Senate Standing Committee on Environmental Quality

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our joint oversight hearing with the Assembly Committee on Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials and Senate Environmental Quality Committee. I'm the Chair of ESTM, Assemblymember Damon Connolly. We're awaiting the Chair of Senate EQ, Chair Blakespear, who is on her way, as well as other members, but welcome to Assemblymember Castillo.

Thanks for joining us. So, let me set the stage. We're gonna be talking about a couple of topics, including an evaluation of the Board of Environmental Safety, as well as Department of Toxic Substances Control reform measures that have been implemented in the last few years. So, again, wanna welcome everyone. Today's oversight hearing is the fifth since the creation of the Board of Environmental Safety through the enactment of Senate Bill 158 in 2021.

The main focus of today's oversight hearing will be on the Board of Environmental Safety. As I mentioned, five years ago, the legislature passed SB 158 that enacted a number of reforms of DTSC and also created the board. We haven't taken a close look at the board since it was created, and now is a great opportunity to review that board and its operations. The original goals of the board were to improve transparency in decision making at DTSC, provide accountability for DTSC, and provide fiscal stability.

So, the question for each witness will be—and we have some good ones today—how has that gone?

Additionally, it will be helpful to know if we missed the mark five years ago, and if so, what changes could we make to help improve the board? Recently, it's come to our attention that one of the board members appointed this year subsequently was hired as a lobbyist and has clients regulated by DTSC. I understand that the board did some due diligence when this transpired earlier this year. Hearing about that process will be helpful.

Additionally, there are some groups that have raised concerns that this situation could pose an appearance of a conflict, and this is also concerning.

We spent a lot of time and effort with the earlier DTSC reforms, in order to impart—repair the department's reputation. I'm not sure this situation helps. I look forward to hearing from the board and possibly meeting with board members individually on this topic in the near future. So, again, before we start, I wanna thank all the witnesses in advance. Hopefully, we will hear from Senator Blakespear when she is able to join us.

With that, I would invite our first panel to come on up.

Welcome, everyone. And why don't we hearse—first hear—from Angela Johnson Meszaros.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, members. My name is Angela Johnson Meszaros, and thank you for inviting me here to discuss DTSC. I'm a Senior Attorney with the Community Partnerships Program at Earth Justice, and our team represents frontline community leaders demanding a safe, just, and healthy environment in which their communities thrive. My appearance here today is not on behalf of a client.

I'm simply an informed participlant—participant—in the work to push DTSC to protect people and the environment from unjustified or unlawful threats posed by the creation, use, and disposal of hazardous substances. Unfortunately, I'm here to tell you that DTSC remains stuck. On July 20th, Director Butler reported to DTSC that—reported that, "DTSC met 70% of the prioritized deliverables that she developed for the last fiscal year." That's a C-minus.

Sure, it's a passing grade, but just barely, and far from what's needed. SB 158 directs the Board to review and consider for, for approval the Director's annual priorities and, and to develop metrics for each department at the, at the agency. So, in response to the Director's report, the Board thanked the Director for her team and her team for their hard work. And, of course, we should thank people for their hard work. And we cannot continue to assume that a C-minus is acceptable.

Director Butler, obviously, is not the first to struggle with moving this agency forward. Indeed, after years—decades—of reform work, as you've noted, Mr. Chair, the legislature decided to create the Board, in part to shape policy, provide more transparency into how decisions are made, and to hold DTSC more accountable for its decisions or its failure to make decisions.

SB 158 was meant to be a type of reset for DTSC, a time to learn—to turn the corner on the bad old days and to usher in the good new days. And that was five years ago, as you noted. So, last year, I appeared before this joint oversight hearing, and I observed that DTSC seems to not share our feelings of the fierce urgency of now.

That is a phrase that Dr. Martin Luther King used to call for immediate and decisive action needed to address critical issues. And in that same "I Have a Dream" speech, Dr. King juxtaposed the need for urgent action against what he called the "tranquilizing drug of gradualism," the illusion of progress, the promise of things to come at a later time. Gradualism is a potent mental state. It's addictive. It is the opposite of change.

And I call again on the Board and on this Legislature to take clear, decisive action to break the spell of gradualism. The role of the Board is to provide leadership to move the department beyond some of its most vexing, long identified problems. And if the Board is unwilling or unable to provide leadership, its role and function become much less clear and change remains unlikely. So, as we pause here today to consider the Board and its work, I offer three observations about what I think must change.

The Board must be willing to choose to speak publicly rather than to stay silent.

It must choose to be active rather than to be passive, and in the end, it must choose to decide whether to defer to DTSC staff or to push them. So, leadership sometimes required saying the hard thing publicly. And as you know, in 2015, after a hard-fought bottle—battle—the legislature adopted SB 673, which required DTSC to adopt a number of permitting and regulatory reforms.

And as I noted last year, DTSC did some of what DT—of what SB 673 mandated, but not the parts that directly protect people from facilities that are too lawless, too close, or too dangerous to continue to ignore.

Adoptions of these regulations has been an urgent priority for communities around the state for a decade. We raised this priority at the very first board meeting in March of 2022 and at many, many subsequent times thereafter. Finally, in the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026, direct—Director—Butler released two proposed regulations. Suddenly, the community's urgency has been replaced by DTSC's haste. Now, there's no time, we're told, for engagement with communities about the proposed regulations.

DTSC gave a mere 45 days for public comment, both of which, which fell over both the fall and the winter holidays. We're super grateful that Senators GonzaleZm Durazo, and Menjivar sent a letter to Director Butler elevating the importance of community participation for these rule makings and echoing our calls for more time for our engagement. The Board was silent.

The Board has also been silent about the issues we raised in our letters and public comments on the proposed regulations, both of which are fatally flawed because they do absolutely nothing to address the harms of the over concentration of hazards in communities of color and the twin evil of facilities that cannot, or will not, follow laws meant to protect health in the environment. Absolutely nothing.

Sometimes, leadership and public silence are not compatible. DTSC's regulations are meant—DTSC's regulations to implement their directives in SB 673 is really such a moment. The protections the Legislature specifically sought for frontline communities are long, long overdue, and this is urgent. And now, Director Butler has decided to hastily move regulatory language forward that community leaders and their allies opposed because the proposed regulations harm communities.

I'm unsure why, in this moment, the Board is choosing silence. And—but I am sure, in this moment, that silence isn't leadership.

A second example—leadership sometimes requires active, rather than passive, use of authority. For example, SB 158 directs the Board to approve a hazardous waste management plan on a three-year schedule. The plan, according to the statute, shall serve as a comprehensive planning document for the management of hazardous waste in the state. In November, the Board approved the plan.

Frontline community members and their allies provided hours and hours of testimony, broken up into tiny, three-minute bites over a month's long process before the Board.

People pointed out problems with both the process and the content of the plan. And at every step along the way, the board members themselves pointed out very deep problems with the plan for which the Director was seeking approval. Ultimately, the Board decided that it could not refuse to approve the plan, that it itself noted was clearly flawed because AB 158, they say, required only that Director Butler submit the plan and that the Board could only make suggestions for, but not require, changes.

It was simply stunning. The statute clearly directs the butler to prepare the plan and to present it to the Board for approval.

So, why would the board believe that the clear language which requires it to approve the plan at the same time gives it only the authority to make suggestions for the plan? Sometimes leadership requires the active use of your authority, even when others prefer you to be passive. The adoption of the plan was just such a moment, and I'm not sure why the Board chose to be so pass—passive—in the use of its authority.

But I am sure that to adjust the challenges facing DTSC, the Board's passiveness is not leadership. There's an obvious mismatch between the reasons why the Board was created and the authorities it was given and the urgent need for the department to bring its A game, rather than its C-minus game.

