Fiscal Administration assessing current Fee Structure and adopting Fee Rate Regulations it is clear that the current fee collection reporting process creates uncertainty and projections in the very time frame that we are called upon and must decide on fee structure and rate setting to cover the appropriations in compliance with 158 to conduct an analysis of DTSC fee structure.

Broadly, we encouraged and support the decision by DTSC to bring on a team of five experts to work with the Department and the board on the analysis of the new fee structure, including rates contracting with CDTFA for billing. Collection and reporting further review of enforcement so that we are all clear on whether the structure itself is adequate to meet the fiscal needs of the Department and the board or if compliance and enforcement are the issues. Or both.

Given the necessity of a loan to DTSC this year, we want to ensure adequate funding to meet the needs of the Department, including a loan repay plan. The board Subcommittee, which is Member Batia and myself and staff, after months of assessment with DTSC finance team, will recommend to the Board on September 7 that we not seek fee increases this cycle, we held a public workshop workshop attended by over 80 persons from across industries and government and NGOs.

There was no objection to the conclusion of the Subcommittee. We will vote on fee rates resolution on September 7. That board meeting also to protect, will vote on it, even though we're not raising fees to protect our authority going forward and be prepared for the next fiscal year should fee rate increases or decreases become necessary. Approving the Hazardous Waste Management Plan, which is due in March of 2025 and thereafter every three years. The board Subcommittee on the hazardous waste management plan.

Members Batia and Ruiz were briefed during the development of the report. Upon completion, all board Members were briefed, and it was presented by the team at an open board meeting in July, allowing for board Members and the public to ask questions, provide comments, and make recommendations. Given that DTSC will present the plan to the board by March 2025, requiring subsequent approval by the board, we're working with DTSC on a timeline that allows for public forums, board consideration in a timely manner.

We recognize that the plan will have several levels of review, and we at this time can't anticipate what issues will come to bear during that period, but our goal is to be on time in March of 2025. This open process is emblematic of the shift to more transparency and accountability by DTSC creating subcommittees of the board that's also in 158, which included the EJAC, the Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Early on, board Members agreed to assignments to form standing committees.

Hazardous Waste Management, plan Bhatia and Ruiz environmental justice. The EJAC and tribal that's Ruiz and Gomez permit appeal. Strauss, Hacker and Ruiz, fee structure. Batia and myself, ombuds, oversight and public engagement. Ruiz and Gomez. DTSC strategic plan metrics. Batia and Gomez, further liaisons to the Department of Defense, which is in 158. That's Hacker and ad hoc engagement by all of us with various BDOs and Alexis. Hacker serves with me on an Executive committee of the board with our Executive officer.

I want to highlight the work of the Environmental Justice Subcommittee Members Ruiz and Gomez, which has worked closely with DPSC on development of a framework for the EJAC. EJAC workshops were held in Fresno, El Cerrito, Los Angeles, as well as remotely BES Members will be fully engaged with the EJAC moving forward. Once formed, we look forward to reports on the work of the EJAC at each and every board meeting.

Further, our board Members, Ruiz and Batia have joined the Exide Etag meetings, and two Members, Batia and Gomez, are sitting. You got that? You got all the names and what we're doing? Okay, good. For contractors applying to continue the cleanup. So the work on revising the contract and then sitting on the panel to review the contract has been important work that DTSC has taken on since the reports of concern at our last July meeting. The Ombuds. SB 158 has challenged us on this one a bit.

It called for an office of ombuds. We generated an Ombuds framework with public input and workshops at board meetings. Further, we're working with DTSC technical staff to create a multi use database model for tracking requests, concerns, actions, comments, as well as the action taken and the responses from DTSC. This will serve not only our Ombuds work, but, going forward, public comments that come into DTSC. So that's a big project that the Oeim, the technical people at DTSC, are helping us with.

We're conducting a needs assessment, and we'll report back on our recommendations about Ombuds next year. So this is some of what your Board of Environmental Safety has been up to the last year. We have learned a lot. There's a lot more to learn, and we're adapting our work as issues come up that are more pressing, perhaps, than the ones that we thought we'd be addressing. But I thank you again for the opportunity to serve, and I welcome your questions.

Thank you so much. Why don't we give the Director the chance to give her a presentation and then open up to big, broad discussion?

Thank you, Chair Allen, Chair Lee, and Members. The year since the last time we had a hearing has truly flown by, and I think part of that is because of the number of ambitious initiatives we have within the Department and all of the things that we're implementing. This is our second year implementing the reforms from SB 158, and they mandated this hearing and much more. Thank you for taking a moment to recognize those who got us through the reform.

If you'll indulge me, I will recognize one person who is not with us today, and that's our former Chief Deputy Director, Francesca Negri, who retired earlier this year and was a driving force behind providing the information you needed.

To be comfortable with the reform and to make some very critical decisions. I'll also take a few moments to talk about our new leadership. The governor's made a number of appointments of deputies who are bringing new ways of working to the Department and tremendous community experience, and I'll highlight them if you could wave when I mention your names. Katie Butler is our new deputy Director for the hazardous waste management program.

Todd Sachs directs our site Mitigation and Restoration Program, which oversees remediation of contaminated sites and Cerlene grant. I don't know if she's back there yet. She'll join us shortly. Is our deputy Director for the Office of Environmental Equity, which houses our public participation and our environmental justice and tribal affairs teams.

All three have worked in partnership with the types of communities most impacted by our work and together with our other deputies, many of whom are here today, our entire Executive team has a shared commitment to our mission. Hearings like this one give us an opportunity to reflect, to take a step back. That's a luxury that we don't always get.

It is rewarding to encapsulate the accomplishments and the lessons learned of the last year and to see that despite the ups and downs which have already been referenced, we are making progress. And though there is a great deal of work left to be done, my hope is that, like me, after this discussion, you'll recognize that milestone after milestone and year after year, the Department is getting stronger and healthier and more effective.

Hopefully not just from your perspective, but from the perspective of the communities we serve and from industry. We clearly don't have time to discuss all that's going on in the Department, but I want to provide updates on our implementation of SB 158, the annual priorities we established for the year excide, and then I'll take a few minutes to look ahead. SB 158 is shaping what we do on a number of fronts. It's impacting how we prioritize our resources.

It's also driving us to improve transparency and accountability all around the Department, not just through the board, but through in other ways. And that's exactly as intended by the Bill. The board does provide that venue for the public to hear about our work, to ask questions, and to call attention to their concerns. Our work with the board has influenced even the work we do outside of their sphere. And so we are communicating more. We are working to be more responsive.

The Bill called for the Data report to support the Hazardous Waste Management Plan by 2025 and every three years thereafter. We released that report in early July. We've had one workshop already, and we're already seeing a very good, deep discourse around the issues that that report raises. And I think some of those issues were captured in the article yesterday, the Complexities. We'll continue that discussion this fall, and we are on track to submit that to the board.

In March of 2025, SB 158 mandated a number of new timelines for our permitting process, and we are on target to meet those timelines. For instance, facilities are now required to submit their permit applications well in advance of the permit renewal, and our goal is to approve all of those permits within one year after the end term of the permit. We're very confident about that.

Of course, we're now realizing the revenues from SB 158 and fee reform did a remarkable job of controlling the Toxic Substances Control Account, referred to as Tosca. We now have adequate revenue to close some critical gaps that were identified in the workload analyses that supported the reform, particularly in our Safer Consumer Products Program and our site mitigation and restoration program. Of course, that revenue has precipitated a great deal of hiring.

Among the most significant is the increase in the Safer Consumer Products Program staff, and that's gone from 41, and it will be funded for 78 positions. And we've already filled 22 of the 37 positions that were authorized since within this new fiscal year. So we're quickly moving to make sure that program has enough resources to reach its full potential and implement all four steps of the regulatory process.

All in all, since the reform passed in 2021, DTSE has filled 629 positions vacant positions, many of which were a direct result of the resources called for in the reform. Over the last year, one thing that's happened is we've shifted from internal hires and promotions to more external hires, which helps us close that gap even more.

So now we're averaging 29 hires a month from outside the Department, and I also think that reflects the Department becoming a more desirable place to work in our site mitigation program. We have the resources to reinvigorate and sustain a site discovery program to identify and characterize potentially contaminated sites, look for responsible parties, and move to cleanup for those communities that have been impacted by industrialization and do carry those multiple environmental burdens.

Both Tosca and the Hazardous Waste Control Account, or Hwca, are projected to have healthy Fund balances at the end of the fiscal year, although I think we all know that the Legislature had to approve loans to make sure that Hwca remains solvent for this fiscal year. Hwca supports our enforcement work, our permitting work, and our inspections, and all of those are critical, and the Fund is falling significantly short of expectations.

So, per Chair Rizzo's comments, we are studying the many contributing factors in order to root out the underlying problems and identify sustainable funding solutions for the future. We will continue to work with the board's fee Subcommittee and will report progress and learnings regularly at board meetings. Let me speak to the priorities that are required by SB 158. The priorities are designed to ensure that we maintain focus on the areas that are most critical for meeting our mission.

They've been grouped under four overarching objectives the first is environmental justice. The second is public engagement, which was prompted by the board. The third is just executing on some very critical deliverables, and the fourth is a continued implementation of our strategic plan. We provided you with a list of those and some status on those priorities, and I hope you've had time to review them. A focus on environmental justice and racial equity is our number one priority.

Across the newsom, Administration departments are taking a hard look at how equity gets embedded in all of their programs. I'll highlight the Cleanup and Vulnerable Communities initiative, or CVCI. Specifically, input from representatives of the environmental justice community is shaping how we award the Equitable Communities Revitalization Grant. There was some frustration at the first iteration, and we've greatly changed the guidelines that will guide the future awards. These efforts have come through partnering with stakeholders so they can actually build the program with us.

And efforts like this do have the potential to restore trust in the Department. Earlier this year, we published an enforcement strategy that was geared toward equity and enforcement. This strategy recognizes and responds to calls from heavily burdened communities who have pushed for years for better protection and more aggressive enforcement. We've already exceeded some of the goals in that strategy. For instance, we set a goal of 90% return to compliance rate for violations issued to permitted facilities in vulnerable communities.

And in the first quarter of this calendar year, we achieved a 100% return to compliance rate. This is a significant increase over the average of the past five years, which was a 51% return to compliance rate. The increased funding we received during the reform made this possible. DTSC also released an internal racial equity framework and launched a new program geared toward diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

This program is led by a select group of our DTSC executives and a council of staff who were selected based on their experience, their expertise, and their commitment to addressing racial equity challenges. Public engagement is our second priority, and this year DTSC leadership has challenged itself to practice more meaningful engagement and to be more transparent to improve our equity outcomes. New approaches are already in place, and we're working to bring community voices into our decision making.

And Chair Rizzo mentioned communities like North Richmond, also Kettleman City and other communities, and of course, the communities surrounding the Exide facility. Deputy Director Cerlene Grant is applying her vast experience and expertise to maximize benefit on this particular objective. Sustained performance is our third objective, and we're focused on reducing the number of facilities operating under continued or expired permits while awaiting a permit decision.

We can only practice effective regulation if there are clear, modern and enforcement permit conditions in place, and that's what ensures that communities have the right protections. We are making progress. We had 37 continued permits in 2021. We've reduced that number to 21 continued permits today, and this year we made a special focus on the oldest, most out of date permits.

By the end of the year, decisions on all but one of the six oldest permits will have either been public noticed or the decisions will be finalized. Our other two deliverables under this objective were the Hazardous Waste Management Report that's already been mentioned, and the certification of the Santa Susanna Field Lab Program Environmental Impact Report, which, again, getting that out the door allows us to move on to a full cleanup, a robust cleanup at that site.

The last overarching objective for the year is our completion or near completion of our strategic plan. We're continuing to implement that. And so this fourth objective is really about keeping our focus on the remaining actions that were identified under that plan. We have published a revised dashboard. We're continuing to improve our metrics so that we can provide a very transparent view of our progress toward that plan. In addition to those priorities, Exide obviously has been a major focus for the Department this year.

In February, the initial findings from the USC study were released to the public, and that suggested that the cleanup of residential communities surrounding the former Exide facility had not been completed properly. Many questions remain about that study and its methodology, but of course, given the seriousness of the issues raised, we are committed to taking appropriate action as needed. Since the Removal action plan was finalized back in 2017, we've been in constant learning mode.

We're constantly finding opportunities to perform the cleanup more effectively, more efficiently, and to provide the protections that this community wants and deserves. Jim Morgan, who was my former CEO when I worked at Applied Materials in Silicon Valley, always preaches that bad news is good news if you choose to do something about it. You could say that we received bad news in the form of the criticism about the quality of the cleanup, our educational materials, public meetings, our website, and other engagement touch points.

We've embraced this truly as an opportunity to learn and to do something about it, to improve the health and safety practices for workers, to improve resident communications, tenant protections, and third party verification of the work. So let me do a quick recap of some shifts in our oversight. Our Executive team and DTSC staff have worked to actively listen to community concerns and frustrations in a new and deeper way. There have been weekly meetings, in some instances with community representatives. Throughout the work year.

We've worked closely with community based organizations, workers, Exide, Technology Advisory Group Members, some of you unions, and the list goes on. We responded by carefully crafting and a new residential cleanup contract that responds to issues raised and strengthens health and safety protections. We expect that contract to be awarded early next month. We've been implementing new approaches to ease concerns about the quality of the cleanup.

We've identified a third party monitor who will observe, document, and inspect work being done by the contractors and receive complaints for referral to responsible agencies. Moving forward, we will also require post cleanup confirmation sampling on all properties that have been cleaned up. We've partnered with the LA County Mental Health Promoters program to conduct community led outreach and to encourage homeowners to sign up for cleanup and sign those access agreements.

The promoters are already trusted in the community, and in their six weeks partnering with us, 23 new access agreements were signed. Communities have long asked for the grassy parkways between the sidewalks and the streets to be remediated. The Removal Action Plan has, to date prioritized fundings for the homes themselves, because that's where people are at the greatest risk of exposure. I'm pleased to report, and it's no news to you, that the Governor supported and the 2023 24 budget enacted funding for the parkways cleanup.

The funding will come from the Lead Acid Battery Cleanup Fund, and we're thankful to the Governor's Office, the Department of Finance, and of course, the Legislature for working with us to make this possible. Lastly, on Exide, we are working with Uscpa to coordinate their work to assess a potential listing of Exide on the National Priorities List. That's an ongoing process. We have a quarterly retreat with them, and in between that, our staff meet regularly to share information and data that will help them make their decision.

Now, I want to briefly turn your attention to the future and some of the problems that we face in this Department and beyond this Department regarding contamination, hazardous waste and toxics in our economy are massive. The Safer Consumer Products Program, or SCP, is an important part of the solution. The program has demonstrated the power to influence market forces and to drive innovation and change. In some cases, our process has prompted entire industries to eliminate harmful chemicals voluntarily before we even had to take regulatory action.

And they have said that to us. Our regulatory actions have resulted in removal of up to 100 metric tons of PFAS chemicals, the perfluorinated chemicals, or forever chemicals that are so much the focus of recent actions, 100 metric tons of PFAS chemicals per year from carpets and rugs, and the treatment products for fabrics that are sold in California. And our actions have led to the removal of toluene in nail polishes.