The Board has been too silent, too passive, and too unwilling to make decisions that push DTSC beyond the deeply broken status quo. It's not clear to me that there's more statutory direction that's needed here. I don't know how you legislate leadership, but I definitely would welcome the effort. Ultimately, as I said last year, the way forward is not, and it cannot, be to annually "tsk tsk" about DTSC's ongoing challenges. The work that DTSC holds is simply too critical and too urgent.

Rather, now, five years after the adoption of SB 158, I think it's time that the legislature acknowledged that the changes that we were so hopeful about five years ago did not actually turn the corner from the bad old days to the good new days. I, again, implore this committee to hold oversight hearings and create a body, a select committee, joint committees, so that members can really dig into what is still broken and what needs to be changed.

I fear, at this moment, jumping into a legislative packet without really taking a moment to think about what's left to be done would be an action too fast and too ungrounded to bring us the changes that we need. We really hope that we can move beyond rehashing DTSC's long, troubling history of challenges and, working with frontline communities, we together can chart the next steps that will move us forward.

Mister Chair, Madam Chair, Exide, G and K Aerospace, the Boyle Heights warehouse fire, wildfires, the Moss Landing battery fires, metal shredding facilities, all of these things are the new normal.

In this moment, more than ever, we need a DTSC that can step up and into the urgency, the fierce urgency of now. Thank you.

Thank you. We'll next hear from Kawn Koepke.

Great. Thank you, Mister Chair, Madam Chair, members. Dawn Koepke, on behalf of the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance. As you know, CCEEB, an organization founded in the 70s, by former, then former, Governor, Pat Brown, really brings together a variety of stakeholders, labor, public leaders, and the business community with the goal of finding balance in protecting the environment, which is obviously very important for California, with ensuring a vibrant economy. And so, we approach our work in that vein, and that is our mission.

As we've discussed in prior hearings, CCEEB came to the table over many years on various legislative issues related to DTSC, frankly, fighting many different legislative proposals that we're seeking to, you know, kind of cherry pick various concerns and different solutions to address those concerns that, you know, failed to address kind of some of what CCEEB and its members believed, at that time, were some of the underlying problems and challenges that were leading to those efforts.

And so, ultimately, after many years of wrangling with that, you know, we came to the table working with your chief consultants and both committees to work on SB 158 to try to find a workable approach that helped address some of those underlying issues, ensure, you know, that the governance structure for the department, you know, as well as the fee structures, you know, ensured, you know, that the department was stable, and even for establishing the Board of Environmental Safety that we have today.

That said, we, we should note, up to that point, CCEEB and its members, and arguably, the broader business community, were strenuously opposed to the establishment of an oversight board, largely over concerns about the potential for politicization of the board, given the fact that these issues before DTSC, whether it be related to hazardous waste management, hazardous waste generation permitting, site remediation are very complex and fraught with concerns not only from communities and, you know, other stakeholders, but also, the regulated community as well.

And so, ultimately, you know, it came to the point where CCEEB ultimately decided that, you know, given the intractable nature of some of those challenges, establishing a board did have some importance and relevance for trying to help ensure that there was, you know, greater transparency, accountability, and responsiveness within DTSC.

And to that end, CCEEB strongly advocated for a board, with the assurances that board members would be appointed with critical backgrounds to ensure that they were bringing a level of technical, scientific, law, public health, cumulative impact assessment type experience to help inform that work because these are complex and fraud issues.

Ultimately, the CCEEB supported as part of that negotiated deal, providing the Board with authority to review and make recommendations related to DTSC authorities, overlapping responsibilities with other agencies, efficiencies and programmatic and regulatory responsibilities and authorities, fee setting, and ultimately, to hear and preside over hazardous waste permit appeals. All of this said, we would just note that at that time, there was a lot of discussion about whether to provide the Board with greater authority, including the ability to establish policy.

Ultimately, the Board was structured without significant independent policy authority, and was instead really focused on, at that time, you know, to be established to provide a forum and an impartial ear for stakeholders who had long struggled with various aspects of the Department, as well as to be the entity through that work to hold the Department's feet to the fire, to ensure that transparency, consistency, responsiveness, and just general accountability to all stakeholders.

In this regard, CCEEB's appreciated the Board's accessibility, responsiveness, and encouraged the Board to be mindful of that legislative intent, not only just for this board, but future members of the Board to avoid that politicization and to ensure that their work is aligned to 158.

Ultimately, you know, the Board is, in a matter of speaking from CCEEB's perspective, the yin to DTSC's yang, ensuring that thorough discussion, analysis, and accountability, transparent and responsive decisions are made to ensure progress on the issues that the stakeholders came together, at that time, with the Legislature to push that reform package forward to see that meaningful change.

With regard to the fee setting issue in particular, as you know, and certainly, your staff is very aware, fee setting is a particular priority within the Board for CCEEB and its members and the broader regulated community.

We agreed to pretty sizable, and maybe an understatement, fee increases as part of that reform, understanding that DTSC needed to be well funded so that it could move forward and accomplish its mission, responsibilities, not only in terms of protecting communities, the environment, but being responsive to permits that were languishing that the regulated community wanted to see move forward and be finalized, just as an example.

Ultimately, when it comes to fee setting this year, CCEEB and its members were pleased with the initial, you know, scenarios that were put forward recently by the Board for fiscal year '26–'27 that largely would keep, at least as currently contemplated, fees at status quo, while also still paying off one of the loans to the Beverage Container Program. We appreciate that. Also, would help address concerns over facility fees. Many of our permitted facilities are struggling with very high fees.

The fees would also adjust downward, very significantly, for those fee facilities, which has a very beneficial impact as well.

But given, you know, those concerns, we do continue to have concerns about the structural deficit for particularly the generation handling fee going forward, which, notably, while, you know, perhaps stable potentially this year, given that the Legislature does have fee exemptions before it for consideration now, that does raise significant concerns not only about fees going into this fiscal year, but also potential impacts on structural deficits, who's going to have to make up that difference for that fee authority as well.

In terms of a recommendation on fee authority and fee setting, what we would really strongly urge the Legislature, Department of Finance, broader administration, and CDTFA in the department is really to work more quickly and fervently with the Board to provide some of the details around, you know, what the budget is, you know, kind of some fee—underlying fee components.

Right now, the Board is not receiving a lot of that detail until very late in the budgeting process, which is delaying the ability, for one, to better understand kind of what is the outlook for the next year, the development of those fee scenarios, much less giving the Board, DTSC, as well as stakeholders and the Legislature, the ability to work through that budget process to make adjustments, whether it be structural adjustments for the fees, much less, you know, could we, you know, maneuver other components to help mitigate ongoing increases going forward.

So, we certainly would strongly urge kind of work to move that forward faster. Ultimately, I think CCEEB and its members believe that DTSC is making strong progress and to be more accountable, transparent, and timely in their work, and the Board is serving its purpose to effectuate these changes that persisted long before the current Director, who we believe has been instrumental in the progress we're seeing with the Department across the board. The 2021 reform package ultimately was just an important first step.

It was a meaningful step, but it was just the first step.

We do believe there's more work to be done. And I would just, if I may, respectfully, disagree to some degree with my fellow panelists, in terms of the Board on various issues and DTSC, and kind of their work as it relates to the Hazardous Waste Management Plan.

One of the components in SB 158 that CCEEB and its members, at that time, you know, really, you know, advocated strongly for was taking a look at hazardous waste classification, given that we do have classification that's very different from other states and even the Federal Government, and as well, some of the management standards associated with that.

CCEEB certainly appreciated that the Department was trying to move forward that recommendation as part of its original Hazardous Waste Management Plan, which ultimately, for a variety of reasons and factors, received a great deal of pushback from communities, as well as the Board, which ultimately resulted in that particular recommendation, despite the feedback to the contrary, being pulled out of the Hazardous Waste Management Plan.