Also, we're requiring tire manufacturers to seek a safer alternative to a chemical that's used in their tires and is endangering protected salmon. This October will mark the 10th anniversary of the adoption of the Safer Consumer Products Regulations, and a fully staffed program can keep more harmful chemicals out of our products and out of the environment. We will be issuing a draft of our fourth Priority Product Work Plan this fall, which will outline the categories of consumer products we plan to evaluate for potential regulation.

We plan to use the new authority granted under SB 502, and that gives us the authority to collect specifical chemical ingredient data, information from manufacturers, and so that will be central to the new Priority Product Work plan. Chair Rizzo mentioned that we are working together to establish the Environmental Justice Advisory Council EJAC. The framework was released, we've had public workshops on that, and the comment period closes this Friday, after which the framework can be finalized and we can begin the recruitment for Council Members.

The Cleanup and Vulnerable Communities Initiative continues to administer more than $270,000,000 to projects that promote equity, and we do anticipate awarding approximately $85 million in the second round of funding for the Equitable Communities Revitalization Grants. The application process opened last week, and final decisions will be made in the beginning of October. In closing, I would like to reiterate that the problems of contamination, waste management and chemicals and commerce and consumer goods are deeply rooted in our state and globally.

They won't be solved by a single policy, a single budget proposal, or even a single market shift. They will not be solved by one Department, but through a holistic approach that takes many factors into consideration. We will have to wrestle with questions like do we have the right protective measures in place? Do we have the right authorities? Are agencies working effectively and collaboratively, or are there silos that are impeding protections?

We need to address these questions, but we must do so in a way that doesn't ignore the complexities, the very difficult challenges around toxics and chemicals policy in California and the world. The discussions leading up to the release of our first hazardous waste management plan will center around such questions, and I hope that each of you and all interested parties will engage us to find new ways to transform the future of toxics management in California. Thank you for your time this morning.

Thank you for your attention to the issues and the complexities behind them. The work is not easy. I think you know that. But it's important and it deserves time and attention, and I look forward to your comments and questions.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Director. Let's start with Senator Arambula.

Thank you, Chair Allen, and Chair Lee, for holding this hearing. I'm excited to have this conversation as we are looking at the waste management plan that will be before us on March 1 of 2025. I'm going to focus my comments today on waste management and specifically on contaminated soil. I'd like to look at the analysis which came today and waste generation trends that have happened since 2010.

We see the top three waste that we have in our state is contaminated soil waste and mixed oil and other inorganic solid waste. But we have not seen significant decreases in the waste reduction over similar time periods. So I'd like to understand if there are some other alternative treatments that we can be considering besides dig and haul and capping.

And I'll point to, if I can, the language that you used, as I believe it was so poetic as we're looking to change the culture and tending the soil and sifting it, cultivating it, if I can. I don't hear dig and haul and capping in that. But I think it's important for us to treat the soil that's before us.

And so can you speak to bioremediation and what opportunities we have to pursue those alternative technologies so that we're not continuing to transport into the San Joaquin Valley that I represent? I think it's important for us also not to be transporting to such distances, but instead to be treating at the source. And so I'd like you, if you can, to comment on that.

Thank you for the question. I think it's a question that's on all of our minds and perhaps in the more extended Q A we can dig into this more deeply. I'll say at the top level that the Department over years lost some of its expertise, some of its expertise to look at technologies and some of the resources to do that work.

We now have some resources that will allow us to do that and we are actively looking for opportunities to pursue technologies, bioremediation being one of many potential technologies. Of course those technologies are complex. It depends on what analytes you're looking at, how effective they are. It's often not one size fits all. Nevertheless, it is important to find ways, whenever possible to treat soil in place. That does a lot for us, not just in this age of climate.

We have to be thinking about that and so it's tremendously important. So I think that will be a focus of the hazardous waste management plan, but we don't intend to wait for that plan before we start pursuing opportunities. We have more authority under our orphan site for our oversight of orphan sites, where we, for instance, don't necessarily have a responsible party who's paying for it. But that gives us perhaps a little latitude to be able to pursue some alternatives.

And again, Deputy Director Sachs can speak more to the issue if there's time.

The best way for us to work on this is to prevent much of that contamination in the first place. And so if I can not then transport it into our communities and instead treat it where it is, I think we're getting upstream. And I'm appreciative of your efforts, but would just encourage you as these alternative technologies were brought to me by community groups who have been advocating it for a while as well.

And I believe it's important for us to have these forums and to be able to express that directly to you and appreciate you coming here today. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Well, along those lines, I know Assembly Member Bauer-Kahan has a number of questions, including on some of your comments on green chemistry, which has to do with the upstream. So let's go to you and then Senator Dahle.

Thank you. And I just want to say to you Director, you have been an incredible trooper through this. You took over this Department when all we had to say was bad thanks, and you have stuck with it. And I think I want to thank you for that dedication to Californians that are subject to these environmental problems. And I have to say so I looked up the dashboard, which you know, is one of my favorite things.

For those that are not you're all laughing at me, but for those that have not seen know on DTSC's website for the public to see, is a dashboard that really tracks in great detail a lot of these things both in graph form and more detail, and I think it really gives a snapshot of what you're doing. First of all, kudos to your organizational health numbers. Drastic improvement there, which I think is a testament to you.

And clearly your employees are reflecting back what you said about the organizational health you're working on. Also, the fiscal stewardship piece looks, I think, also pretty positive. And generally, I mean, across these numbers, we're seeing some pretty impressive upticks in compliance and the like, like you highlighted.

So I don't want to...I have a couple of questions on things that don't look good as this not surprising Director, but wanted to highlight that if anyone looks at this dashboard, there's a lot of good news in it, and obviously it's our job to look out for the places where it's not. So I'll start with green chemistry. One thing I noted on green chemistry in the dashboard was it only includes 2022. 2023 numbers.

Yes, which doesn't give us a huge look back of where those reports are, which I was curious about. In a lot of places, we can see fiscal year improvement. Not on that one. It does show that you've done five reports this year, but it shows only one regulation adoption. So again, moving towards regulation and improvement, we're not seeing the pace of regulation that I think the Legislature would like.

Often you see us move bills, and I know the Governor doesn't love it when we start to get in the space of the safer consumer product division, but we have a lot of products that are harming Californians. And as you know, and I know, I want to say chair Allen has been a huge leader in this space. We have been pushing to move this faster because we have to protect Californians from these chemicals, and we're seeing the EU outpace us.

And so how do we catch up? And so I just wanted to give you a chance to comment on those prior fiscal year numbers and sort of where we're going to move that faster.

Yeah, thank you for that. I think there's a lot to say, and I do want to point back to the fact that it's the ten year anniversary and we will publish an accomplishments report that will catalog all of the different things that have happened under the program, whether that's seven Priority products that have been adopted. Actually, the number is this year. Two have been finalized, adopted in regulations.

The nail coatings with Toluene was effective in January, and the automotive tires containing six PPD takes effect on October 1. There are two. The proposals are forthcoming. There are a number that are in the queue. I would encourage you, and we can share this with you, it might have been in your materials ahead of time. We have a timeline.

Okay.

It's pretty weedy, but it's weedy for a reason, because the team is actually looking at a very broad range of products. So there's a queue, there's a bit of a backlog, and you'll start to see announcements of Priority products in the coming months, and hopefully you will start to see some differences. And obviously, seven products over the course of the year. We do have a more ambitious target for ourselves that's on the dashboard, and we need to meet that target.

And then some say, I think the new resources we have not only will help us get through the product decision making and the prioritization process, but enforce. We're going to be in a much better position to enforce. We're already doing some enforcement actions like testing samples of products to make sure that companies who said they removed the chemical actually removed the chemical.

And we'll continue to strengthen that part of the program. So there's a lot going on there, and the data call in authority that was strengthened will also be of a tremendous help.

And 7 year would be a huge improvement. So to your point, it's moving us in the right direction.

So the other place that sort of jumped out at me on the dashboard was hazardous waste management. The efficacy and safety of that I know. Notice that compliance rates for violations issued has taken a little bit of a nosedive in past years. We'd been well above 95%. We're now at 73% for compliance. And there was another one on here that wasn't looking great with the reviews of that.

So I just wanted to point that out, give you an opportunity to comment on that because that's obviously critically important that we're managing those where we see violations, we're getting them cleaned.

Yeah. And I'm not actually prepared to speak to that. I know that if you're still around when we get to the general questions, I suspect Katie Butler can speak to that, but I do know that that number does fluctuate. It's a hard number because when's the inspection, when's the quarterly snapshot that goes on the dashboard and when's the 90 days or whatever that...

Why don't we bring her up? Because I don't know that we're going to look, there's a lot of questions we got to ask. Let's get this question answered. I think that's a valuable one, and I think we all have questions about the dashboard. So this is our time for general questions.

That's great.

Quite frankly, you're going to have tons of time, Ms. Butler.

It's a great question because the rolling nature of that metric does reflect what you're seeing. So in the first quarter of the year, you'll see a lower percentage, and then as we move through the year and for example, some facilities might have 90 days to return to compliance, and some have maybe 30 days, depending on the violation and the severity. And so there's a lot of nuances to compliance that isn't reflected in that simplistic metric.

But it's supposed to be a real time every quarter that will be updated. So next quarter, hopefully, we'll see that metric for the first quarter improve, so it will be updated as we get the real time compliance return to compliance data.

Got it. Okay, so we'll keep an eye on that because that's a number we don't want to go down. You were at 100% 97% in fiscal year 21 22. We want to keep those numbers up high. So I appreciate that. Thank you. I had two questions, two more questions. I know the Senator is getting upset with me, but he knows me well enough at this point to know I always have a lot of questions.

So I noticed that you were talking about and you mentioned this Director, but it sounded more rosy than was in our briefing, which is that there's been a reduction in waste, so therefore a reduction in fees. I always find it funny how we do fees which pushes us to want more waste because then we get more fees. But one of the things that was highlighted was that there's an exemption for where the government is doing the cleanup, right?

So they don't pay the fees on behalf of the person who caused the hazard caused by another. And that makes sense and that was part of the work we did. But there still is a party there that should be paying for that, right? And I guess what are we doing to go back and make sure those monies are being collected from the party that is responsible for the waste?

You put your finger on it. As I said, there are a number of different factors that are contributing to the shortfall in Hwca. But the one we have to look at first is compliance and enforcement. If people aren't paying their fair share for hazardous wastes being generated, not necessarily talking about government here, that's the Low hanging fruit. Until we get that solved, the other things are of lesser priority to address. We do have this team of five folks who's analyzing those things.

We're working very closely with CDTFA to figure out how to implement solutions that help us do the enforcement more effectively, prioritize some of that work either with our staff or their staff and we'll be reporting out on that regularly and go before the board. But you put your finger on it. We do have oversight responsibilities, there are regulatory actions associated with these things, so.

I appreciate that. I love enforcement and to the extent that we can be supportive, I mean, if you need a change to ensure that those folks are paying, I think the polluter should always pay. And so I appreciate your efforts to make that happen and know you have partners here in ensuring that's the case.

My last question was there was a note in the briefing that our criteria for hazardous waste was outdated, which I found interesting and that makes sense to me. As innovation happens in the chemical space, we may not be identifying things properly and I think that's something that interested me and I thought might interest my colleagues. So if you could touch on that and talk about how we can get that updated to be addressing things properly.

I'll just make a quick comment and turn it over to Katie Butler. The hazardous waste criteria haven't been revisited for a long time. Again, we did not have a unit to do that and believe me, there was tremendous expertise in the Department, a lot of which has retired around this particular issue.

And so we're building all of that capacity back up and I just wanted to take that minute to, again, appreciate having the resources to even do that work and then Katie can talk a little bit about what the roadmap looks like for assessing the hazardous waste criteria.

Yeah, thanks. So, as you know, our California hazardous waste criteria, they're more broad and more strict than the federal criteria. And because our criteria were developed so long ago, some of the toxicity assumptions and other specifics of the toxicity tests, they may not reflect modern science. And then also we want to do another comparison to current federal criteria and standards to make sure that we're adopting any improvements in federal standards that have happened over the last decade.

And so that will be one of the first priorities of this criteria task, is to compare to the federal standards. And then we'll also look at the specifics of toxicity tests and get into some of that more nerdy science work. And that will take some time.

And because that will take time, at the same time we're going to be looking at it was mentioned earlier alternative management standards opportunities along with the criteria to look at how we define hazardous waste and make sure that it's rooted in the current science.

Perfect. Well, thank you all for your time and being here and answering all of my questions.

Thank you, chair and we can come back to you if there's more come up. Senator Dahle.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I want to thank both of you for being here today. I'm going to do just a little bit of comments. I didn't do that at the start, so I've sat on an Assembly ESTM, which I was the Vice Chair for most of the time I was in the Assembly, and I've also sat on the EQ committee as Vice Chair here in the Senate.

And I want to just preface some of my comments to start out with over the eleven years I've been here, worked with Christina Garcia on the X side issue, seeing that her community was really being destroyed. We have new things out. We have PFAS. That's something we talk about a lot.

There was, I believe, three or four bills this year on PFAS, recommended that we may have actually a hearing like this on PFAS and talk about what the future of that looks like because we're going to see these bills every year. Just this week or last week, I toured a carpet recycling facility in my district and met with them and the challenges they're faced with recycling carpet. So I love this committee. It's one of the toughest committees.

I'm a little bit nerdy as a Republican who gets in the weeds a little bit. So I want to just kind of give some broad comments. And I do have a question on some of the oil recycling. But I want to say that as a farmer who works in the field every day, we're harvesting right now, a certified organic farmer, trying to do the right thing for the environment at the same time trying to balance things that we have to have to make food.

So we're 95% certified organic because 5% of our farm has such a obnoxious weed problem that we have to use herbicides to manage it, that 5% would not be tillable under an organic situation. So when we talk about California and we look at how are we going to make it work. So when it comes to oil, for example, if you've been through a fast change oil recently, it used to be 29.99 and they serviced your car and it's close to $100.

And that is because the producers, there's a fee charged up front on the oil and just the cost of living is going up. And so I think for me, what I'm trying to say is that we have to balance the ability to do the right thing for the environment at the same time making sure that we have the disadvantaged communities can actually afford to do the things they need to do.

So, for example, I'm going to now transfer into the part I wanted to have the question about. I represent a very rural area where $100 to change your oil or $90 is a huge amount. So you can go to the local hardware store and you can get your oil and you can change it and then what are you going to do with that oil?

For me, I want to make sure it goes to a recycling center and that you actually do it because they can probably change your oil for maybe 30 or $40 on your own. But we know at the facility where you go, it gets recycled. So there's a balance there. And not all toxics are equal. Some are definitely harder to control than others.

And I think that's something that needs to be looked at when we look at how we're going to go after the producers or we're going to reclaim those. That was one of my main points today. When it comes to oil, actually, oil is one of the things that we can recycle and reuse. We take out the contaminants from the motors in it and put it back in.

And as somebody who has looked at the General Fund monies that we put forth for like the X Side projects, so the taxpayer is paying and the consumers are paying upfront for the fees that are on top of that. So those are just general comments I wanted to just let you know about and some of my concerns.

And I want to go now to, I actually sent a letter to the Director March 1 on an issue with the recycle centers and oils for places that recycle in my district. And so there was some confusion on the rule-making on 158 whether the recycle centers were having to pay the tonnage price or not.

And so I got back thank you, by the way, some information, but they contradicted each other and so quite frankly, now we're at the point where they've actually filed I think they used oil, people have filed; they're going to court on it, on the interpretation. But my point to that, that'll figure it out itself out in court. It's unfortunate they have to go that route.