So, I think that's just an indication that the Board is doing its job in raising concerns, hearing communities, standing up for that feedback, even when Department is pushing something that we—that the business community—may believe is warranted, appropriate, based in science, what have you.

So, I just felt that was important to, to mention. All that said, CCEEB and its members sincerely appreciate the Legislature's ongoing engagement on these issues. Certainly, would invite either of you to really be, you know, in the weeds with us on these sorts of issues. Certainly, would be helpful. And at the end of the day, just happy to answer any questions.

Thank you.

Thank you. We're gonna hear from Miguel Alatorre.

Let me get my notes out. Sorry. Good afternoon, Chair and members of the Board. My name is Miguel Alatorre Jr. I'm the Executive Director and Cofounder of the Unidos Network, as well as the Co-Chair of the Environmental Justice Advisory Council and Planning Commissioner of District 2 in Kings County.

I also happen to live in Kettleman City, about three miles as the crow flies north of the Waste Management Hazardous Waste Facility in the Kettleman Hills. I also live about, uh, 55 minutes away from the Buttonwillow Clean Harbors Facility. So, when the Legislature talks about hazardous waste policy, it's talking about my neighborhood and the people that I love and my friends and family. And so, I wanted to start by mentioning that because it is a real effect on our community.

I'm gonna speak about what I feel the BES has gotten right.

So, before SB 158, community members in my region had no standing venue where a DTSC decision could be questioned in public and on the record. That has changed. Six, six public meetings a year, an ombudsperson, and an annual appearance for you, and a permanent appeal process with a published form and a filing window. These are not small things when you come from a community that's historically found out about permanent decisions after they were finalized already.

So, it's, it's definitely a change that we've loved to see.

The Hazardous Waste Management Plan is the clearest proof. The Board did not simply receive DTSC's draft. It sent it back. It insisted source reduction sit at the top of the hierarchy. It insisted on measurable goals. It removed the recommendation on alternative management standards for waste soil that would have moved more material towards landfills, like mine in Kettleman City, or the ones in our partner's in Clean Harbors in Buttonwillow.

And it told the Department and public to engage the people who live there, where the waste ends up. That in my eyes is a board doing its job. The EJAC is—exists for the same reason. It is the first structure of its kind in this department. Here's my concern, said plainly.

The Board is consistently eager to lift up community voices, but it is not consistently equipped to act upon what it hears. The Board approves the Director's annual priorities and adopts performance metrics, but the resource decisions that determine whether these priorities are achievable move on a separate track. Budget change proposals are developed inside the port—the Department—and travel to finance without the board playing any formal role. So, the body accountable for performance has no authority over the resources that produce it. Communities feel this directly.

We raise something at a board meeting or through the Environmental Justice Advisory Council meetings. The Board agrees it matters, and then the follow-up depends on the staff capacity that nobody at the table controls. Sixteen years, 10 priority products, exide onsite remediation not yet begun. These are capacity problems as much as policy problems.

The other gap is how community voice counts in permit decisions. This is the second gap and it sits inside the permit process itself. SB 673 promised that the vulnerability of nearby populations and their existing health risks would account when DTSC issues modifies or renews a permit. Eleven years later, the two criteria that carry that prom—that promise—community vulnerability and setback distances are still in rule making. Meanwhile, the criteria that got finished first are the ones a facility can document on paper.

Past violations, financial assurance, personnel training, those do matter, but they are parts of the standard that do not require anyone to ask a resident what is happening in their home or around their neighborhoods. The appeal process has the same shape. Only someone who commented on the draft permit or smoke at—spoke at—the hearing can petition for review.

That is a reasonable rule for people who knew that the hearing was happening. In an unincorporated area, like the ones that I serve in both Kettleman City and Buttonwillow with no City Council, no local newspaper, and a workforce that's in the fields when the meeting is called, that rule quietly closes the door before most people know that there is one to walk through.

So, what I'm asking for is, on the budget process, to require the Department of Toxic Substances Control to present every budget change proposal to the Board in public session before it goes to the Department of Finance and transmit the Board's concurrence and written comment alongside it. Choose to give the Board authority to originate its own BCP for Board operations and for the EJAC, the Environmental Justice Advisory Council, so community infrastructure is not competing inside the Department's internal ranking.

Three is to tie the BCP review to the performance metrics the Board already adopts, so resources and accountability sit in the same place, and to require the Department to report back to the Board on how funded positions were actually deployed. On transparency, with regards to community engagement, I'd like to see, and so would the communities like to see, to require the Department of Toxic Substances Control to publish an annual accounting of what it actually spends on community engagement.

Staff positions assigned, translation and interpretation costs, technical assistance grants awarded and to whom, and travel and meeting support available to community participants. Right now, nobody outside of the Department can tell you what exists. Groups like mine spend real time discovering what a resource was—I'm sorry.

Groups like mine spend real time discovering what a resource was available only after the window closed. It's also nice if we would require that accounting be presented to the Board in public session, so that the Board can see whether the engagement it is asking for is funded. Then, on permits, it's, it's really amazing that we haven't finalized track two on a date certain and let the Board hold DTSC to it.

Give the Board explicit authority to require, as a condition of appeal review, what DTSC document—how community testimony was weighed in the permit decision and not merely that it was received. Ask the Board to examine whether the standing rule for appeals is functioning as a fairness protection or as a filter.

On the EJAC, we'd like to see it treat—we'd like to see, on the EJAC, to treat its funding as a dedicated line item rather than a discretionary allocation. An advisory body that has to relegate to its own survival every cycle cannot do candid work. I wanna be direct about why these pieces belong together. When a community shows up, testifies, and they cannot find out what happened to what it said, people stop showing up. That is not apathy.

That is a rational response to a process that does not report back and does not work for community members. I'm here to ask you to—I'm not here to ask you to weaken the Department. I'm here because the board you created is the best listening structure DTSC has ever had, and listening without leverage becomes a burden on the people doing the talking.

Give the Board a formal voice in the budget process, transparency about what engagement resources actually exist, and authority to make community input count and permit decisions, and you will get a board that can finish what our community start. And we have a really big problem with hazardous waste in California, and I would say the Board is definitely eager on helping, but it needs the teeth in order to actually make the help tangible to the community members in Kettleman City and Buttonwillow.

Thank you.

Thank you to all three of you. Really helpful testimony. I'll start it out with a few questions, maybe going in order of the witnesses. Ms. Meszaros, so it sounds like your organization originally opposed SB 158.

Yes.

And you've raised a number of ongoing concerns. We'll get into those a little bit as well. But given the original opposition, do you feel that there have been any positives that have come about, due to the creation of the Board, especially around community engagement, or if you could just kinda elaborate on that.

My mother raised me to believe that there's always something nice to be said, but it was not a lesson that I took kindly. So, it's not my position that nothing positive has happened over the past five years. The concerns that we had when the bill was adopted remain concerns, but there is a place, to Mister Alatorre's comments, there is a place now where communities can go and say a thing, and there is a public forum that didn't exist previously.

But the flip side of that, also as was noted, is going to a place where you say a thing, but nobody does anything to address the thing you said, is very disheartening.

Now, different people have different notions about what that should mean. Some people believe that having the forum there is better than having no forum at all. Some people believe, I believe, that I'd rather not go to be ignored because there's no part of being ignored that is satisfying, fruitful, or productive. So, the Board has done that.

The—associated with that is when you have a public forum, but all your input is either in writing, which, who knows what happens to that, or in three minute moments in front of a microphone, that's not really a format that facilitates deep, engaged conversation.

So, if the Board is going to be that forum, then there need to be, I believe, structural changes in how it uses that forum to build a format that is much more engaging and productive.

And you kind of address this in the sense of, as you noted, it, it's hard to statutorily address leadership. That having been said, part of our role is to consider bills and statutes. Do you have any suggestions that we could make statutorily to improve the Board?