But for the rulemaking process, I wanted to ask, were the stakeholders able to come in at the rulemaking process and have those they said they did not have that ability to come in during the rulemaking process, that you didn't have that ability for them to come in and actually get information on the discrepancy in the Bill. 158.

Okay, I'll speak to that first, and then I'll go back and maybe make a comment on your which is that I'm not certain about that comment simply because we follow the Administrative Procedures Act whenever we do rulemaking, even if we do emergency regs, those emergency regs have to be followed by full rulemaking. And there's always a public comment period. So if you're talking about that part of it, where we implemented a regulation, I'm not sure what regulation you're speaking to. There's always opportunity for public comment.

If we're talking about the actual formation of SB 158, we actually held weekly meetings with three sets of stakeholders throughout the process of the development of the statute. And that was one group was community groups and NGOs and local government, one was the Legislature making sure we answered any questions and thought through how to make this a workable, practical, meaningful, legally defensible statute, and then the last one was with the business community.

And so, again, week in and week out, we met with them throughout the development of 158. And there were opportunities. If we missed somebody in terms of outreach, obviously that's a lost opportunity. We would welcome conversation, additional conversation. The comment was made about the need to communicate. The communication helps us understand what the challenges are for businesses, what issues communities are facing, and that's helping us do a better job. So I will look forward to hearing from them.

Okay, well, I wanted to just so for my take is that if we're talking about the environment, we need to make sure that we have places to take the products that people that do it at home do. And if we lose that opportunity, especially I live 75 miles from the closest Walmart. That'll give you an example of how rural the community is.

Now, thank God we have at our transfer stations, the rural counties have a program where we can take our oil to the transfer station, and they just take it. It's great, right? And so we do all kinds of public outreach. But if you're in an area where you don't have that facility, and you're relying on a recycling center, and we need to make sure that those are still available.

And because the cost is going up on all things, and people are choosing to do it, in their backyard, which I personally don't want. I want to see them do it at a facility where it's all collected. But that's their choice. We still have the ability to be able to save a few bucks here and there because the cost is very expensive.

Yeah, we are in this critical moment, we're moving toward circular economy. And you hear those words thrown around a lot, but I think we have to figure out, what does that mean? What is the infrastructure that truly supports a circular economy? We don't want to be recycling products that have toxic content. How are we going to get that content out of products in order to allow the circular economy to function?

How do we lower those barriers for people to address the toxics that they may have used and may be ready to dispose of, but may have some value after the initial use? These are things that need to be wrestled with. I think the recycling centers, I think you're referring to the ones that CalRecycle has more authority over, and that's been certainly a point of a lot of discussion over the past several years.

And we are coordinating with Cal Recycle on a number of issues related to toxic content, circular economy, they'll be instrumental in our development of the hazardous waste management plan, because what we do there could have implications for what happens at Calorie Cycle. And we want holistic solutions when we go out. Our Department is the First Department that goes out after these wildfires and floods. And our job is to make sure those properties are safe from hazardous materials that may be on site.

And what we find, and the pictures are quite stunning, are just we collect all of that material, we facilitate the collection, and the piles and piles of hazardous materials that are found everywhere are remarkable. And then you even talk about, you're going to get me carried away, so I'll stop after this. But if you look at our firefighters, our firefighters are suffering from cancer at astronomically high rates compared to the rest of the General population. And why is that?

And a lot of that is because we have so many toxic products in our houses that we're not recognizing that when they go up in flames and create dioxins or create other byproducts, they're the ones who have to experience those exposures. So we have a lot of work to do around these issues.

So if I may just make a last comment, too, as somebody who really is nerdy, as Senator Bauer-Kahan said, when it comes to these toxins. But at the end of the day, I think this is the thing I want to drive home. We are not going to do away with batteries, and we need batteries, and we're not going to do away with tires, and we're not going to do away with gasoline or diesel for a long time. And they are toxic. We know that.

So the balance is what I'm looking for is the balance of, hey, look, I represented paradise when it burned up and I was there when we cleaned it up. And you're right, there's a lot of talk stuff there. So we want to do our best to get those products safe as we can at the same time making it so we can still afford to live in California. And if you've purchased a battery lately, I don't know if you have, but we have farm equipment, $150.

Battery is $400 now. So back to my oil scenario. If I'm going to pay $90 versus 30 and I'm on a fixed income and I can't pay that, I'm going to change it in my backyard. And that's not really where I want people to change oil. I want them to go somewhere else. So there has to be a balance. And at the same time, we're not only charging them up front, we have a fee on a battery to recycle the battery up front.

You're paying it as a consumer, same as with oil. So the Legislature has taken the approach to charge the producer up front. That money is supposed to go to go in the cycle and then they come back to the Legislature. And now we're adding more fees on top of those fees to get the job done. So I'm looking for a balance, a fair balance that says, look, we're not going to do away with these products.

It's the same scenario as I said when I first that 5% of my farm, I have to take care of that with herbicides because it won't produce after that, before that. So that's where I want to make that statement. So if you'll keep that in the back of your mind, that if you drive the cost so high the consumer will do something different, we'll haul it out of state, is that necessarily the best thing for the environment? No. Is there a cost to do that? Yes.

So the balance is what I'm looking for as the majority of the legislators here pass a legislation thinking they're saving the environment, great. But are they really? At the end of the day, what are we doing? Are we driving the cost up so high that the disadvantaged people in California, we have the highest population of poor people in the nation and we're the fifth largest economy? Doesn't make sense. Something's wrong. So I just want to thank you for coming.

I want to share my concerns about that. Because at the end of the day, when I talk to my constituents, who may have to drive 50 miles to get to a place where they can even get their oil changed, are going to do it in their back yard and it's going to end up not where I want it. Typically, if there's not a place easy for them to take it.

So I just want to thank you for coming, and I will follow up with I know there's litigation now at this point over the interpretation of 158, which is unfortunate. It costs people money, and I think they're right. I think they were exempted from the program to start with. So. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate you indulging my time, and I will be watching from my office. I have other meetings. I'm very interested in this, but I'm sorry I can't stay for the whole meeting.

Thank you. Thank you, Senator. Let's hear from Senator Rosa.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the presentation today and specifically want to thank Director Williams for the visit and for everyone who was involved in putting it together. I was able to go to and do a visit, and the residential area where this cleanup is taking place related to exide and exit has gotten obviously a lot of attention for several years now. We were very slow to react.

We were very slow to start to implement, and we were slow to take in and absorb all of the suggestions that were coming from the community because the community was just not included or their issues weren't taken seriously. So we're at where we're at now.

And from the visit, obviously I saw for myself the complications of doing a cleanup of that magnitude, of that size in a residential area the sensitivity with which the cleanup crews the people who are actually doing the cleanups the way that they do it. And one thing has an impact on the other thing and the other thing and you get into the backyard and maybe there was either electrical work being done illegally and so how do you find out about it?

How do you you know, maybe even gas lines were illegally put in. So a lot a lot of real precautions, extraordinary precautions that have to be made and also sensitivity to the residents themselves, respect for their concerns. They have a yard with trees that have been there for decades, and you just can't come along and yank them out because you can do the cleanup. The difference between getting permission from owners and renters.

So I got, I think, a beginning of an idea of what it takes to be out there. So if you can be a little bit specific about where we're at in that cleanup process as far as the time frame that you expect for this cleanup to be going on.

And also, I know I think this connected with Assembly Member Arambula is the alternatives that have been proposed by advocates, community advocates, on doing the it was mentioned here earlier about dig up and that, but versus the other remediation process. So one is specifically, where are we at and where do we expect to be, what's going to be needed to finish that project, and also alternatives that have been proposed.

Thank you for that, and thank you for taking the time to visit the site. The cleanup, it's always informative, and I think you really did get a picture of how complicated that cleanup is. It's a very intimate process to do that cleanup in people's homes and yards, and that presents a lot of challenges. At the highest level, where we are is we were given an appropriation to get us to 5900 properties, and we anticipate doing completing that cleanup in 2025. That's the funding we received.

And right now, we're cleaning up properties that are contaminated down to 200 parts per million contamination level. As we clean up houses, that number continues to drop. And that means that the exposures when we started this project, there were properties that had 500, 800 ppm on those properties. And now we've dropped down significantly, and we're down to 200 ppm, which is below EPA's current cleanup standard, just for the record. So at the highest level, we are shooting for that 59 40.

I will tell you, we have done, and I have to salute our assistant deputy Director, Medi Bedhar, for this, among other people. But he has controlled the costs on this project to a degree that's almost unimaginable. We are still paying the amounts that were established three years ago, and we all know what inflation has done. We are now going out for bid on a new contract.

I don't think it's fair to assume that we're going to be able to maintain the costs that we have been so that 59 40 is still in our sites. But we may come back to you and explain just how much we can do with the remaining funds. So that's at the highest level, we are looking for ways to improve the cleanup. We already found one, and I can't remember if we shared this with you.

What we're doing now is those well established trees, we don't want to pull them up. We don't want to yank them out. They're so important to just the feel of the community and to individuals who live on those properties. And so we clean down as far as we can until we get to the roots. And we were then putting clean dirt over that, but we've actually changed that process a little bit.

We're now putting another fabric layer around the roots, and then we put gravel on and then fill, depending on how deep the space is to the roots. So in other words, we're adding an additional protection, and we're looking for opportunities like that. We're putting in place this confirmation sampling to make sure the cleanup was done properly. And we're just taking a number of steps to address the issues that have been raised, and some of those will be reflected in the new contract. And I'm not sure I answered the fullness of your question.

Yeah, I think so.

I appreciate the role of getting the Promotores involved in reaching out to the community. Obviously, the issue of trust is something that was ignored for so long, for so many years. People just don't know who to trust, what'll happen, and if any lesson for other areas that we discover contaminated. The earliest possible, like immediate, before anything starts, is meeting with the community. What are the issues, what are the potentials? Because we're catch up here.

We're trying to catch up to a community that distrusts government because government did not respond when they were asked to intervene. So I think a lot of this is doing it way before, not after the fact, because it'll certainly facilitate the process, but it will show the community and us where we're doing it right and where we're doing it wrong. And that's what trust is all about, believing that if I criticize, it's not to be taken negatively.

Criticism is: let's do something better, let's do something right that's not be done right. So just again with that. And I appreciate my other colleagues from the state legislature before I came and who fought so hard to get the resources and so many other issues that I know are connected with this. We pay for the consequences one way or another. And so upfront to not raise these issues, we're going to have to pay for them anyway. I just want a couple of other areas.

This is a very specific and then a very broad question is about the VSP process, which you mentioned earlier. But I had a bill a couple of years ago to reform the grading, the structure to better account for the nature of the violations and not allow the scores to be diluted. DTSC expressed concern in the policy committee analysis that VSP should be reformed, but there was a commitment made to reform the VSP process.

And so where are we in that and what is the delay to doing this, addressing this?

Thank you for that and I'll again get it started and kick it over to Katie Butler. We have made very good progress on assessing the impacts of any changes to the formulation and other aspects of VSP.

I will get on my little soapbox and say VSP has been good for DTSC and good for the environment and good for communities and that if you look at ten years of compliance history and documentation of compliance and how inspections were conducted and you learn a lot, you learn a lot about what it takes to do a good inspection, what it takes to truly enforce and to take legal action. And so as a result of VSP, it inherently has made our enforcement work much more effective. So we've done a lot of analysis and we are anticipating pre-rulemaking conversations this year.

And Katie, maybe you can talk more about the timeline. Anything else?

Yeah, we have been working on revised regulations and a proposal for a revised framework. We aren't as far as long in publicly sharing that yet as we would like to be in this point in time, just other competing priorities at the Department. But we are looking at sharing the potential revisions early next year. And like Director Williams said, we are seeing a decrease in especially Class I violations, the most serious violations since VSP was implemented.

So it has been positive, especially in improving coordination between our permitting and enforcement divisions. And so it's one very important tool we have in our toolbox, and we look forward to sharing those potential revisions with you and other stakeholders shortly.

So if you'd be open to a briefing once we get closer, we'd welcome that chance.

Okay. And then, trying to understand as much as possible. But the Community Impact Scoring System, if you could talk about that, it's still not completed. Why is that?

And Katie, do you want to just dive in there or you want me to-?

Go ahead, yeah. So we've implemented five out of seven criteria from Senate Bill 673. So one is the enforcement history with VSP. Two is financial assurance, three: financial responsibility, four: health risk assessment requirements, and then five: improved training, hazardous waste training for workers on site. And so there's two more criteria to Senate Bill 673 that we're working on, and that's the community vulnerability, which I think you were referring to and considering setback distances.

And so we were hoping over the summer to have a public workshop on this. We're pushing it back probably later this fall, definitely before the end of the year. We'll be proposing the revised framework for that.

Okay. That was supposed to have been completed by 2018.

So all of Senate Bill 673, yes, was supposed to be completed by 2018, and we have implemented five out of seven parts of that bill. And this last part, it is complex. It's looking at cumulative impacts, frameworks, and community vulnerabilities. USEPA is actively working on their framework, and we're eagerly waiting to see what they're going to come up with as well. We'll want to fold that in in the future in our work.

So it's an active area of research and development that we've been monitoring closely and working on. How do we apply it here in our state?

If I may? So it has been a long time. It's been too long. Everybody wants to see those regulations in place. I will say it's somewhat of a Holy Grail in terms if you look nationally at people wrestling with how to do this in an effective way; it's very challenging. And I think we've done some good thinking around it. There will be no perfect solution, but I think we have some viable paths forward. But there is obviously an urgency to enact those regulations.

In the meantime, what we've done is for a couple of communities, we've found a way to consider community vulnerability in our permit decision making process, most notably for the Kettleman and Buttonwillow communities. Kettleman City and Buttonwillow. So what we did was we started with CalEnviroScreen. We looked at what the impacts there. We did our own assessment of where we thought the likely impacts were. And we're engaging the community to see if our takeaways are consistent with their lived experience.

And so short of regulations, we want to make sure that we have that information so that if there are permit conditions or actions that could be taken, if a permit is granted that would help us protect that community in some way or if DTSC can play a role in providing a whole of government solution, that we are doing that for those two communities.

And then Chair Rizzo also mentioned that in North Richmond, we're partnering with USEPA to do a very comprehensive cumulative impacts analysis for that community, which has refineries, it has hazardous waste facilities, it has transportation challenges. You name it, they got it. And so that gives us, again, part of what we'll get out of that is how do you engage community to validate the experience, validate the observations that could lead to an assessment of cumulative impacts and community vulnerability?

Okay, thank you. Just overall, I appreciate, Chair Rizzo, the comments about community involvement, and you were very specific about organizations and number of meetings and all this. I think part of the frustration and part of what we look forward to is how to take all of that and turn it into more action, more change, more of what needs to be done.

Not only have the opportunity to express it, but then what are you doing and how are you doing and how quickly are you taking that and really implementing change? So that's, I think, the overall feedback that I get from community. Thank you.

Thank you, Chair. Appreciate the great discussion this morning. And thank you to the witnesses for your work. Board Chair Rizzo, great to see you in this role. Your tremendous work over the years on breast cancer issues in my district and statewide as we seek to really implement robust implementation of SB158. I just wanted to ask a few follow up questions based on the committee materials and the testimony you've given so far.

One of the key purposes of SB 158 was to reform DTSC's fee structure and to stabilize funding at DTSC. But it appears the fees collected under the new fee structure are less than half of the anticipated 80 million dollars. I understand that DTSC is still gathering data on this, but if findings indicate the existing fee levels are not sufficient to cover costs at DTSC, what are next potential steps regarding that shortfall?

Thank you, and good to see you again, too. Last time I saw you, you were hiking a mountain for us. So thank you very much.

Now I'm in a cast.

I know, I saw that. To your point exactly, the reason that we made a recommendation for no fee change this year is because we don't have that information. We have to really dig in with CDTFA, look at how they do it. There was this first year where there was a duplication period where people were paying the old fees and then the new time frame was coming in. So there's a question of 'does everybody understand what they owe? Did they pay?'

'Is CDTFA doing a good job of collection and enforcement and reporting back?' And we should ask the question, is that the way we want to do it going forward? There's a fee involved, a percentage fee that I think this year it was somewhere around six million dollars for the collection. Is that the best way for us to collect fees to use CDTFA? That's been raised. I have no opinion about it, but just that we will be looking at that. Is that the best model?

And understanding the projections have to come at a certain period of time when there are two payments that are being made, one of which is delayed or late, and people don't seem to feel an obligation to be on time with their payments. So that makes it more difficult for them to come up with the absolute numbers. That's what we're going to spend this next several months with the finance team at DTSC and CDTFA and dig into it.

So we didn't want to penalize ratepayers now by increasing rates for those who are compliant, especially since the loan was forthcoming. But we do have in our sights the repayment of that loan has to be calculated in the future. So I think your point is well taken. We don't know why that fell so short, and is it a question of the consolidation of the different fees?

And so the team has been amazing and some of them are here today and they know that's a priority for the board.

Great. Changing direction a little bit, why is the Safer Consumers Product Program moving so slowly? And a couple related questions: what are the limitations to efficient operations of this program? And what is DTSC's plan to shore up the Safer Consumers Product Program?

So I will start and I don't know, Karl, you may have and want to contribute to this conversation. So when the green chemistry laws came into effect and the program was established, there were no resources that were dedicated to it. So that's one reason there's no pollution prevention program at the Department now. And so it was pulled together and it has been a small but mighty team in terms of the impact that it's had and the work that it's been done, the work that it's done.

That said, we all recognize more as expected of the program, it needs to move faster. The authority it has is tremendous and so it really can drive a lot of change. I will say that hats off to Karl and the team because they prioritized hiring for the past, I would say, six months in anticipation of knowing that they were going to get new resources.

It's very hard to bring folks into state service, and yet, in this period since the July 1 budget, they've already brought 20 people on staff. So the first reason the program has been slow has been resources. Secondly, there's a scientific rigor that the program set a very high bar for itself, and I'll take some responsibility for that. And gathering information, information, as Karl would always say, is the coin of the realm.

And so figuring out how to get the information to make good decisions has been very challenging. So there are a number of contributing factors. But, Karl, could you say a little bit about what you think is going to accelerate the program and anything else you want to say about what's contributed to slow?

Yes. Thank you. And thank you for the question. Yes, as Meredith indicated, this program, thank you to the Legislature, was a very ambitious, innovative program to start with. No one in the world is doing it this way. And so we had a big leap of how are we going to do this, and we've done that now. And we've only identified and regulated seven products. But as some say, our shadow is somewhat bigger than our shape and that we've had other impacts.

And as Dr. Williams said, our priority is getting the staffing up. We only had 40 people, about 25 scientists and engineers to do the core work. And we were very strategic about what we did do, and we've been impactful in what we have done, but we recognize that we need to do more and do it faster. And in the years that we've been implementing the program, we've learned a lot. We'd never been involved in the product manufacturing world, which we found is incredibly complex.

And interestingly, many of the businesses that want to comply and want to be more transparent don't even know the chemicals that are in their products because their suppliers won't tell them. So it's a complex world that we're in, but we've learned a lot. I think a good indicator of where we're going is our most recent regulations that we've adopted for tires containing the chemical 6PPD.

When that paper came out at the end of 2020, which was the silver bullet that answered the question of why are salmon in the West and Pacific Northwest dying in these events that happen? That has been studied for over 20 years. We quickly moved on that. And in less than three years, that regulation will be in effect.

And that may seem like a long time, but for a very complex chemical, for a complex product--automotive tires--working with the industry, having workshops, bringing people together, this is a national and international issue where we're actually leading to say, 'what are we going to do about this?' And working with the industry to see if there is a safer alternative not to necessarily ban that chemical, but say, where can we go to make it better and still work?

So the challenges are real, but we did that much quicker than we've done anything. And that's going to be foreshadowing the pace that we're going to be now that we have staff to get up to that level of effort and speed. And we've also refined the processes. We have a very transparent process. Dr. Williams alluded to our timeline that we're putting out that every quarter we tell people everything we're doing on these projects.

We also are going to benefit from the new authorities we have in SB 502, thank you, Member Allen, that allows us two important things. One is to actually get information from manufacturers that they are required to give us now, which they weren't before, is all voluntary. So now we can use that very tactically and strategically to get information that can move us forward faster and more efficiently.

It also allows us to point to other work that's done in other states and internationally that we can use to accelerate our process. So those are two key things that we're looking forward to in the coming years. And then just really quickly, just the staffing issue. We have an amazing staff. We've been very successful in attracting high quality staff, and we're getting more.

And so once they get up to speed, which will take a little time, we will hit the pace on our targets that we said we would. But I also want to highlight that our program isn't a be-all and end-all to chemicals management. As the Director said, there's a lot of talk about the circular economy. There's a lot of talk about chemicals management writ large. Our approach is very important, but it's only one part of a more holistic approach that needs to be addressed.

And whether that's looking at classes of chemicals, it's looking at access to information data, it's looking to stimulating innovation and development of new technologies. All those things need to be accentuated.

Thanks.

The one thing, if I may add, is that what maybe is less visible are the products that the team has researched and has decided not to pursue. And they have actually made some of that information public. So while there may be a gap in terms of products that don't get announced, part of that is because they've done extensive research.

And in one case, the food packaging case, because they had done so much research, I think that Assembly Member Ting's bill that went through last year to ban PFAS in food packaging had a very strong foundation because the issue relied heavily on the work that the team had done on food packaging and debated about whether or not to list it as a priority product. And I think all of that fed in. So there are these things that get undertaken where they don't take action, but there's value there, and I think it's important for the program to make that more visible.

I just want to add one other thing, is that we're now about ready to go to the last phase of the regulations, the regulatory response that was put on hold for about three years as we were sued by the American Chemistry Council. I'm happy to say that we won that case and on appeal. And so now we're preparing to move forward. So that will be the last segment of the framework regs.

And then we've been juggling staff between each function, and now we're going to have the staff to dedicate it to each part.

If I could just add to that, having been really involved a long time ago in this program, the disclosure of ingredients that you've had to work so hard, and the ability of business not to have to disclose ingredients or hide an ingredient behind the word 'fragrance,' which I know you had to deal with, right? There could be hundreds of chemicals in fragrance, but it didn't have to be revealed or put on the labels.

And I think we all took to looking online because online more ingredients have to be disclosed. But that effort shouldn't have to be made by every consumer and every regulator. So I really applaud the work that you've done to push on that. That makes a big difference because if you don't know what it is, can't do anything about it. And reverse engineering, trying to figure out what they put in it is not a worthy effort. So I think you've done a great job with that, by the way.

A couple more questions, if we have time. The background paper indicates a number of facilities operating with expired permits. What is DTSC doing to correct this? And what steps is the agency taking to ensure protection of communities near these facilities?

Thank you for that question. We have some of the oldest permits that we're looking at this year and really working hard to renew them because it is important that they're modern our new permits. They often have over 100 special conditions that allow us to hold facilities responsible, hold them accountable to more requirements above and beyond the state's hazardous waste laws.

So what we do oftentimes for a facility that is operating on one of these continued permits that has expired, we still have our state hazardous waste laws that we can enforce, and we do that to the fullest extent.

And so our state hazardous waste laws are strong and they do give us an ability to enforce, for example, an off site release or if there's leaking containers on site, and a number of other really important steps that operators have to take for the safe and appropriate management of hazardous waste on site. So while getting those permits renewed or denied or modified, whatever the decision is, is of critical importance, we still have our state hazardous waste laws that we enforce.

And thankfully, we do have a lot more enforcement resources now that enable us to do that even better. As the Director spoke to earlier.

I very frankly invested a lot in making sure these permit decisions get made. I meet with that team on we have what we call our continued permits meeting and focused on the permits that are more than five years old, expired. And that's my way of holding folks accountable for making progress on those permit decisions. And I've seen that number when we started those meetings, there were 17 permits or something like that on that spreadsheet.

And now we're down to, I think, six permits that are more than five years old. And again, all but one of them are slated for some kind of decision or public notice this year. So that will bring the average age of expired permits down. And even now, we used to just focus on those five year old plus permits. Now we talk about the ones that are between two years and five years. So we're just continuing to work our way down.

And again, I work with that team regularly because I know this is such a pain point. And again, we cannot katie is right. We have tremendous authority and we use it, but we don't want to have to be that creative. We just want our inspectors to be able to go out and say, this is the permit condition. You're not meeting it. Fix it, or we're going to enforce. And the more we get modernized permits in place, the more we're able to do that.

Great. Appreciate that. And then finally, just wanted to touch on the issue of exports of hazardous waste, namely, what is DTSC's long term plan to deal with the exports of California's hazardous waste?

Well, I will say, although DTSC is putting together that hazardous waste management plan. It's not going to be DTSC's plan, it's going to be the state's plan because we have to think there was this conversation about what the right incentives are. We don't want to just reduce the amount of hazardous waste if that means we're not cleaning up contaminated sites. At the same time are we looking at technologies that could reduce the amount that has to be disposed in a hazardous waste landfill?

And the plan is the key to answering that question and I really wish I could sit here and say we have a plan today but it's complex and we will address that. We had to prioritize, we're having to prioritize all the different issues that could be addressed under the hazardous waste management plan. Thankfully it's not a one and done, it's going to roll every three years.

But I do think that certain issues rise to the top for warranting focus in that first hazardous waste management plan and the export of hazardous waste is obviously very high on that list.

Appreciate that. Thank you. Yielding back.

Yeah thank you so much. All right what I think we ought to do since it's already after eleven why don't we ask the chair and the Director to just move to these two seats? Okay?

We can ask Dawn and Ingrid to come up into these two seats and we ask everybody to stay in the room obviously from the Department and we can hear from our stakeholders. We're purposely keeping you up here just because we know that the discussion is going to continue. And I know that Lee and I both have some questions as well. But we do want to make sure that we give some time to both of our other Stakeholder presenters to present.

And I know they've got some good thoughts to share with us. So let's start with let's continue with the two of you and I think who's on the agenda first? Is it's Ingrid? OK. All right. Let's go with you. Ms. Brostrom first.

All right yes. Thanks very much for the opportunity to speak today. I wanted to start with some high level takeaways particularly coming from the hazardous waste management report that came out. So I think what really struck me initially was that California is not following its statutorily suggested hierarchy. That is that our first management should be really focused on hazardous waste generation reductions. That is in statute. That's what we should really be focused on.

And then at the bottom of the list the least preferred option of managing our hazardous waste is land disposal and we have turned that on its head at this point. We have no pollution prevention program and nothing really in the Department that is focused on reducing the generation of hazardous waste. And we have by far most of our hazardous waste is being land disposed at this point. And so we need to give effect to that hierarchy and we need to rebalance.

And of course, really looking forward to working on the hazardous waste management plan with that lens. We need to reestablish the pollution prevention program that was in 2012, removed all the funding for that, but we need to revamp it and make it make sense. We need to restructure fees and be really intentional, how do we use the fee structures to drive reductions in generations such as graduated tier fees?

And we really can't really address this problem until we address contaminated soils by adopting mechanisms to push for more innovation, more technology, other alternatives to dig and haul or capping. And then I want to focus on there's been a lot of conversation around the export of waste, and so much of this conversation has been focusing on capacity, increasing capacity or the decreasing capacity in the state, and how we need to really stop waste from being exported.

And I really think the stronger guiding principle needs to focus more on what is going to provide the least impact to communities. And if we lead with that as the lens to help guide our hazardous Waste Management plan, that's really going to get us to the right decisions. So there are reasons to be concerned about out of state disposal with the impact lens.

And that's because there's transportation related impacts in terms of long distances traveled, as well as the issue of non ricra waste being disposed at municipal landfills, out of state, because there's less protective measures. But we really need a more nuanced approach. We need to look out of state, where is the waste going, what are the demographics, what are the community impacts associated with that?

Because I think if we just lead with blinders on about focusing on just stopping all exports, we miss a really important part of the environmental justice concerns here. Because if we really focus on capacity, we don't want to artificially keep open facilities that are hurting the communities, we don't want to add new facilities in EJ communities, and we don't want to weaken hazardous waste standards. Those are all ways you can increase the lifespan of capacity in the state.

But all of those will have a very large impact disproportionately on EJ communities. So we need a nuanced approach and we need to lead with impact. So now I want to just talk a little bit about both the board and DTSC and kind of where we've seen improvement and where we'd like to see more, starting with DTSC areas that we've seen improvement.

And you heard it mentioned a couple of times is that there's been a lot more effort, particularly around the Cleanup and Vulnerable Communities Initiative and the Equitable Community Revitalization Grant, to work collaboratively with environmental justice groups, really in response to the Round One funding cycle and concerns that the EJ community had. So in response to that, DTSC has worked very closely with a group of environmental justice organizations to really address those concerns. And I think we've spent four all day convenings with DTSC.

And this type of collaboration is important to build trust and it moves us away from the antagonistic and defensive posturing that we really felt at DTSC for a long time. So really have appreciated that collaborative, we think it's a model moving forward and that environmental justice communities and organizations should be seen as partners in developing solutions. And I'll just note for the Legislature, just funding for participation is not currently available.

So groups have to provide on travel own lunch and that will be an impediment for impacted residents to fully participate. And so it is an ongoing barrier. And I just wanted to note that in terms of room for improvement for DTSC, it was mentioned here, but we need to have the SB 673 regulations adopted. It's way overdue. It's very important to assess community vulnerabilities. And the most important part of that legislation was really looking at community vulnerability and cumulative impacts.

And so that is the part that needs to be done. Another thing that I'd like to see is there still appears to me to be a reluctance to make the hard decisions. Those controversial sites, those are still the ones waiting permits. And it is, I think, going to be very telling to see where DTSC lands on some of the most polluting facilities and their permitting decisions coming forward. There has been a risk adverseness at DTSC for a very long time, a fear of litigation.

And I for 01:00 a.m. Going to be really looking at what DTSC is doing, moving forward in terms of making sure that community priorities are met rather than leading with industry interests. And then finally sequa. So Sequa in the absence of 673 Regs, sequa is the place where communities can really engage in looking at how they are impacted by hazardous waste facility decisions. And under the Newsom Administration, there hasn't been a single, not a single Eir prepared for any Department decision.

So since 2018, there's not been a single Eir for any DTSC decision. And I think that's reflective of the difficulty that communities have in really engaging the Department in what impact is this having on community and how can we insert ourselves into that conversation. So my recommendations increase your outreach and collaboration with EJ and community groups across the state, adopt the 673 regs and make the hard decisions for the Board of Environmental Safety.