So, this is always a very tough question, and I just wanna, again, reiterate that I am not speaking on behalf of others. So, I listened to the list of things that my colleague here at the table mentioned. Those are all helpful and productive things. I think there's probably three things that I would make sure were clear in this, in this statute. I would make sure that it's clear that the Board's obligation is to push DTSC, rather than to receive information from DTSC.

I believe that the statute was created in, in 2021 to get DTSC out of its own way. And the difficulty with, I guess, in any daylight between the idea that the Board is a place to get DTSC to make hard moments of change, choices, is problematic because we stay stuck in this cycle. DTSC staff does what it wants to do. The Board says, "Gosh, I wish you wouldn't do that." And the DTSC staff says, "Thanks."

That's not productive. So, I guess I would bring more clarity in what that actually looks like, I would do. The second thing I would do is I would make sure that there is a structure that requires more alignment between the Director's priorities, the Hazardous Waste Management Plan, the metrics for performance. All of these structures that 158 set out is independent articles. In my mind, they all go together, but it is obvious to me now that that is not the way everyone sees it.

So, perhaps there's statutory language that could direct more clearly that the, the money, the art of the—what's going to be the basis for understanding progress and how we measure whether or not we've made progress all go together instead of being little bits and pieces of efforts that we hope to achieve. And the last thing, and maybe this is just me, but I believe that the appeals process before the Board is deeply broken.

I'm not—I don't understand the value of having a board that's primarily about policy and oversight of the agency having a little, mini court process that takes a lot of time, resources, and energy when the Board itself has decided that its role in the process is to defer to permitting's decision.

So, if you set up a agency and you make its oversight body responsible for simply deferring to the staff's decision, then I don't understand why we're spending those resources, both the financial resources of setting up what the Board needs in order to conduct that oversight and the time that it takes to go through that process, when ultimately, we're just going to get a redo of the decision that was made before.

So, I would, I would, urge the Legislature to think carefully about whether the resources associated with the appeals process, the way the Board conducts it now, is a productive use of people's—of the people's money—and of the stakeholders' time and energy.

Great. One more question. You talked quite a bit about just shortcomings and achieving the goal of community participation and facilitating that. Do you have any additional recommendations for us that we could make to improve the Board's or DTSC's engagement with community groups? How much time do we have?

That's right.

Well, now that you mentioned it, what I think is how to get this department to shift how it thinks about engagement with stakeholders is a long-standing challenge. And I fear that what we've done is we've left the same people who've been making the same mistakes in charge of figuring out a new way. So, it could be that the Legislature could direct a public engagement process that requires outside experts to come and to co-create how we're going to engage in conversations about these things.

I think, to my co-panelist's point about this being complex, these, these being complex issues, I think that it is in some ways and it isn't in other ways. So, I don't think there's anything complex about hazardous waste should be create—should be treated carefully and shouldn't be...about people's communities.

I think that's very straightforward. And I think—but I do think that making sure we have the spaces for engaged conversation is more complex. And we are as much stakeholders as anyone in the business community or lots of people. And so, figuring out structures that allow participation where you don't have—I, I don't know if you need to legislate this—don't have your public comment period be at 9:00 on a Tuesday morning.

I mean, do you have to write that in the bill? Maybe. But figuring out, like, what are the best practices? And perhaps there's a way to do this more uniformly—CalEPA, for example. Some people do it better than others.

But if we're going to come to grips with some of these complicated issues about who gets protection and how much and under what circumstances, then we do need a much more robust and engaged way that moves beyond the people who have peep—people—who can engage full-time in Sacramento get heard, and those of us who don't, can't.

Sure.

Hello. Thank you. Thank you to all three of you for your testimony. I, I wanted to, just, first of all, recognize, how important this panel is. And so, to say thank you for both—all three of your individual perspectives.

And I very much appreciate, Mr. Alatorre, your perspective of coming from local government and recognizing how much things actually have improved by having this oversight board that we now have that we didn't have before. I'll also just say, coming from local government myself and serving as the Mayor of my city and on City Council in Southern California, I found that there were always complaints about process, almost no matter what you do.

And so, I just wanna recognize the difficulty of, like, for example, saying testimony should not be taken at 9:00 AM, but the number of people who complain about testimony being taken at 6:00 PM, because that's when people are trying to get home from work and go grocery shopping and pick up their kids, and, and doing it at 10:00 PM is not a good time, and you do it on the Saturday, that conflicts with kids' sports, and nobody wants to spend their weekend doing that.

And you literally can come up with no time that seems like it's a good time to take public testimony. So, there are lots of things that can—the framing of it can make it seem like there's something wrong. But in reality, there's no there's no great answer, where it's just an effort to create forums and process and a way for there to be feedback. So, one of the things I wanted to, narrow in on was some discussion of the fee structure.

So, I wanted to ask Ms. Koepke the question about—you, you address the current fee structure, but I wanted to get maybe a little bit more granular about did you have any suggestions for improvement of this the fee structure while the effort to conduct the fee analysis may be underway?

Was there, was there something that you wanted to suggest in there?

Yeah. I appreciate that. We have done quite a bit of work trying to kind of look at fee structures, you know, alternative options, or even just refinements, to kind of help address not only the structural deficit in out years, but also my members' concerns and the broader regulated communities' concerns about just ongoing increases. I mean, even just with the CPI index factor in that, arguably, those fees could increase every single year in perpetuity, which is frankly not sustainable.

I think, you know, when we're talking and layering that, as I mentioned, with some of the discussions that are currently in process with the Legislature around fee exemptions for certain sectors, appropriately understood, you know, the concern around housing where there needs to be remediation, fee exemptions, and even in those cases, while maybe well intended, understand the concerns that that drives up those costs of those projects, that gap for that loss of revenue has to be filled somewhere.

Further, there's been some discussions in the past also around, you know, geothermal exemptions, given that that's one of the, you know, bright-shining lights for possible new energy sources. Right? And, but that process, as we understand it, produces a great deal of hazardous waste, generate—generates—a great deal of hazardous waste. But there's gotta be some discussion to get back to.

Not the only thing, but around if we are gonna look at exemptions like that and for the fact that much of the work—and I'm not saying, you know, generators should be off the hook.

But in those types of cases, look at, you know, should General Fund dollars be back filling that, rather than shifting that to other fee payers where they had nothing to do with the generation of that waste. Not an easy topic and, and proposal to broach, recognizing there are a lot of budget priorities, the challenges, you know, we've faced over the last few years around budget.

That is something that we absolutely believe the Legislature and the administration should be contemplating, not only just for the fee side of the equation, but even to implement parts of the Hazardous Waste Management Plan that are not focused on necessarily one specific, you know, sector of generators or permittees, but have broader benefit for kind of management, oversight, remediation for the state.

You know, we also have looked at, you know, possibly, you know, kind of diversifying and kind of spreading the costs a little bit more widely, given that there are, you know, benefits derived just generally around our hazardous waste management structure, you know, looking, you know, at, you know, even under the Environmental Fee, for example.

It's a widespread fee across, you know, employers within the state, recognizing that, in theory, the vast majority of employers in the state do have some generation that their process, supply chain, employees are involved with in generating some level of hazardous waste. But the exemption threshold, I think it's 100 employees or lower, pay no fee whatsoever. So, maybe not that that's the silver bullet that's going to solve the fee challenges and concerns and structural deficit. We have been trying to think of that.

Not easy to come up with solutions, but we're committed to working, you know, with you, you know, with your staff.

We've had a lot of conversations, with both committee staff about this, as well as the Department, the Board. So, we remain committed to working on this and trying to figure out, is there, like, a package of refinements or structural changes that would make sense. We also know that the Board has been working with some academics around some recommendations too. So, we are starting to dig into those to see what might be workable, as well. So, we'd welcome the opportunity to continue that discussion.