The theory behind creating this board is that by sunlighting issues, by making sure that decisions are made in public and there's a public forum that we will and allowing the board to ask the hard questions of DTSC in a public forum, that that was what was going know, lead to change. And so I think it's still an experiment. We have yet to see whether this theory is going to work.

The accountability structures we've put in place in 158 are performance metrics, a public process with public input on what are we measuring the hearings and the meetings to query DTSC and obtain responses to community concerns. This hearing, this annual legislative hearing, is a very important component of the accountability as well as the annual performance reviews on DTSC and Director. So of course, we're really looking to see how much is the board using these different accountability structures to measure progress and to push progress.

So what have we seen? I do applaud the board's transparency. I have appreciated the board's commitment to transparency, and I see it incorporated in many of the processes and decisions. The fact that there's been high participation, that the public forum is being used. There's routinely over 100 participants in the hearings, and by sunlighting issues, this can lead to increased focus on them and hopefully resolution of the issues that are being raised in these areas.

And I have really appreciated that they've hosted meetings across the state and been intentional to use those opportunities to meet with community groups and learn about facilities in different areas. In terms of areas of improvement, there is a steep, steep learning curve for this board and the board Members, they're learning a lot and the expertise that they need in order to challenge DTSC, to hold DTSC accountable. I think that's still developing. It's still growing.

And that may be more difficult because DTSC is getting most of their information and expertise from DTSC. So that's where we have a little bit of that clash with how can we expect the board to hold DTSC accountable when DTSC is the main provider of information to the board? So how do we get the board some more independence and more training and more knowledge? So they're not relying just on a single source.

And I think the EJAC, the Environmental Justice Advisory Board, or Council, can be an important tool to provide an alternate source of expertise. So figuring out the EJAC is going to be essential. And also, how are they interacting with both the board and DTSC next capacity? The board is coming on the heels of decades of community concerns, and many of these are not addressed. And so many dozens of sites involve significant community concerns.

And the important role of the board was to hold site specific hearings to start unpacking what's going on in the communities? How can we get answers from DTSC? And we haven't yet seen a hearing on an individual site. So I know the board is tasked with a lot, but that is an important part of its function. So how do we make sure that there's hearings on individual sites? How do we prioritize those sites? Is there a mechanism to request a hearing?

Like, how do we more institutionalize these site specific hearings through assessment teams, through prioritization, and through a formal mechanism to request a hearing? And then finally, no SQL review for permit appeals? As I stated, without the 673 regulations providing an avenue to look at community impacts, SQL was what we had. That was the tool we had, and that has been removed from oversight. It is very, very important for the board to be able to look at DTSC's compliance with Sequa.

I know we heard that it's a complicated process, but as I mentioned, at this point, we're just asking for DTSC to do Sequa. So we're not asking for reviews of thousand page documents. We're looking at should had DTSC done an Eir because there's a potential impact in this community. That's the level of decision that we're asking for the board. And so that capacity, in my opinion, is already there.

And so I just wanted to close out by having a few recommendations how the Legislature can be helpful here. First, so if DTSC continues to fail to act on SB 673 regulations, the Legislature may need to step in to both strengthen that deadline and to impose some threshold conditions. So that's got to be on the table. We can't see year after year after year go without adopting those rules.

To the extent that the board does need more resources to consider SQL compliance, it is such a critical part of what we wanted the board to do that we should figure out how we can support the board in doing SQL review and appeals. Third, make EJAC a permanent body. Right now. The Environmental Justice Advisory Council expires in 2025. We're just going to get started at that point. This needs to be a continuing collaboration, continuing partnership.

And so we need a permanent source of funding there, providing additional resources and direction to DTSC to mandate a pollution prevention program that's long overdue. And especially given the capacity issues and the things we've heard about soils, we need to really focus on source reduction. And then finally, regarding soil contamination, we need more resources to figure out the technology and innovation needed. So we're not using all of our capacity in our hazardous waste landfills to take contaminated soil.

There's got to be other mechanisms out there, such as bioremediation, that we need to look at. And so we may need some more resources to bring to bear on looking at those technologies. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate those comments. Let's now go to Ms. Koepke.

Great. Thank you. Dawn Koepke with McHugh Koepke Pedrone. On behalf of the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance thank you to Chair Allen, Chair Lee, and the Members of the opportunity to convey some feedback. Experiences related to Seed and its Members interaction related to the passage of Senate Bill 158 that reform its engagement with DTSC and the Board of Environmental Safety.

As many of you will recall, SC was very engaged over the multi year effort to get to SB 150 eight's passage and the reforms contained there within and certainly continues to be engaged with the Department as well as the board to this very day in an effort to be constructive, proactive, productive, related to all things hazardous waste generation management, site mitigation and cleanup, green chemistry and more.

As you all can well understand based on the conversation today and certainly your own understanding, hazardous waste management, cleanup issues, very complex issues, multilayered, multifaceted and challenging, warranting a level of technical expertise that some of us only just pretend to have. But there is a lot to that and a lot we can unpack. Just listening to the conversation this morning with the chair and the Director.

I mean, there are so many different pieces of that that would warrant additional time, a whole hearing on, perhaps to unpack, discuss, dig into. And so, certainly, the complexities add to some of the challenges related to the department's work, the board's work in this area. Additionally, it should be noted that Steve's engagement in that reform effort was certainly significant. We came to the table in earnest to be productive, proactive, but it wasn't an effort that our Members and the broader regulated community took lightly.

It certainly included a number of significant adjustments, including fees that were very significantly increased. There was an appreciation that that needed to occur at some level to ensure a well funded Department to be responsive to the needs of communities, the environment, the regulated community and permitting activities, site cleanup and beyond. But many of our Members, amid that fee increase, have faced significant increases, even upwards of well above 370% across their fees. So it's not insignificant.

Nevertheless, they are continuing to move forward, working with the Department to be compliant and to be engaged in terms of kind of our work. Also notably with the board, you may recall as part of that conversation about the establishment of the board, our Members in the broader regulated community was very nervous about the establishment of a board that in other realms has often been politicized in other media and other board scenarios. And so we were really concerned about that.

So certainly it was important from our Members perspective to ensure that the board did have and bring to bear certain types of expertise to kind of help guide their work, understanding that there would still be a significant learning curve. We're really just pleased with the board to date. They've been very engaged, open, accessible, as was noted, transparent in their work, thoughtful in their work.

And while certainly many challenges face them in their work and ahead, we would argue that it has been a beneficial environment and setting for which the regulated community as well as communities, environmental organizations, have been able to come to the table on those discussions. And then, although the reform package was not necessarily perfect from the regulated community's perspective, you may recall that there were a number of provisions that the regulated community was particularly supportive of in that package.

Among them was the development of the hazardous Waste Management plan and ensuring that that was undertaken in a more expedited fashion to be developed along with General Fund resources, understanding that that was a plan for the whole state. So certainly very positive. Also certainly positive that there was the ability for the Board to hear hearing appeals of hazardous waste facility permit decisions, which was a priority as well.

Also importantly, providing the board the authority and ability to review and make decisions, recommendations related to various DTSC's authorities overlapping responsibilities with other agencies, opportunities for additional improvements, efficiencies and programmatic, as well as regulatory responsibilities and more, including fee setting, efficiencies. What have you. And certainly happy to have the establishment of a DTSC ombudsperson as well as a Board ombudsperson to serve as an impartial resource to all stakeholders and the General public.

Also, review and recommendations for regulatory and policy changes to address concerns with DTSC site mitigation remediation activities and finally, but not certainly lesser of a priority. Also included authority to help develop alternative management standard recommendations and approaches for waste that are classified in California as hazardous waste under state law. These provisions will help ensure thorough discussion, analysis and accountable, transparent, responsive decisions are made to ensure progress on the concerns of all stakeholders, communities, environmental organizations and the regulated community alike.

These efforts are already underway, and Cbnitz Members intend to approach these efforts in a proactive productive, collaborative manner. As we look, I'd like to draw the Legislature, Department, Board and broader administration's attention just to a few considerations specific to the development of the Hazardous Waste Report Management Report that's currently out for review, as well as the ultimate plan.

C would just note that, generally speaking, the report was very well laid out, providing a great deal of insight and understanding into the various hazardous waste streams, how and where they're managed, and much more. Although we can't help but note that there is an inherent tension as part of the discussions related to the report, its findings, the development of the plan, and how that interacts with fees as well.

Certainly, there's a strong interest on the state, the departments, environmental and community advocates in reducing the generation of hazardous waste, and certainly the regulated community endeavors to do that as well and would support reduction in generation wherever possible. However, there are complexities and challenges in doing so. Such reduction efforts can be undermined in a number of ways, including the fact that soils, as one example, one of the largest hazardous waste streams in the state, can't be minimized or reduced just through minimization of generation.

Those ultimately as part of cleanup is just going to continue to be a significant source of hazardous waste. Additionally, pushing to expedite cleanup of orphan sites and other sites within disadvantaged communities also will increase waste streams for certain types of waste like soils. Also, the push to clean up sites to background levels rather than a risk based cleanup will also continue to increase waste and challenge the ability to manage that capacity.

Over classification of hazardous waste with very broad definitions of hazardous waste that may differ from the rest of the country conservative handling and reticence to consider alternative management processes, including onsite treatment that comes with some challenges. Complexities for permitting.

We have a pharmaceutical Member as an example who's already begun some conversations with the Department on looking at ways to do a circular approach with a particular hazardous waste where they can treat that on site and put it back into their process rather than having to dispose of it. But some of the challenges are leading them to have to dispose of that currently. So looking forward to working more on that in the interest of pollution prevention, circularity reduction and reuse.

Also challenges with a nervousness and unwillingness to adopt new technologies processes and the hurdles to moving in such directions both at the regulated community level as well as getting buy in from the Department communities, what have you in terms of technologies for other treatment options, those often are very expensive, energy intensive. Certainly the business community, regulated community has been looking at those, what options might be available. We, even as Siebe participated in a Department led initiative a number of years ago.

Looking at some of those technology treatment type options, visiting a number of sites in California that are working on those challenges remain with the energy intensive nature of some of those technologies, at least currently, as well as the throughput capacity that they could even manage at this stage, but certainly supportive of continuing to look at ways to provide resources, encourage additional work in that area.

Additionally, when it comes to the reduction of hazardous waste generation, we would also just note that if there was the ability for generators to further reduce, they most certainly would, especially given the fact that we faced over 300% increases for many generators in the generation of the hazardous waste in their processes. So there is a vested interest in their part to do whatever they can to reduce the generation within their processes in terms of fees getting tension that I mentioned.

And the interest in reducing hazardous waste generation, something that the Department, the board, stakeholders and the Legislature will have to grapple with, is even if we are successful in making headway and reducing the generation of hazardous waste in state, that inevitably is also going to result in some.

In the fees paid by those generators and the funding available to the Department to undertake their work. Certainly a goal but certainly a significant impact also should be noted and was highlighted in the committee background. The fact that some entities, like some government entities, may not be also contributing towards the management of waste that they are responsible for as well and so certainly places additional burden on the regulated community to pick up the slack fee wise to help support the Department and the state.

We would also just note, increases on those wastes for those generators will likely result in further decline of some of these hazardous waste permits and permitted facilities. Not only are we talking about the generators that are paying these fees, but there are also facility fees as well that are paid for the oversight of those. And each of those certainly has an impact on the capacity in those facilities in state.

And then always concerns related to some of the smaller generators who may not be able to sustain those increasing fees over time could result in improper disposal by unregulated entities to escape those costs. Management requirements, what have you in terms of alternative management standards and hazardous waste classification? Certainly something we very strongly support looking at and reviewing. We would just note one example that we've been working with the Legislature Department on this year under Assembly Bill 407 by Assembly Member Chen.

That Bill really seeking to clarify in California law that the current exemption pathways for a very small subset of used oil, the highly controlled used oil dielectric fluid, already has the exemption pathways in state law. The Legislature proved that. And yet the concern being is that under federal law, there is a provision that requires that can only consider that not hazardous waste if it's burned for energy recovery. And clearly that is not something that the state supports.

And so looking to clarify that based on other federal statutes as well as EPA guidance, that it does not indeed have to be treated in that manner and burned for energy recovery, that it can be recycled based on certain criteria and management requirements. And yet there's some challenges and tension in working through that with the Department based on concerns again about fees associated with that, if that is indeed exempt, much less the oversight of that as well.

So it just shows some of the tension with wanting to look at ways to push towards circularity recycling reuse of these waste wherever possible and that tension on a fee oversight basis as well that we'll certainly have to grapple with. And then finally, in terms of the tools for hazardous waste management, we've talked to heard a lot about capacity. It's important that we have a combination of in and out of state tools that are critical to managing capacity in the state.

As you well know, the background document pointed out, there are two permitted hazardous waste landfills in state, but at the current rate of land disposal in state as well as out of state, there's a combined 20 years of permitted capacity remaining in state.

That said, if the interest is solely to focus just on in state, which is important to have that in state capacity, to be sure that timeline will reduce significantly if we're focused only on in state capacity for managing this and that will reduce that timeline by over ten years. Further, the additional ratcheting up of fees will also have an impact on the shift of that potentially out of state. Even more so. All of this to say, complex.

And we need an array of tools, both in state tools as well as out of state tools, to manage that capacity, not only just for disposal, but for treatment, recycling, what have you, and certainly encourage that to be at the front of mind. So with know, just want to close and just say appreciate the opportunity to share Steve and its Members perspectives on these complex issues.

Pleased to continue to work with you all as well as the board, the Department on all of these issues moving forward. Happy to answer any questions on the topics I've mentioned. Also wearing other hats related to green chemistry and beyond, if those are of interest. But with that, I'll leave it there and just appreciate your time today. Thank you.

Thanks very much. Okay, so much to grapple with here. I know you've got a whole string of questions, so let's turn over to you.

Yeah, well, thank you so much. I'll first start with our current panel, since the first panel will have a lot of more questions, I'm sure. So I just wanted to generally because I heard a lot of feedback about your experience with the board and how you participate with it.

But in general I just wanted to more clarify and capsulate is, do you feel with the addition of the board that the operations with the addition of the board has made a difference in the operations of DTSC? I'll post to both of you.

I measure success by impacts on the ground in the mean you're talking more about the operations. I think my measurement is going to be community impacts. And so I think at this point it's too early to tell because there's lag time, right, for things to change at DTSC with BES as an oversight body for that to make its way into community decisions. That's going to just take a little while. So from my perspective, it's too early to tell.

But I know what my benchmark is and so I really want the board also to consider those as performance metrics, as are we hearing different feedback from the communities? Are there fewer complaints? To me, frankly, it's just a little too early to tell.

Thank you for the question. I would argue that I think it is providing some benefit in a number of ways. The board in terms of their know, partial oversight certainly has helped to spur the, you know, Director Williams has been doing a fabulous job in moving the Department forward. But stakeholders for many years, if nothing else, have been aligned in concerns around transparency, lack of responsiveness, timeliness.

And I think from a regulated community standpoint, what we are seeing is that having the board establish, working with DTSC very closely, continuing to kind of push the envelope on these topics, is that that responsiveness, the timeliness of activities, transparency is something that we're seeing not just because of the board. Certainly the Director's done a lot in terms of moving that forward, but I think the board is kind of helping to expedite that as well.

And certainly the addition of the directors new team Members over the last year or two years has really been very helpful as well. But I think we are seeing kind of overarching benefit in terms of that transparency, timeliness, responsiveness in particular.

And I just want to follow with Ingrid Brostrom, you work with a lot of the impact communities, environmental justice groups. Obviously, there's a lot of trust rebuilding and that process has to happen. And again, this might be too early to say, but I'm just curious. From your perspective, do you feel impact Communities feel there's a stronger sense of trust or they feel that this process is working right now? We're still too early to tell.

I mean, with trust, when it's broken, it takes a long time to so, you know, I know DTSC has been hearing challenges for a long time from communities, and I don't think that trust is not going to be rebuilt overnight. There has to be sustained efforts over years and it has to relate to changes on the ground. So I'm going to be quite candid that I think my answer is going to be no. There's still a long way to go in order to rebuild community trust.

Like I said, I think starting working with environmental EJ organizations on specific programs like the ECRG, I think that's a really good model know rather than kind know, be against each know. When we see DTSC be responsive to the concerns that were raised for the first round of ECRG and it actually led to changes. Oh gosh, I'm going to mess up the acronym.

Equitable Communities Revitalization Grant.

Thank you.

Yeah, so it's brownfield redevelopment grant. And so we actually saw the complaints made from the first round actually led to changes in the second round. So those are the types of things that is going to rebuild trust over time.

Okay, well, it's good to hear. Thank you for that. Now I have some questions turned back to our first panel, if that's okay. First of all, I want to congratulate Chair Rizzo on your 1.5 and a half years world tour that you seem to have conducted across the state with the board. So I do thank you for doing that and obviously going to the sites, listening to folks, and even getting 100 plus attendees.

I just wanted to ask you more briefly, is you've mentioned that you've met with a lot of groups and even groups that I'm familiar with in the Bay Area. But briefly, what's the kind of feedback you're hearing from community groups about sites or about DTSC in General? I've heard you meet with a lot of people, but I want to hear what that feedback is.

Thank you for that question, Chair Lee. I think Ingrid spoke to many of the things that we hear, and when I talked about earlier what we're hearing from the community, they want things faster, better, more opened, deeper engagement. I think that's they feel some instances, the public participation effort on the part of DTSC with the community is good. In other instances, they feel like it's non existent.

So then we have a conversation about that, whether it's North Richmond, Healthy Contra Costa, and we all went out there we all went out there on a two and a half, three hour tour with the North Richmond people to hear from them or Brookside. There was a concern that Brookside wasn't getting the kind of attention that they felt. And I think what we heard is that there's a distribution center going into their community, and they didn't want that.

They preferred that there be a housing or a park. Well, that was a land use issue decided by the county. So now when the land use decision is made and they didn't know about the activism they could have, todd Sachs invited us to come and meet with the community, with the developer. We all sat for hours with 40 community Members.

They came away understanding that next time they're going to get involved in land use at the county level, but given where we are now, they could really participate in what they wanted from the developer. And the developer sat there and agreed to put a green wall in and change the orientation of the access. They didn't get everything they want by any means, but they got some concessions. And so that level of engagement, it's just a lot more work, right? It's like everybody talking, bringing.

And the developers were willing to come with their lawyers. They all showed up and they made some agreements. So they were going to issue a report once a week. They said, you know what? The community wanted to meet with them once a week. So that's the commitment that was made. The difference between getting some kind of a report and actually talking about what's happening is their dirt being managed well? Are the trucks traveling where they're supposed to or not supposed to?

I found that to be a really good example of what we can accomplish when we're all saying that this matters. So the Healthy Contra Costa people, they're not happy that there's a distribution center going in, but they feel they've got some ownership and some say in what happens and what DTSC's role is going to be in it. DTSC can't control local land use issues. So that has separating out what's their responsibility as opposed to what comes before or after.

But we could do a better job coordinating and informing and engaging.

Yeah, I was going to say certainly that's a great demonstration of the convening power of the sport is able to do. And it perhaps outside the well, good. Well, powerful, I think outside the original vision of it still, which is, I think, still powerful.

But I did want to hone in on saying that since you are channeling and hearing a lot from communities specifically also about DTSC, how do you feel that DTSC has been responsive to those concerns, complaints that you've provided channel up to the Department? Too?

I think it's varied. I think having Katie Butler, Todd Sachs and now Cerlene because there were positions that were not filled when we first came on board, and I find them to be incredibly responsive to the issues, as is Dr. Williams and Francesca before that. But there's just so much you can execute if you don't have the whole team in place. So I am seeing a culture shift, if that's the right language for it, and a responsiveness and saying, let's do this together. We're hearing this.

It's taking us off a little bit of the checklist of issues for us to deal with. But we don't feel like we can do this job unless we first engage on the ground. And that's part of what we've been spending our time doing. And in order to be effective on the other items that are on our list right. Our mandates. And I will say that until we really relook at the language in 158 on the Ombuds, we have work to do on that.

That has to be at a whole higher level and more developed level, certainly, than our budget. But we don't talk about money here. I know that. But we do talk about coming back to you with a list of what we would need to do to affect some of the things that you're asking us to do.

Thank you. And just to clarify, too, on the topic of money, I think you said in your statement before that you are going to be hosting a workshop or meeting about the fees later on. Right. That hasn't happened yet.

No, we had a workshop on the fees. The September 4 board meeting, the fee Subcommittee will make a recommendation to the full board. We'll do that, there'll be public comment.

The full recommendation we made at and.

Then, yes, we will vote on it on September 7.

September 7. Okay, very good. Well, I want to shift over Dr. Williams, too, on the topic of our budgetary issues. I won't beat this death because you've heard from my colleagues about it a couple of times. But when we talk about the non compliance aspect of waste generators that should be paying, it is quite alarming to us that the Low hanging fruit category of folks are not paying it. So obviously, please work with us to figure out how to best do compliance enforcement.

And I know that obviously, even though it's shifting just public money from one Department to another, there is a $6.6 million contract between CDTFA and DTSC, where of course, and what I understand is that there is a data tracking issue where your data systems don't match. But DTSC, ultimately the only reason we know there are people in non compliance is your data system shows while the collections is not coming through. So we want to make sure that that Low hanging fruit is there.

The Legislature, of course, approved $55 million to fill that gap in and it's a loan, but we don't want to have to keep doing that and keep saddling the Department of Debt in that sense. So you've heard from my colleagues enough about wanting to strengthen the enforcement compliance, but please do if there are ideas or things, it's something that I'm interested in working on and making sure that happens because we don't want ultimately the communities to be paying, the taxpayer to be paying.

We want the polluter to be paying if they are indeed polluting and we don't want there to be non compliance. So just wanted to add on to that point and you yeah, I think a lot of my other colleagues had said things I want to say, but I am glad to hear that there's a lot of progress being made in terms of listening to the input of impact of the communities.

And I think the board is a big integral part of that and want you to continue working on that. And also on the permitting issue, I know now it's your goal to this year to handle a lot of the permit decisions, right? And you're hoping to do that by the end of the year for most of these controversial sites too, is that correct?

That's correct.

So hopefully, again, something, if that needs to be something the Legislature needs to take a look at too, in the long term to make this more sustainable, that's something we want to do. I mean, of course, as you heard from Ingrid's testimony, the same sites have always been the same top controversial sites and we don't want them to linger forever.

In the same sense that some of these articles talked about how like, say, Fibro has lasted for decades with a continuing permit, where the permit they were given in the 90s is different science, different understanding, different even urban development around there much different times. So we don't want that to be lingering. I mean, not to stress the point, but Fibro has been basically on continuing permits since I was alive, basically.

So as long as I've been alive, but we don't want that to be the case, the status quo. And I'm glad that you're making progress on these things, but I don't want this to lapse when we're all gone. I don't want this to be a thing. We want it to be institutionalized. So I just wanted to make that comment that we don't want this to be a continuing thing too.

Could I speak? Sure, absolutely. Thank you. Because that is a great point, the idea of not having this be one and done. There are a number of factors that are going to help us avoid seeing this be the case in future years. First of all, there was kind of a slug of permit decisions that needed to be made because of when the hazardous waste, they were all bunched up and they've actually been spread out.

The other thing is we're now using our authority to say a ten year permit for this facility is okay, but this one five years. So we're also taking that into account so that we can keep a closer touch on some facilities and maybe even shorter time periods, depending on the facility.

Third of all, cannot overstate the impact of SB 158 and the changed timelines that are called out in SB 158 for when we get information to start the permit process, when engagement starts with communities and a clear deadline for our decision making. So I do think that we are well positioned to have addressed these problems, as you say, institutionally, as opposed to just one off. Okay, we took care of that. And lastly, of course, the quality of the permits helps avoid a lot of.

The yes, yes, absolutely. Well, I just have one last question for you. Dr. Williams, and I wanted to then maybe hand it over to Senator Stern, who just joined us, but I noticed that and of course, Ingrid brought this up, too, that, of course, DTSC opted out of SB 158 in their own program to create the Environmental Justice Advisory Committee, which is still to be created. Well, to come to fruition, I should say. So this is something of personal interest to me.

By law, right now, I'm trying to do a Bill where another sister agency within Cal, EPA DPR, I'm trying to create an Environmental Justice Advisory Commission for them. So I am just curious in a positive way, why did the Department come to their own independent conclusion that they should create an EJAC for themselves?

Why did we? Yeah, well, I would say it was a joint effort. I would say some encouragement from people like Ingrid that this is important. I think Ingrid's perspective on what community engagement looks like is very important. And again, there are lots of ways to look at engagement. And sometimes you look at the organizations who are advocating, and sometimes you look at the actual people who have the lived experience.

And so I think people like Ingrid really convayed the importance of getting those voices, making sure that people were heard there was a good model. I think the Community Protection and Hazardous Waste Reduction Initiative had some good aspects to it. There were some other initiatives that had happened where I think, and quite honestly, the People Senate. I actually kept the recommendations from the People's Senate on my desk, and I would just look at it a couple of times a week throughout the whole reform process.

Because my understanding, I wasn't there for all of it. But my understanding was it did a good job of capturing again, community voice, and it's tiring to let people down on a consistent basis. It would be much better if we could be in a different place and have that trust, which is not going to happen overnight, but the board has precipitated a lot more transparency, I don't think folks even realize.

We went through every question that the board had received around Exide for over the course of the year and responded to every single issue. It came out to something like 30 pages now. Good for us. Maybe. But should it have taken a year to gather all those responses or should have been happening in real time? It should have been happening in real time.

So we're building public facing databases that will allow us to say we took this issue in, we're addressing it this way and we're being more responsive. So these are the things that we know we need in order to again change the dynamic with how we're acting with communities.

Yeah. Thank you. Just to be fair, Ingrid, I want to ask you, since you've been credited with some of this advocacy for this, how do you feel that an Eject would complement the efforts we're trying to achieve? Because of course, you have a board as well, so how would this be complementary or additive to this effort as well?

I see great value for the EJAC. Yes, to be a partner, but also to be an accountability tool. I talked about some of the accountability tools that are built into 158. Some of those are performance metrics. The EJAC can provide input to those performance metrics. What should be measured? What are they hearing from the communities that they want to see change so they can put input into the performance metrics as well as the annual performance review? Are things going in the right direction?

Where are they not? So my idea of the EJAC is both to provide advice, recommendations, using their perspectives to both the board and BES, but also, I think very importantly, it's an additional accountability layer and feedback both for the Legislature and for the board on are we seeing those on the ground changes? That's going to be like the guiding metrics for environmental justice organizations.

I know you guys are looking to have some workshops with stakeholders on that topic in the fall so people will have the opportunity to weigh in. But gosh I heard some criticisms about folks from the Administration saying one thing to the public about negotiations with Boeing and then doing something else. But yeah, let me turn it over to Senator Stern to ask whatever questions he might have on this topic and others.

Well, thank you to both the Chairs for holding this hearing and digging in deep. Our region talked about sort of lingering issues or the challenges of even getting going on some of these cleanups. Santa Susana is almost a different animal entirely. It's been a very long and winding road, and I'm not just talking about the canyon roads that we've up and down to that site, but getting to a place of progress has been decades in the making.

And I just wanted to get some insight from Director Williams in terms of where we're at in the process now. And I'd been watching the hearing and sort of hearing about restoring trust and what those pathways look like and how to actually get started. The Department seems to have at least charted out, say, an initial compass on how you want to get there.

But from what I can tell from at least the EIR that was just posted as certified and final, it's not really final. We don't quite know yet what cleanup is ultimately going to look like, what those levels are that are ultimately going to be hit. At the standard that has been adopted, you could say it's risk-based or you could say it leaves the community in limbo, not knowing what things are really going to be.

And I think there's a deep frustration and skepticism about whether there's going to be moving targets going forward. In other words, I know that sometimes science doesn't give you that certainty, always. And so you have a very hard job in that regard. But I'm just hoping you can share some insight there and really why you chose to go this path. And what about, say, Federal Dynamics, your discussions with the private entity responsible here, Boeing? Why go this route?

And sort of what do you see going forward in terms of landing this with the community? And especially from my conversations, the LA County side. I think there's been a lot of engagement on the Ventura County side of the situation, but as we know, the hill goes both ways. And so, just hoping you can share a bit of that.

Santa Susana. We could spend another hour. I'll try not to. And I actually might be happy to talk about Santa Susanna for an hour. It deserves it. It deserves the time. It deserves the attention. We did finalize the program Environmental Impact Report, and as you say, it is a program level EIR, as opposed to a decision document in the EIR all in one. And we did that because there are three responsible parties. The EIR captures the outer envelope of what that cleanup could look like.

So now we have anticipated the potential impacts and what it would take to mitigate those impacts for the most aggressive cleanup that we could foresee for that. And that being, of course, the background cleanups for NASA and the Department of Energy, and the background cleanup for radiation for Boeing, as well as their risk-based cleanup for Boeing to a resident with garden standard.

So those are the standards that were assumed in the EIR, and those are the decision documents that are being developed by the responsible parties. And believe me, they're being developed. You are quite right. Everybody wants certainty. Moving targets don't help anyone. And to that end, this is very challenging. It's just a very challenging cleanup. To get to background as though nothing had ever happened on that site is really challenging. And to be able to say with some level of certainty, yes, we have met that standard.

The responsible parties want the certainty of how are we going to know when we're really there? And so we're having deeply technical conversations about lab methods, about backfill. How do you certify backfill? It's going to be hard to find backfill material to bring onto the site after we've excavated that will meet the standards. That's how aggressive they are. It's just going to be a challenge. And so we're digging into the technical issues.

Lab methods have evolved since 2007, when the NASA and DOE background commitments were established. So a lot of work to be done there. I said those backwards. I said it backwards. But I know you know the project well enough. So, number one, I will say the responsible parties are extremely motivated to get this cleanup going. Therefore, they're showing up in a way that I will say is very different than it was when I took this job. To use the vernacular, we felt like we were getting blown off a lot. I don't think that's the case any longer.

Some of us had the privilege of visiting the site last week in a meeting that Boeing facilitated, but it was primarily at the request of the tribes. There's a Sacred Sites Council that is composed of all the tribes who have a connection to that landscape. And it was quite a day in terms of understanding what the land means to folks. I mean, I'd heard it on paper, I'd seen it through zoom.

But to be on the landscape and understand the connection in a very deep way, it was something apart from that. And I think what I heard from the tribes is we recognize this land needs to be cleaned up. We, of course, want to protect our connection to the land. Very unique resources that are there.