Assembly member, do you have any question? Okay. Good.

I'm, I'm sorry. Can I just really quickly note? I think that the issue around the fees is actually a really important issue, and there may actually be some overlap between industry and some sector of folks. It's, it's not cleared—it's clear to me that the cost of managing hazardous waste is quite high and there are lots of general public benefits of making sure we do it effectively and well.

And I believe that part of the struggle that we've seen is that as in this—as the regulated community focuses on keeping their costs low, we shave off of a lot of important things that really ought to be happening. And so, I personally am a proponent of General Fund dollars supporting the important work of managing hazardous waste. If we could make it all go away tomorrow, that would be awesome.

But since we can't make it all go away, we've gotta have a sustainable system in place that makes sure that the hazardous waste we've created gets taken care of in a way that's truly protective of front lines in the communities. And I don't know that it works to have an increasingly small number of people have ever-increasing fees to do that.

The General Fund, I think, is the appropriate vehicle to support, not offload, but to support a lot of the work that really ought to happen.

Thank you, Angela. Appreciate that.

Well, thank you to all three witnesses. Appreciate it. Alright. We're gonna move to panel two, updates from the Newsom administration on California DTSC reform.

Welcome

Thank you.

Whenever you're ready.

Alright. Thank you, Chair Blakespear, Chair Connolly, for this opportunity to provide an update on DTSC reform and the work of the board of environmental safety. My name is Andrew Rakestraw, and I have the honor of serving as board Chair. As the board is in its fourth year, I'd like to take a step back and reflect on what we've learned from DTSC reform. My overarching conclusion is simple.

When the board is involved, the outcomes are generally better, better for the public, better for stakeholders, and better for DTSC itself. The board has made DTSC more transparent, more accountable, and more fiscally stable. But four years in, we've also learned a great deal about the strengths and limitations of the current model. I'll focus my remarks in three areas. First, where the board has improved outcomes.

Second, lessons learned about the board itself. Third, DTSC's performance, including where it is succeeding and where improvement is still needed. The board of environmental safety helps DTSC rebuild trust with the public. It does so by improving DTSC's transparency, accountability, and fiscal stability. This board's creation came after years of criticism regarding permitting delays, financial instability, ineffective community engagement, and oversight failures, particularly in the light of Exide.

Four years later, I believe the board has delivered meaningful improvements. First, transparency. The board has created a public forum where DTSC's work can be highlighted, discussed, questioned, and influenced in public. Prior to the board, the public had no such forum. Community members, environmental organizations, businesses, and DTSC leadership all participate in our meetings.

Board members also travel to communities to meet people where they live and work. And through our ombuds program, public concerns receive substantive responses and follow-up. And through workshops and public hearings, stakeholders have opportunities to influence decisions before they are finalized. Second, accountability. The board evaluates DTSC's performance.

The board adopts the director's priorities. The board shapes and adopts performance metrics. The board approves strategic documents. The board was crucial to getting DTSC's environmental justice advisory council off the ground, and the board hears permit appeals in public. Permit appeals are a good example of why board involvement matters.

Historically, permit appeals were heard by a permit appeals officer within DTSC behind closed doors. There were no public hearings, very little transparency, and the review was limited to specific permit conditions. Today, permit appeals are heard before an independent board in the public forums in a public forum, and appellants can challenge the decision to issue or deny the permit itself. The process is imperfect, but it is unquestionably more transparent and accountable. Third, fiscal stability.

DTSC is in a stronger financial position than it was before reform. The board annually establishes fee rates through a public process. The board is also conducting the fee structure analysis required by SB 158. We're working to identify funding mechanisms that sustain DTSC while promoting fairness and long term fiscal stability. More broadly, when the board is involved, the process is generally stronger.

Board involvement creates transparency, creates a public record, opportunities for stakeholder input, and board involvement often results in a better product. So I'll now take a few minutes to reflect on the board itself. I take seriously the comments and criticisms that we hear from community groups, environmental organizations, and industry representatives. I believe the board has been successful but has room to improve. We have also learned several important lessons.

First, DTSC is still adjusting to having a board. It takes time for a large organization to make these types of shifts. The board is attempting to contend with, in the space of five years since passage of SB 158, decades worth of institutional decisions at the state and local levels affecting millions of California Californians. The legislature intentionally created an independent board within DTSC.

We've heard from both community groups and regulated entities that they want the board to be more involved and more assertive, and, frankly, I agree.

The board is strongest when DTSC proactively shares information and when the board is engaged early in the department's process not reacting to potentially settled matters. That's not only gonna strengthen the board, it's going to lead to better results for DTSC and for impacted communities. Second, there remains a mismatch between public expectations and the board's authority and resources. Many stakeholders view the board as California's hazardous waste watchdog. In reality, under SB 158, we have decision making authority in a handful of areas.

We have a small team of 11 staff, four part time Board Members, and one full time board Chair as compared to DTSC staff of more than 1,000. The public often expects the board to provide detailed oversight of every aspect of DTSC's operations and expects that the board will compel DTSC to take decisions, but much of DTSC's day to day work occurs outside of the board's jurisdiction. There are ongoing discussions and disagreements about the extent of the board's oversight of DTSC operations.

Navigating this tension remains one of the board's greatest challenges. I'm committed to using our resources efficiently, but should the board receive additional mandates, we may need more resources.

Third, we continue to navigate the best approach to permit appeals. The process is dramatically more transparent than before reform when appeals were decided by a member of DTSC staff acting as a hearing officer. The transparency alone isn't enough. We've heard concerns that appeals take too long. We've heard concerns that the process is difficult for for participants who do not have legal representation.

We are actively working to improve both efficiency and have created tools to improve the public's understanding of the appeal process. Fourth, the board's role in fiscal oversight is structurally limited. The board establishes annually fee rates, but the primary driver of those fee rates is departmental spending established through the budget process. The board isn't consulted on budget change proposals or programmatic strategic decisions that affect the budget and ultimately affect future re fee rates.

Those decisions are primarily that of the Department of Finance, the governor's office, and the legislature.

However, engagement between the board and DTSC on budget change proposals to provide technical assistance and guidance would allow the board to more fictive effectively manage fees. And finally, the board continues to struggle to raise awareness of its work. Many Californians still don't know the board exists, and this is particularly true of our ombuds program. I am committed to expanding the board's community engagement, including by working with the legislature to increase awareness of the board's ombuds program. So I'll now turn to DTSC's performance.

The board is generally seeing measurable progress, and this is in large part due to director Butler and leadership at DTSC. First, DTSC is doing important work on helping California meet its housing goals, including through community revitalization and infill development. Much infill development is on contaminated land and doesn't have a responsible party to pay for cleanup. DTSC's equitable community revitalization grant plays a critical role in addressing these areas and rebuilding communities across California that have long suffered from high pollution burdens.

But California is in a dynamic fiscal situation, and while the ECRG program is doing everything it can to stretch every dollar, future projects will be challenged under the current funding proposals.

Second, DTSC has substantially reduced the permit backlog that existed prior to reform. Prior to the board's creation, around 30 facilities were operating on continued permits. Today, four of DTSC's approximately 100 permits remain continued. This matters because new permits generally provide modern standards to protect public health and the environment. Third, DTSC is more fiscally stable than it was before reform.

It said, the hazardous waste control account, which includes revenue from the generation and handling fee, remains in a structural deficit. The baseline assumptions that were used to set the initial rate of the GNH fee in SB 158 proved to be far too low, resulting in a shortfall that required loans to keep the account solvent. We remain concerned that future fee rates fee rate increases will be necessary.

And of note, further exemptions from fees, particularly for the hazardous waste control account, makes the fund more structurally imbalanced, and the existing fee payer base then retains the burden of paying for DTSC's activities. Fourth, DTSC has seen significant improvements in compliance and return to compliance rates with facilities, and this can be part partially attributed to DTSC's violation scoring procedure regulations.

Fifth, DTSC's enforcement activities have dramatically increased under director Butler's leadership across all three of DTSC's main programs. Sixth, on the safer consumer products program, this program is undertaking valuable scientific and regulatory work, and the board is currently working with GTSC and stakeholders to develop performance metrics for this program. In f y twenty five twenty six, SCP proposed 22 distinct product chemical combinations under the SCP framework and finalized five additional product chemical combinations, and this is a large increase since reform.

DTSC also, for the first time, used its authority under five SB 502 to propose a direct to regulatory response priority product listing to ban hydrofluoric acid in cleaning products. And finally, Exide.

Concerns over the Exide facility and cleanup were one of the principal drivers for DTSC reform. To date, DTSC has cleaned up over 6,300 parcels and all parkways. DTSC has also conducted retrospective and verification sampling and has just started to release the data. The good news is that DTSC's initial data suggests that the cleanup met the objectives in the cleanup plan, but we've been working with DTSC to ensure that residents have access to these results and the data is released as quickly as possible.

At the same time, several recurring themes remain, and these are areas for improvement that I intend to focus on.

First, timeliness. While DTSC has made progress reducing the permit backlog in fiscal year twenty five twenty six, DTSC made 56% or five of nine of its permit decisions on time. The timeliness and accessibility of administrative records also varies greatly. ThiS Board haS Been working with DTSC to improve access to these critical records. In addition, as mentioned, the SB 673 regulations remain unfinished despite being required years ago.

The board hears from the public at nearly every meeting raising concerns about the process and substance of these regulations. Second, public engagement and trust. Stakeholders, both community and regulated, consistently tell us they want earlier engagement. They want clear explanations of difficult decisions. They want to understand how their comments influence the final outcome.

Public trust remains fragile and can must continue to be earned. In addition, DTSC should publicly communicate its successes in a more frequent and timelier manner through press releases and other communications. And finally, the hazardous waste management plan. The board approved DTSC's first plan in November 2025, but all Board Members and stakeholders felt the plan left unanswered some of the biggest policy questions facing California's hazardous waste system. What treatment, recycling, and disposal infrastructure will California need in the future?

How much waste can realistically be reduced or diverted? How much hazardous waste treatment and disposal capacity does California actually need over the next twenty to thirty years? Those difficult policy choices still lie ahead. Many in the public also felt that actions called for in the plan could lead to reduced health protections for Californians. The board retained oversight with the plan's implementation to avoid exactly this result.

And in addition, the board removed the most contentious portion of the plan. So in closing, five years into reform, DTSC is stronger than it was. The board has improved DTSC, but the work of reform isn't finished. And my experience in has reinforced a simple conclusion. When the board is meaningfully involved, the outcomes are generally better for the public, for stakeholders, and for DTSC itself.

Thank you very much. I look forward to your questions.

Thank you, Chair Butler or director Butler rather.

Thank you, Chair Connolly. Thank you, Chair Blakespear, members of the two committees. Before I discuss DTSC's work over the past year, I'd like to acknowledge the important role of the board and from my perspective as director, touch on what the board brings to this important equation. The board provides a public venue as we've discussed where complex permitting and hazardous waste topics can be examined openly. Where permit appeals receive independent review, and where the public can engage directly on issues that impact them.

And every year, the board reviews the department's annual priorities. These priorities directly connect to how the department prioritizes its resources and staff. From my perspective as director, the board makes DTSC stronger. It challenges us to continually improve, and it provides a public forum that strengthens accountability and transparency. While the board operates independently, and we certainly do not always see eye to eye, we share the same mission, protecting public health and the environment for all Californians.

So with this shared mission in mind, I'd like to highlight how DTSC has translated reform into measurable deliverables. Since I started as director, I've consistently prioritized four areas. One, strengthening enforcement. Two, deepening community engagement. Three, advancing science and innovation.

And four, building collaborations and partnerships across all of government and with our external partners. So let me start with enforcement. Enforcement is the bread and butter of protecting communities, and it begins with holding accountable responsible parties so that we are holding them accountable for following environmental rules and regulations. Enforcement is stronger than ever at DTSC. This year, we settled a record number of enforcement cases, 51 cases.

That's 30% more than two years ago. We've recovered more than $4,000,000 in penalties and half of those go back to communities through our supplemental environmental program. Most importantly, 92% of violations have returned to compliance. By and large, businesses want to comply. They wanna understand how to comply.

And our goal is always compliance first. But when entities fail to protect Californians, DTSC will not hesitate to pursue enforcement action. A recent example is our $1,400,000 settlement with ALCO Metals, where half of those funds go directly back into communities through supplemental environmental projects, and ALCO is required to implement important engineering controls and other measures that prevent fires and protect the community. This is what accountability accountability looks like. Communities should not have to be concerned whether enforcement is making a difference or not.

We're showing those receipts. Secondly, community engagement, it's changing outcomes and it's not just checking a box for us at DTSC. When it comes to our permitted facilities, community engagement is no longer something that we are only doing at the beginning of the process at the end of the process. Excuse me. Once a permit is already drafted, that's the traditional point and the required point for public engagement when the draft permit is out for review.

It is now becoming of how we it is now becoming a way that we make our permit stronger. So for the Ecobat permit decision, for example, one significant shift that we made was hosting community meetings before finalizing the draft permit. This was instrumental to public input public input actually informing the permit requirements themselves. And as a result, we are requiring in this permit expanded environmental monitoring, modernized facility upgrades, and increased financial accountability. And by the way, we held one of those meetings on a Saturday.

We want to increase access to our public process. We are proposing regulations as mandated by Senate Bill 673, which I agree are long overdue. To codify these improvements to the public engagement process, The updated permit criteria in these proposed regulations will serve to better protect communities and provide regulatory clarity for businesses. Separately, community engagement is vital to successful revitalization of contaminated sites across our state.

As a result of Senate bill 158, DTSC is working closely with community organizations, local governments, developers to turn brownfields into places where communities can thrive.

We've administered a total of a $130,000,000 in grants. 90 grants in total at over a 150 sites, and that's resulted in 600 affordable homes built to date with 5,000 more affordable homes or market rate value homes to come as a result of that grant program. One example is a Northgate Gonzales market in Linwood in this Los Angeles region, where we had a grand opening to celebrate this amazing vibrant market in what was previously a food desert.

It once was a gas station, and now it's a market that serves the local community. And let me tell you, their tamales are good.

Science is driving environmental protections. Science, scientific advancements, staying at the forefront of science is critical to DTSC success. I'll give four examples of how DTSC is leading the nation in scientific advancements. The first is a lead attribution study. In partnership with the United States Geological Survey, DTSC is developing scientific methods to help us understand when we find elevated levels of lead, where is it coming from?

This will strengthen our ability to improve how we link potential contamination to responsible parties. Whether it's coming from a lead acid battery recycling facility or other urban sources like paint, legacy gasoline, or other industrial sources. We're tackling research, guidance documents, and regulations to address forever chemicals known as PFAS. In February, we released a draft technical document on floor maintenance products containing PFAS. This includes products like cleaners, finishers, sealers, and represents a first step towards possible regulation of these products.

We are also preparing to publish research on PFOS in ski and snowboard waxes, hard surface sealers, and anti fog products. We are taking steps to verify that PFOS chemicals are no longer used in certain products, including artificial turf or intentionally added to textiles or leather products. The this effort to conduct compliance activities is crucial to our success and preventing PFAS chemicals from entering our water systems. We have invested in our environmental chemistry lab.