But throughout the day, the urgency about moving forward with the cleanup came through, I had a chance to meet and the Secretary has met with high level Department of Energy and NASA representatives. In fact, last week gave us some of that opportunity and they want to know how they can keep everything moving and how this cleanup can get going. They have aggressive timelines for when their decision documents will be done and they are sticking to those. As was mentioned, we will have a series of workshops.

We polled the community early this year to see what topics are of interest to you, what is it that you want to hear about? And so we're lining up workshops that are based on the results of that survey. They're very topical. The last thing I'm going to say, maybe I'll pause there, is that we have pulled Todd Sachs into this. He's a PhD, he's a professor. He actually teaches at Sac State.

His technical rigor is exemplary and I think his contributions to how we move forward are going to be tremendous. Nobody's going to get anything over on Todd from a technical standpoint. And he's creative in terms of working towards solution. He understands the issues. His staff has been briefing him and bringing him up to speed. And I'm hearing some very encouraging things about how we can keep things moving forward. So I'll pause there.

Was the tour before Hillary came through LA?

Yes. Yes.

It just begs the question in my mind. I know water, and no one ever thinks it rains in LA until it rains, way too much, way too fast. I know that's a lingering issue, especially down mountain in LA, what that groundwater runoff and sort of those overlying issues are going to be. Comments there?

I will just say extreme weather generally, whether it's the wildfires, we all know the Woolsey fires started there, and extreme rain events are front and center. The waterboard has now granted that NPDES permit. The conditions for Boeing to get out of that permit are very stringent. The amount of monitoring they have to do after they say they've finished that cleanup is long enough to really establish whether or not they've been successful.

There are provisions so that even if they have finished their cleanup and NASA and DOE haven't, NASA and Doe will pick up that work. But all of that does give added urgency to keeping the cleanup moving. And I think that's manifested in the work we've done to try to find opportunities to do initial cleanups. There are places on the site where the cleanup just maybe isn't as complicated or what was done operationally on the site isn't going to be.

Buildings are easier than soil.

You got it. Now there are even some places where we can look at the soil and get a jump-start and keep things moving. It's scheduled to be a 15-year cleanup, so doing what we can when we can is going to be very important without compromising the cleanup standards.

I appreciate all that. I know you've been working hard on this. I do know there's still, I think, justifiable skepticism, somewhere between skepticism and outrage because people are sick. They have questions as to why that disaster decades back still lingers. Meanwhile, my nieces are going to summer camp and there's gardens. I mean, we're testing out that residential garden center in real time just across the hill. So the stakes are very high for you all to get this right. I want to help with that.

But I'm going to emphasize once again, sort of as the broader theme of this, the local stakeholders, the community groups, and those who may not necessarily respond to a poll, right, but who you have to go find or get to the heart of it, but also local government. Really, it's either going to be a battle here and this thing's just going to carry on, or we try to actually land something.

And I get that there were deals negotiated with the responsible parties, but now the impacted need to be part of that deal, too. And unless that happens, I just don't see how we're going to be durable enough to just to roll out the way you want to and that I want to. And I appreciate the "let's do what we can right now and pick those spots." And that may be a good blueprint for future things too, right?

Like pick the places you can agree and knock them out and get moving, especially when you can get federal dollars and other things going, because we know budget is a big issue and responsible parties to the table. Right. But I'm concerned that the process itself still has folks feeling left out. And that may be because of the strategy itself employed.

And the PEIR is not going to be as tangible or dependable, but we're going to keep pushing you in the spirit of the integrity of this department to keep doing the hard work here and hopefully set a model and not a cautionary tale.

So, a couple of things on that. You're right that there needs to be engagement and, in fact, there will be a lot of engagement opportunity around the individual decision documents. There's a public process for that, in addition to the workshops I mentioned. That's certainly the expectations. Second of all, you said what I essentially said to the responsible parties myself. If they're trying to evade their responsibilities, we can be assured that we are going to be bogged down in litigation for another 15 years until we get to the cleanup.

I think they get it. I think they get it. That shirking that responsibility just stalls everything. And I can't be sure they did it. They get it. And it's our responsibility as a regulator to make sure that they do, and if they don't, to hold them accountable. But you are absolutely right.

If we don't actually clean it up the way the agreements say, it will never get cleaned up because it will be just an endless cycle. And if the community, I will say this, though. We have worked to make ourselves available. I do think that our engagement with the counties, especially after the Boeing settlement agreement, was very helpful in terms of their level of understanding of some of the technical issues that were contained in the Boeing settlement agreement. We are always available to have those discussions.

There's some misstatements about the level of cleanup that's being done that are quite accurately, quite frankly, wrong and inaccurate. They're not factual. And yet we have struggled to find an opportunity to engage with communities to let us explain the technical issues behind how we're going to go forward with this cleanup. I am hopeful that the September 7th board meeting, where Santa Susana is on the agenda, will give us another opportunity to walk through some of the issues.

But the board is not the right place for some of that. It takes sometimes 2 hours or multiple meetings to go through the technical issues associated with risk-based screening levels of dry lettuce versus wet lettuce. It's just not simple. And we're willing to do that. We're available to do that and we welcome it.

Thank you.

Thank you. I had a long list of questions, most of which were touched upon to some degree or another, but I'm certainly going to do some follow-up. A couple of things that Ingrid said intrigued me that I'd like to ask about. She made a comment about this sort of reluctance on the part of the Department to make hard decisions.

And maybe just to start with you, Ingrid. Can you give us a little more? I'd like to dig in just a little bit more onto that comment and maybe get the response from the Department.

Yeah.

And I mean, I think the controversial hazardous waste facilities is an obvious place where that happens. We actually finally did see a denial just recently of a hazardous waste permit, but before that there had been none. And the one that was made, I think it is a testament that we're seeing somewhat of a shift on those decisions, but the real controversial sites where communities have consistently engaged, the concern there is that we are going to continue to permit facilities again and again and again and leave these, basically, communities as sacrifice zones.

And I think I heard someone mention, perhaps at DTSC, that capacity is not one of the factors that they look at when permitting a facility. And I would hope that is true because it really needs to be looked at on just the individual basis. But I don't know how true that is, because earlier, back when I started this work, some of the deputy directors at that time said we need to make compliance easy and economic because of capacity. And so I'm really looking at some of the very problematic facility permit decisions coming up. And the fact that there was a draft approval for Fibrotech gives me concern.

But the waste management report doesn't it say that if all waste destined for land disposal were to remain in California coming out of the other EJ concerns raised by the other article with us sending stuff off to Arizona, Nevada, et cetera. If all that were to remain in California, then we'd basically be at capacity within a decade. So part of the challenge here is there's one argument to be made coming out of that article that we got to take care of our own problems. And the only way we do that is by having more space here to do that work.

I think the flaw in that argument is this kind of idea that California collectively created the waste, so California collectively needs to know handle it at the back end. But the fact of the matter is, we as a state are generating the hazardous waste and two communities in California are dealing with the fallout, so we have Buttonwillow and Kettleman.

So, to me, it's a little bit of a fallacy that we have some kind of responsibility because it does fall so disproportionately on so few Californians. And that's why if you lead with an impact lens rather than kind of a knee jerk, we can't export waste, then we can get into the details. Where is this going out of state? Where is this going in Utah, Nevada, Arizona? How do we really try to reduce that generation so that we're just relying on landfills less? But the capacity issue can lead to some, I think, potentially dangerous EJ outcomes if we're not very thoughtful about kind of the impacts, if we lead too much with the capacity question.

Gotcha. Thank you. Any response or thoughts?

Sure, I want to pick up on this capacity issue and everything in the state. I will say that, nationally, the philosophy about capacity is that you need to consider it on a national level. So incineration is still part of hazardous waste disposal, like it or not. And there are no incinerators in California and that's an example of where, okay, so some of the waste is going to go to incinerators that's required by law.

And I actually very much appreciate the lens that Ingrid's advocating for, which is think about impacts, don't oversimplify this. So I do hope that that becomes part of the conversation as we move forward. Going back to just the general issues around the hard decisions and these permits, I'll say a couple of things. First of all, there's no comparison between a permit that's issued today and a permit that was issued 10, 15 years ago. The Department did not.

First of all, the poster child for not making a decision and putting off a hard decision is Exide. And I think that everybody did learn that lesson about needing to make that decision. We are willing to make the decisions, and the decisions are not black and white in all cases. I mean, we're talking about, for instance, these six facilities that are very complicated. And is the answer to deny all six permits? I don't think so. I think it's much more nuanced than that.

Are there permits that could be issued that would be protective? And what's our confidence about compliance? And do we have what we need to enforce? I will say that right now we're having workshops on a new framework for penalties and our penalty regulations, because if violating hazardous waste control laws is just a cost of business, the permits aren't going to do the job when we do issue permits.

So I just want to say that we recognize that hard decisions have to be made, but sometimes the hard decision is to deny, and sometimes the hard decision is to issue the permit. So, we will continue that conversation, I'm sure, as we move through these oldest and most challenging permits.

Okay. All right. We've gone a long time, and I know there's some folks in the public who want to make some comments, so why don't we give them the opportunity to. I know some folks want to come up and line up and make some brief comments. We'll start with you, Michael.

Thank you. Good morning, or afternoon, Chairs Lee and Allen, Members of the committee. Mike Caprio representing Republic Services. Appreciate the opportunity to present today and appreciate the opportunity or the effort put forth by DTSC staff in preparing the report. For point of reference, Republic owns four of the five out-of-state facilities that receive California hazardous waste. And certainly source reduction and treatment are the primary first options for managing this stream.

But for the materials that are left, there's been a lot of discussion about what to do with them. And in a perfect world, all that would stay in state, and the impacts would be not so severe on just two communities for the most part, or a few communities. But the capacity and permitting limitations are real, and those constraints at in-state facilities make it unlikely that all the material can be managed in-state.

Given those circumstances, we advocate for a diverse set of options for management of hazardous waste, and we think that the out-of-state facilities that serve the state now should be viewed as an asset rather than maybe a negative that's been framed otherwise. Just some quick notes on our facilities. Per the Haz Waste Management Report, none of them are located near sensitive receptors. All of our facilities are rated in the low end of the EJ federal EJ screening tool.

The facilities are all designed and constructed in accordance with detailed federal standards for landfills. These are subtitle D standards that are very rigorous. The environmental controls, monitoring systems, waste containment features, waste characterization and chain of custody procedures for management and acceptance of materials are all more than sufficient for the waste that are received at the facilities, and that includes the California hazardous waste that is sent there.

We have a very strong compliance record at each of the facilities and our relationships with the local communities are exemplary and mutually beneficial. We take these responsibilities seriously on a nationwide basis and not just in California. And we view ourselves as long term stewards of all the materials placed into our facilities, not only the California hazardous waste, but everything that's brought there. Bottom line, the waste that are sent from California to these out-of-state facilities are in very good hands.

And we look forward to participating in the development of the Haz Waste Management Report and continuing to provide the services that have been discussed here today. Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks very much. Appreciate it. We're asking folks to keep their comments to two minutes, please.

Yeah, thank you. This is Miguel Alatorre, Jr. I'm one of the residents of Kettleman City. I'm an organizer for Green Action, a Member of El Pueblo para el Aire y Agua Limpia de Kettleman City and a Director for California Environmental Justice Coalition. And I'm here today with a really heavy heart. The plight of Kettleman City in Buttonwillow, California, is a dire one. These communities, vulnerable, exposed, are trapped in a cycle of environmental injustice that can no longer be ignored. Cal Enviro Screen 4.0.

The state's own tool exposes the vulnerability of these communities. With Kettleman City ranking 92 and Buttonwillow a 96 percentile, these figures represent not just numbers, but lives burdened by an unfair share of pollution's consequences. In the shadow of these stark numbers, Waste Management's Kettleman Hills facility has operated on an expired permit since June 30 of 2013. Clean Harbor's Buttonwillow's facility's permit expired even earlier on April 6, 2006. Notice of deficiencies serve as a haunting reminder of regulatory violations that continue to plague these communities.

But the gravest of all is the state's failure to enact the cumulative health impact criteria and permit decisions, despite a mandate to do so January 1 of 2018. This very system designed to protect us remains silent in the face of injustice. Esteemed Members, I implore you to grasp the severity of our situation. We need to put a moratorium on the dumping in the communities of Kettleman City and Buttonwillow.

And this is something that we have asked the BES many times, politely and impolitely. At the last El Cerrito meeting, we brought 100 community residents that were very upset with the BES's decision for keeping well, not just the BES, but this decision to keep these toxic waste dumps open in these marginalized communities. So we're really looking forward to you guys helping us out in this reform and getting these dumps closed. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Yes, sir.

Good afternoon, Chairs and Members. My name is Jonathan Pruitt, representing the California Environmental Justice Alliance. We appreciate this opportunity to offer our insights on this issue. We also appreciate the ongoing partnership we have with DTSC. It's essential to really recognize that this hearing is a result of the years of work, the dedicated efforts of residents and organizations leading this environmental justice-driven work.

In our letter, we noted several key areas warrant legislative attention and action, and due to timing up briefly, just touch along one of them. DTSC's role in housing redevelopment processes is unclear, and significant gaps need to be addressed. Contrary to common belief, DTSC does not provide consultation and oversight for all redevelopment initiatives on contaminated sites. This can lead to significant differences between a developer's chosen soil remediation method and DTSC standard.

This misconception highlights the necessity for an improved DTSC oversight on broad field redevelopment processes. We understand the pressing need to address the housing requirement in California, however, expediting that process should not be at the compromise through environmental reviews and proper cleanup.

Given the current challenges in identifying toxic sites statewide, we would like to sort of see an established, secure and efficient site review process, which is imperative to ensure that the creation of safe and healthy housing. CEJA remains committed to fostering a collaborative relationship with DTSC and the BES. We appreciate your thoughtful consideration of our concerns and hope that you take our actions and requests and help lead positive change in DTSC. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon. My name is Grecia Orozco, commenting on behalf of the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment. Thank you so much again for having this opportunity to speak and provide feedback today. I'd like to first start off by thanking current ongoing efforts by DTSC and BES to really work with community-based organizations. It is a very necessary first step to start developing that trust with communities, but there's still some more work that needs to be done.

Despite this outreach and everything that we have already communicated with this organization, there are still, as you've heard today, a lot of community concerns that remain unaddressed. There are many contaminated sites throughout the state that have not undergone necessary cleanups. And these are sites that community members have come forward at BES hearings to DTSC directly multiple times throughout the past years, and nothing has been done. And it might be an issue with capacity, resources, but still, this needs to be addressed.

We understand that there are some challenges associated with these concerns, but there needs to be some mechanism, perhaps, that the Legislature can help with, to put forth some strategies, implementation, investigation, or working with these communities directly to try and address these in a more expedited manner. The development of the EJAC is a great step forward in this process, but currently the budget only allows for it to be going until 2025.

And for decades, disadvantaged and marginalized communities have been dealing with the public health and detriment and safety impacts due to hazardous waste facilities and contaminated soils in their areas. As such, we propose that a budget should be expanded to allow this to be a permanent body so that you can continue to hear from community members directly on how to address these issues in a manner that is sufficient.

And lastly, I'd like to end by asking the Legislature to please monitor development of 673 Implementation if there are additional resources or oversight that is needed to really expedite this so that the cumulative impacts are addressed in permitting that is crucial for our communities to get back and get better based on the decades of toxic waste that has been gone under seen in these communities. Thank you so much again.

Thank you. Yes, ma'am.