Our lab has expanded additional in house testing and this strengthens in turn our compliance and enforcement work, and our ability to do testing that supports the evidence we need for that enforcement.

Progress is underway to develop methods for asbestos, formaldehyde, and 30 consumer product types, as well as source attribution techniques. Notably, our labs contribution to the ban on flame retardants has influenced The United Kingdom to adopt similar flame retardant regulations. Collaboration is how we multiply our impact. The most complex environmental challenges cannot be solved by one department alone. They require strong partnerships across federal, state, local, tribal, academic, and community organizations alike.

I'll note just a couple examples of collaboration over the past year. Together with the water board, DTSC delivered vapor intrusion public workshops. We locked arms with our regulatory partners on several major emergency response incidents, providing technical expertise to protect communities. DTSC is delivering on reform. Last year, before these two committees, I made commitments.

And today, I'm pleased to report that DTSC has delivered. We hit record enforcement numbers as mentioned. We develop statewide training and other public facing tools that provide consistent guidance for communities, regulate regulated entities, and partner agencies. We initiated or finalized six priority products that's exceeding our commitment of five. Plus, we initiated or finalized five other rule makings in our safer consumer products program, including adding microplastics to the candidate chemical list.

We are on pace to deliver similar results for next year. We're committed to modern and robust approaches to community engagement. On this front, we have established the environmental justice advisory council that Mister Alatorre chairs, where communities can share and connect about environmental problems, projects, concerns. We committed to being responsive to emerging issues and concerns, and we are becoming more nimble as an organization to quickly redirect resources for response activities. For example, the Sandy fire in Ventura County encroached closely to the Santa Susana Field Lab site.

And DTSC leadership and staff directed the three responsible parties, NASA, Department of Energy, and Boeing, to deploy air monitoring to proactively monitor the potential for radiological materials in the fire. Ultimately, the Sandy fire did not reach Santa Susana, but DOE did deploy their air monitors and DTSC staff was ready. When it comes to fiscal stewardship, we committed to improving DTSC's financial commit condition and this happened. Financial stability matters to us because every dollar we recover is another dollar that we can use to protect Californians.

One of the key components of reform was implementing a new fee, the generation and handling fee.

Our revenues have increased from 43,000,000 in 2022 to over 70,000,000 this past fiscal year. I extend my gratitude to our staff, to you, your colleagues, the board for supporting ongoing resources for the department to accomplish its mission. So in closing, as we reach the 5 year milestone for reform and we reflect on DTSC's progress, as well as the work that still lays ahead, it's clear that reform was not simply about building new governance structures, fee structures.

But for reform to be successful, it has to build public confidence and trust. Trust that hazardous waste will be managed safely.

Trust that communities will have a meaningful voice. Trust that we will act decisively when there's a public health risk. And as I've outlined, DTSC has taken steps to strengthen that trust through stronger enforcement, deeper community engagement, advanced science, and responsible fiscal stewardship. While I'm proud of this progress, we know there is more work to do. DTSC's vision is a California where every community thrives in an environment free from hazardous substances.

The board is a critical part of that vision, and the progress report shared today shows how oversight and delivering results go hand in hand. I remain committed to working with the Chair, with the board to advance DTSC's work, and I will continue to value public input and ensure that the public input we receive makes meaningful impact on our decisions. Thank you for your partnership, and I welcome your questions.

Thank you. Question to you both, your reference to hazardous waste management report and plan. Do you have any suggestions for the legislature, us, on how we can help with the implementation and adoption of that plan, I guess, from the standpoint of both the board and the department?

Thank you very much, Assembly member for your for your question. In in terms of, you know, additional statutory changes, Aye, you know, I I I'm happy to consult with you on this, but I do think that, making explicit a couple different areas would be helpful. I think first, the board's, kind of coequal role with the department in terms of drafting the plan.

I do think that there are a number of lessons learned that we have as the board in terms of how to make, encourage, facilitate more meaningful community engagement. Those are things that I'm planning to prioritize as we think about the next plan.

I don't know if those are things that necessarily need to to legislate. But the other thing that the board in deciding to approve the plan, kind of retained is oversight of the implementation of the plan. So not just the development of the plan, but also retaining, the ability to work, with DTSC in a coequal way in terms of kind of the prioritization of how they are implementing it.

And in particular, the our priority was in lifting up those particular recommendations where community members expressed particular concern that the implementation of them could lead to reduced health protections. And that was really the lens that we viewed Our approval was, it was avoiding that result.

And I think that, was, you know, why several of the Board Members were comfortable ultimately approving it was because the plan itself, asks DTSC to do certain actions and review certain things, but the outcome of those reviews or those evaluations is left up in the air, as I mentioned in my remarks. And so the board wanted a meaningful role in that discussion. So those my two reflections are.

One challenge for the department in implementing the report and plan is a matter of timeline, where we have an iterative schedule every three years, we publish an update to the report, and every three years, we publish an update to the plan. And this this may warrant reexamining that cadence as we get into the cycle now that we've published the first two reports and the first plan to make sure that our resources are going and focusing on implementation. Right?

So we have, you know, the report is data that we report every three years and the data are what the data are. And so I'd really like to focus our resources on implementing the plan as opposed to, you know, reporting every three years, and and then planning every three years.

So I think that cadence warrants a reexamination just to make sure our resources are being utilized in the best way possible.

Thanks. And and sorry if I did forget to mention, there is a, I think, a common misconception that the board has a role in the report, which I'm not sure if the intent, was for the, the board to have a role, but we don't have a role. We just received the report. And so I think there has been interest from many groups in having the board have a role in constructing the reports, recognizing that, of course, it is quite technical.

No. Appreciate that. Chair, to you, kind of a little bit more broadly, do you have any additional recommendations for us on how we can help improve the board, again, from a legislative standpoint?

Yeah. Thank you so much for that question. I would say, a few different things. The first is, as I mentioned in my remarks, fiscal oversight. The board's role, remains, kind of, limited.

We, basically receive the fund condition statements for the three funds at the end of the process, and we don't we're not involved in any budget change proposal process or any programmatic decisions. So our ability to influence the fee rates is very limited. We're really looking at just a couple of dollars on either side, and, of course, the decisions on, you know, the magnitude of it were made earlier in the fiscal year. That's one on the hazardous waste management report and plan. We talked about that.

And I do think that there could be value of board role in certain regulatory processes as well. We've heard time and again, including from the earlier panel, that they would like the board to be involved in certain regulatory decisions on the procedural end of it. And so, you know, just reflecting back that that's what we have heard is the there's an interest in having the board be more involved in that regulatory process.

Great. Appreciate it. Director, we appreciate that DTSC is using some of the tools provided under SB 502 to expedite listing of priority projects or products. Can we expect the department to begin listing more products? You talked about that briefly.

If so, about how many priority products per year could we expect the department to propose?

So we're on pace to propose between five and ten priority products in any given year. And you're exactly right that the SB 502 authority allows us to streamline our process. We did use that authority this year for one priority product and our team is very thoughtful in evaluating how that goes. And I am expecting that we will be using that authority for other products as warranted.

It really specifies to certain situations that is warranted and and if it if we have those situations, then we will use it.

Thank you, Chair. Yes. I just wanna follow-up on that question because as the as the, Chair of the environmental quality committee, there'll be bills that come through that their premise is basically that DTSC is not able to keep on top of the many number of products, like, particularly around the pesticides area and and what is in the variance and changes that are happening really quickly. And so five to 10 maybe not being enough.

But I also you know, we don't have the expertise in the legislature to regulate, and we want the regulatory agencies across a whole range of topics.

But to be able to do their job and to to authorize you to have the tools needed to do your job. So I just wanted to ask you to respond to that as a premise that that there, you know, there's just not the capacity or the ability to get through the number of different materials that are coming now from industry.