Good afternoon. My name is Jennifer Ganata with Communities for a Better Environment. I wanted to thank you for having this hearing. I think it's very important. I also wanted to thank the work that DTSC has done. So, Communities for a Better Environment has worked with DTSC on the cleanup for Exide for many years, since Director Williams has been there. I would say this has been a pretty fruitful dialogue between the agency and our organization.

For a state agency, I feel like we have pretty much weekly conversations now. But I did want to kind of raise up something that Ingrid had raised and that has to do with CEQA exemptions. And in regards to the Clara process and the California Land Reuse and Revitalization Act, I think a report that Senate EQ did a few years back looked at a CEQA survey from 2011 to 2016.

In that CEQA survey, 388 categorical exemptions happened under Class 30 exemptions, 90 negative declarations, six mitigated neg decs, and only 16 EIRs. So that means that the agency is looking at cleanup that would happen on Brownfields, but oftentimes those are not going through EIRs and actually being exempted by CEQA, which has, I think, a different impact in environmental justice communities, particularly where those sites might be pretty close to residential.

And so I think kind of going back to what Ingrid was saying, looking at the data and how that's happening. So my understanding of the Class 30 CEQA exemption is if the cleanup is less than a million dollars, it gets an exemption. But the information as to whether it's a million dollars or less, that's coming from the project proponent. So, if you're the project proponent, you're not going to say your cleanup is going to cost a million dollars or more, because then you'd have to do an EIR.

So if there is a way to look at that, because this is something we're seeing in southeast LA. We have a project that we were able to close down with the help of LA County, but it's still zoned as industrial, and they want to do reuse. But because it's a ministerial exemption, that's local land use, which DTSC can't really do anything about, it went through a ministerial exemption.

However, the soil remediation goes through DTSC and through the Clara process, they can do a site remediation plan, but if it's less than a million dollars, then it could still be exempted. So that still means the community that's been impacted for multiple years has no say in what happens in that project, even though that project is across the street from where lots of folks live. So I just wanted to raise that, and I do appreciate this space. CB is a member of CEQA, so I know a lot of our issues were addressed already. Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks very much. Hi there.

Thank you. Chair Allen. Chair Lee. Senator Stern. Tim Shestek with the American Chemistry Council. Just wanted to make a brief comment about a paragraph in the background document. It speaks to the various bills that have passed over the years restricting certain chemicals in various product applications.

The fact that many of those do not have any provisions around providing guidance to the regulated community, no standardized testing methods for compliance, really resulting in a situation where it may be very difficult for the regulated community to comply with some of those requirements. And we're also seeing that this year, a couple of bills that are moving through the Legislature with that same situation.

Just speaking today would encourage the committee, encourage the Legislature to perhaps convene various stakeholders over the interim to look at what are some appropriate roles, perhaps for DTSC to play, to inform those laws, to provide some guidance to the regulated community, perhaps provide some insight into various testing methodologies that might be available for the regulated community to comply.

So I can't speak for the broader business community, but I think there would be interest from a number of my colleagues to participate in that discussion and would encourage the Legislature to look at that. So appreciate the time today. Thank you.

Thank you, Tim. Thank you. Yes.

Hi. Good afternoon, Committee Members. Thank you so much for creating this time and space for us to speak to you all. My name is Jazmine Johnson. I'm the Director of Health and Environment Programs at Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles. Excuse me, haven't had enough water today. We're an environmental, health and justice organization based in LA. And we're also a part of the CEQA Coalition.

So I want to first thank DTSC staff for their tireless efforts and work this year, over the past year to work with EJ groups across the state, particularly through robust conversations to ensure that the CVCI programs, especially ECRG, D, and E programs, are centering equity and preventing further harm to EJ communities.

And this collaboration is a tremendous step forward, I think, as Ingrid said, towards ensuring that the state and the agency are both responsive to community needs and that they're actually centering communities in conversations that ultimately lead to changes that will impact these communities and allow them to thrive in place. Despite these efforts though, there is still a lot of work to be done.

I know you've heard this a dozen and one times, but we just want to uplift some of the things that several speakers have said today and that's really looking at the ways in which we dispose of hazardous waste and pay attention to the fact that they're not necessarily centering equity or health.

And so looking at current policies and practices within the agency that really limit its ability to truly reimagine the ways that we're generating and managing waste and making sure we're prioritizing the health and safety of communities.

So things such as the limited policy and financial support for safe remediation techniques including buyer remediation, the lack of prioritization of community input and remediation work plan approval or selection as well as the prioritization of cleanups to the highest standard, regardless of in use, which I know was mentioned as a challenge, but something we should really be striving towards. And also lengthy and burdensome bureaucratic processes that are required for remedial action to take place on sites.

So things that are preventing sort of early remediation processes to take place before that plan is fully implemented. So I think one of the things we've talked about is potentially exploring using bioremediation even before plans are fully in place, so that sites are not just sitting vacant and communities are being harmed in the meantime.

Further, we would like to see more resources allocated to ensure that the agency is not necessarily relying on developers or municipalities for community engagement, but instead are proactively engaging and building relationships with cleanup communities. And I know a lot of these things are going to be addressed in the hazardous waste management plan, but really, we need to work on these now to make sure that communities aren't continuing to be put on hold while the plan is being reviewed and implemented.

Thank you so much.

So just quickly, I just wanted to say that we do have a long standing history with working with DTSC and BES, and we really just want to, again, prioritize restoring communities to their full health and just want to thank you all again for the engagement that we've had.

Thank you. Thank you. All right. We're so overtime. We're going to go to the phone lines. We're going to ask the folks on the phones to provide up to 1 minute of testimony. Let's go to you, moderator.

Thank you. And at this time, please press one, then zero. Again, it's one zero. And then go first to line number 14. One moment here. Please go ahead, line 14.

Hi. This is Melissa Bumstead. Can you hear me? Hello?

Yeah, we can hear you. Yeah.

Great. Thank you. My name is Melissa Bumstead. I live less than 4 miles from the Santa Susanna Field Lab. My daughter is a two-time cancer survivor, and she's one of 80 kids in our community who recently got cancer. In fact, two children last month were diagnosed with rare cancers in Simi Valley. Earlier this year, DTSC broke the 2007 and 2010 cleanup agreements for their site with their new Peir that has provisions that will allow Boeing to leave 90% of the toxic contamination on site.

And NASA and Department of Energy can now leave up to 65% of their acreage contaminated. That is written into the PEIR language. These new agreements have been done without public involvement, without environmental review, and they're going to leave generations of residents at risk to exposure from radioactive and toxic contamination. DTSC's, so called best science, continues to favor the polluters, and it contradicts established and health protective science.

And we do not consider the 20 minutes presentation next month at the BES hearing to actually be community engagement because the documents have already been finalized. We have worked very hard to be heard by the DTSC, and we have worked very hard to have some oversight with the BES, but that has not been provided to us. And I believe that that's contrary to the intent of SB 158. And I think there's room to revise for site specific reviews.

Our grassroots group forced to sue the DTSC and Boeing over CEQA violations, along with other NGO groups in hope of returning to a site protected cleanup standard. But having to sue for justice is an additional burden on frontline communities. We believe that DTSC is being influenced by corporate developers, polluters, and politics that continue to harm communities like mine.

We hope that you will take further consideration into revising SB 158 to include site specific review, so that way, communities like mine don't have to sue, but can actually have someone we can bring up our grievances to decide between us. Thank you.

Thank you. Let's hear from the next caller.

And that'll be line 39.

Hello?

Hi, there. Yeah, we can hear you.

Okay. Hi, I'm Rachel Rowney. I'm a concerned citizen. DTSC is failing the community right now and failing to do its job to regulate toxic substances. I'm going to bring up something that a lot of people have brought up, and it's Santa Susana Field Laboratory, one of the most polluted sites in the state. The cleanup for the site was supposed to be done in 2017, yet DTSC only published their draft EIR at this time, with the final EIR only being certified this year.

Within the EIR, DTSC does not hold to the standards of the legally binding cleanup documents signed years ago. Instead, they let the polluters, NASA, Boeing, and the Department of Energy get away with a substandard cleanup, putting our community at risk. DTSC leadership claims certifying the PEIR will allow DTSC to move forward with a full cleanup of Santa Susana Field Laboratory.

Yet the PEIR breaches the 2007 and 2010 agreements, which required a full cleanup, and will instead allow the great majority of the contamination to never be cleaned up. Within the PEIR, the DTSC fails to directly answer comments of their assessment of alternatives, and fails to do what the EIR is meant to do. I ask you to leave the politics, power, and money aside, and think of what our community needs. Thank you.

Thank you. Next caller.

Line 34, please go ahead.

Hello. Can you hear me?

Yes.

My name is Daniel Hirsch. I'm the retired director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at UC Santa Cruz, and the president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap. I followed DTSC for three decades. It is one of the most dysfunctional captured regulatory agencies captured by the polluting interests of late that I know. Rather than making progress at reforming itself, it is currently worse than I have ever seen it. It poses a toxic threat to public health.

I was simply flabbergasted by the extraordinary false statement Director Williams made earlier today about the Santa Susana Field Lab, heavily contaminated former reactor and missile testing facility in the LA area. She claimed that DTSC had just certified an EIR that guarantees a "full" cleanup. In fact, EIR breaches the 2007 and 2010 legally binding agreements, which required full cleanup and instead allows the majority of the contaminated soil to never be cleaned up.

And last year, breaking long-standing pledges not to do so, DTSC cut a widely criticized backroom deal with Boeing, abrogating the 2007 agreement. These broken promises will, if not overturned, leave the public at perpetual risk. I urge the committees to hold a field hearing on the Santa Susana scandal, which, if not, redressed, will put at risk tens of thousands of people, including many in the districts of Senators Stern and Allen. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Next caller.

Line 36, please go ahead. 36, your line is open.

Hello? Can you hear me?

Yes, we can. Yes, please proceed.

Okay. I am also speaking on the Santa Susana Field Lab. My name is Jeni Knack. For those of you not familiar with the site, over 700,000 people live within 10 miles of the site. Federally funded independent studies show a 60% increased cancer incident rate for certain cancers for those living within 2 miles of the site. Today, Dr. Williams stated that there was information about the cleanup decision that was being circulated that was not true.

Those of us speaking about the cleanup decisions today, stating that Boeing is being let out of their cleanup agreement with the possibility of leaving over 90% of their soil cleanup not cleaned up on site. That is according to special investigative studies published by Reuters and independent expert analysis by Committee to Bridge the Gap. These claims are not false. They're independent and based in scientific analysis by reputable sources. The decisions that they came to with Boeing were done without public input, without environmental review, breaking CEQA regulations.

And what we are concerned about is that the decisions have already been made. So, as most of us have stated, we are being forced to ask our electives to sue the state to maintain those 2007, 2010 cleanup agreements. We would like this legislative body, this joint committee, to stay on task because we believe that DTSC is still a captured agency, that they are failing everyone when you look at the details.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right, let's hear from the next caller.

Line eleven, your line is open.

Thank you. My name is Logan Williams. I'm sorry to disappoint the legislators who are hoping to see that your efforts are bearing fruit. They're not. DTSC is fundamentally unchanged. You've gotten a taste today of what we and the impacted communities experience when dealing with DTSC.

You've already heard that Director Williams lied, lied to your face, when she said today that the newly released EIR for the Santa Susana Field Lab will result in a full cleanup, when in fact, it will leave most site contamination right where it sits. Director Williams can't admit this because doing so would rock the boat too much. So she accuses the community of being factually incorrect. When we get into the factual details, it's clear her position has no basis.

But we don't have time in a hearing like today's to get into those details. And she's able to fall back on her authority because who are you going to believe? Her or the community? DTSC continues to be patronizing the community members, continues to sign off on polluter-friendly deals, and continues to be believed by people in power when it lies about all this.

Chair Allen, I call on you in particular to get involved in the Santa Susana Field Lab to site the constituents in your own district. Please, hear us. Change the pattern. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Let's go to the next caller.

Line 37, please go ahead.

Hello. Thank you for taking my comment. DTSC is objectively failing to do its job to regulate toxic chemicals. They are captured by polluters and working for the polluters instead of the public. If we take the Santa Susana Field Lab as an example, DTSC's negligence is clearly visible. The legally binding 2007 and 2010 cleanup agreements required SSFL to be completely cleaned up by 2017. But here we are in 2023, and the promised cleanup has yet to begin.

DTSC only published the draft Environmental Impact Report for the cleanup in 2017, and it's taken six years to issue the deeply flawed final EIR. We've heard today already that Director Williams claim that the EIR assures a full cleanup of SSFL is false. The EIR breaks the 2010 and 2007 cleanup agreements in many ways, and instead allows greatly weaker cleanup standards that will leave the majority of toxic chemicals and radionuclides to never be cleaned up.

By stalling the cleanup for years beyond its due date and then violating agreements that required a full cleanup, the contamination from SSFL continues to migrate off site into the surrounding neighborhoods. DTSC has put the local communities at great risk. We need the legislator to hold their feet to the fire.

Okay. All right, thank you. Let's hear for the next caller.

Line nine, please go ahead.

Yes, can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

Thank you. My name is Sally Tobin. DTSC has a core mission of protecting California's people, communities, and environment from toxic substances and restoring contaminated land. Unfortunately, as you're hearing, up and down the state of California, DTSC's performance is a big disappointment. I speak as a resident of Richmond, California. Richmond is an environmental community by any measure, with income disparities, asthma-risk, major freeways, a refinery, and a long history of industrial sites.

Yet DTSC advocacy of tapping near the Zeneca site shoreline is virtually guaranteed to increase the burden of toxic sites by spreading contamination into neighborhoods and into San Francisco Bay, risking both the health of future residents and the vibrant biological life cycle that is the basis for commercial fishing, crabbing, port fishing, and recreational industries. Plus, a dead bay will no longer reduce carbon, contributing to the climate. Well, why isn't Zeneca being required to clean up this mess? And how many rare cancers will present themselves among Richmond residents?

And why isn't DTSC carrying out a comprehensive assessment of shoreline sites, especially around the bay? There just seems to be a lot of questions that need to be answered before you will have any degree of trust in the community.

Thank you so much. All right, let's go to the next caller.

Line 35, please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Janet Johnson. Can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

Great. Thank you. I am Richmond Shoreline Alliance Co-Chair and Sunflower Alliance Co-Coordinator, and I want to thank you for this opportunity to address you. DTSC and BES have uplifted north Richmond, but downplayed Richmond's Superfund qualified Zeneca site right on the San Francisco Bay shoreline in an SB 535 disadvantaged community. This 86-acre site contains half a million cubic yards of contaminated soil, a toxic soup of chemicals and heavy metals dumped by Stauffer Chemical for a century.

DTSC has ignored the will of our community for an appropriate cleanup as well as the threats of rising sea level and groundwater. And it's enabling development of 4000 condos there by recommending experimental treatments and then capping this unlined site. Regarding public participation, as DTSC revamps its public participation strategy, impacted communities should be able to submit recommendations during the process and not be relegated to input and feedback. Thank you so much again.

Thank you. Next caller.

Currently none further in queue.

Okay. All right. Really do appreciate all the comments. Gosh, so much. Almost an overwhelming number of topics to deal with and a whole slew of important follow-up to do. So I do appreciate everyone's participation. Obviously more to come, but this was very fruitful and learned a lot. And with that, we're going to adjourn this hearing. Thank you.