Yeah. And I think to respond to that one way our team is now looking at proposed regulations is potentially classes of chemicals. And if that's something that we're able to do actually, I invite our deputy director Christiansen to speak to this exact issue. I know it it has been a topic of internal discussion lately.

And I was gonna ask about that. So perfect timing.

Thank you. Robin Christiansen, deputy director of the Save Our Consumer Products program at DTSC. Yes. To the question, first of all, with pesticides in particular, those are completely out of scope for the safer consumer products program. So just wanna put that out there.

Taking it a step back and looking at what the legislature may be interested in approaching, there are few different ways in which we see that there are opportunities for SCP to have a complimentary approach to the legislature. So for instance, we cannot work on issues that are outside of our own priority product work plan. So that narrows our scope for the existing three years.

So for the specific products and the new in types of chemicals that might be introduced onto the market, that may be a really key spot for the legislature to take action if it is not currently in our excellent, place for a collaborative approach. Another situation would be if there are unexpected developments or new products that are coming onto the market that none of us would have anticipated.

I think that's an excellent opportunity. We would enjoy working with the legislature and providing technical assistance on those topics as they emerge. And then finally, there are some situations where it might be cross cutting. You mentioned pesticides as one. There may be other issues that we cross cutting with other state agencies.

Those would also be a key area in which having support from the legislature to bring the right parties to the table together and work on a cross cutting collaborative project for the state. To our director's point, yes, we are absolutely looking at ways to improve regulatory efficiency. So taking a chemical class approach is one of the ways in which we're doing that. We are also looking to cluster more products within each rulemaking.

So I think you may have heard our director talking about the priority product listings and the Chair talking about the number of product chemical combinations that is in fact an indicator of that efficiency.

Okay. That that was a highly technical answer. I mean, I'll just say that I I do I had a bill on marine flares that, you know, it it it is difficult to get technical expertise from DTSC. I'll just say that there'll be this idea that, well, we'll work with you next year, and then we're just not able to get substantive feedback on things in ways that is helpful or timely. So is it to go this way or to go that way?

Or, you know, here is a specific thing that's an issue, and we are trying to to make some progress on it. And so so I, you know, this is somewhat of a separate issue from the large number of products. And I think this also happens in other areas that I work in, like around plastics and compostables and what is actually compostable or not and all the new products we see on the market.

And it seems like around the things that you regulate, you know, you were saying this is out of scope and this and I I I'm not fully following what is and is not in scope. But I do think it's important just to recognize that that there are bills from my colleagues that that are coming from advocates and those on the ground who are suggesting that DTSC is not nimble enough to be able to manage this.

So they're asking the legislature to do that, and I think that's something we have to deal with. You know, I don't know if that's from my, perfect world, it's DTSC being a bit more nimble, being able to to to offer more guidance in real time, to be able to account for more products and more chemicals and more combinations of chemicals so that we can be responsive to what we are seeing on the market.

And and so, you know, I'll I'll you're you're welcome to respond to to that if you seems like you would like to.

I just thank you for that. And, yes, the nontechnical answer is yes. We are being more nimble. Thank you.

Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Chair.

No. Really like that, follow-up. That's all I had for this panel. With that, thank you again. To be continued.

I'll just make one more comment if you don't mind. Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate the comment about how you're asked to be the hazardous waste watchdog, and that's outside of what the scope is of what your role is. You know, Aye, there's always this tension around, you know, who's responsible for the budget?

Is it announced is it a board that's appointed, or is it the Department of Finance, in relationship with the agency? And so, you know, there's questions of what to modify or change, but also just to be really clear with the expectations of the for the community and for your public communications about what you do and don't do. I think that is really an important thing so that there isn't the expectation that you'll be doing something that you're not able to do.

So, anyway, I I wanna say thank you to both of you for coming today and participating and recognizing the, serious amount of improvement that's happened in five years.

I I think the other question I wanted to ask was about the fees and if there was anything that you had heard in the first panel as suggestions or, reflections that that you thought were good ideas or things that you're working on that you see as trying to make sure to stabilize, and continue to be on an upward track.

You know, the numbers that you gave were something like 70,000,000 in three years versus 40,000,000. I mean, that's a big improvement. So but I know there was somewhat of a bumpy start at times. But and so, you know, are there thoughts that or things you see on the horizon that you think will be helpful Or things you heard in the first panel that you thought were good ideas?

Okay. I'll start. I did take notes on some opportunities that came out of that first panel. I think, using technology to enhance the public participation process is something that's on my radar. The ease at which people could submit comments and get more real time feedback.

We've implemented it on, you know, a couple projects, but I think across the department that's ripe for improvement. Also, you know, there was a lot of discussion about implementing Senate bill 673 and addressing community vulnerabilities. And I took the feedback from miss Maseros Johnson as instructive, because from our perspective, we did a great deal of public engagement pre rule making with the three informational sheets. And the lesson learned there for us is to be sure that we release straw language for regulations.

Even if we are doing public engagement at great lengths through presenting to the board and reaching out personally to folks who we know will wanna be engaged.

And so that's instructive to me as director on how we can improve our processes going forward, and I'm committed to continue to working with our staff and our Cali PA partners on addressing this topic of cumulative impacts that our communities face. It's incredibly important.

And then on the fees issue, I don't have any immediate thoughts, but I except for I am happy that we have a much more transparent process now, where every year, our chief fiscal officer presents the fund conditions publicly, and there's an opportunity to ask questions about the revenues, the funds, and so that that process itself to me is is a huge success of reform.

I would say just two thoughts on fees. The first is as I mentioned in my testimony, you know, any further exemptions particular from the generation and handling fee just kind of, you know, layers on to the existing fee payer base, that additional increased cost. So that's something we just hear time and time again from the fee payers.

The second point is the board is tasked with conducting a fee analysis of looking at these both, you know, micro and macro issues, and that's something we're in the middle of and eager to partner with the legislature in this effort.

We're both looking at, you know, fees as policy drivers, fees as make ensuring that, you know, all regulated entities are paying their fair share and DTSC is kind of getting back the amount of, appropriate money to the work that they're, putting in, and kind of, like, at all different levels.

And so, you know, we will have thoughts quite soon on on this from the board's perspective.

Thank you. So when you say partnership, how exactly do you see that working? Because, I mean, do you see that as being a bill idea, or do you see that as being a working group? Or what how do you see a partnership with the legislature working?

I at least how SB 158 may states it, we're here as the board to make recommendations on the structure. So the form of that, I I would have to defer to kind of our legislative on exactly that, but, you know, we are You

would put it in writing, basically That's right. From the board, and then you would submit it to the legislature, and we could do what we wanted with it. Exactly. Okay. So it's a formal a formal process.

Okay. Okay. That's good to understand. Thank you. Okay.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you.

Again, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

K. We're gonna move to public comment if folks would like to start queuing up. And why don't we keep it ideally to a couple of minutes?

Okay. Yeah.

And noting our esteemed first speaker.

Thank you, Mister Chairman. Thank you to my former colleagues. I wanna thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today. I'm proud to have been part of the legislature with you that passed SB 158. Our former colleagues, Assembly member Christina Garcia, Senator Bob Wachowski, who was here but had to leave, were the impetus.

And it was Exide that really brought this to our attention in a pretty visible way. I am proud to have been appointed by my, former Senate colleagues in the pro tem to serve for a limited time on the board of environmental safety. And although my time was short, I had to move on to something else. I wanna tell you I learned a great deal. I learned how complicated, these issues are.

I learned that the board of environmental safety is staffed by a small but mighty team of of staff, headed by, the executive Swati Swarva, and legal counsel Greg Forrest. I wanna say that the appointments from the governor and the speaker and the pro tem are good. The two appointments, Georgette Gomez, which I initial initially made as pro tem and then, pro tem Limon reappointed her, and Ingrid Brostrom from the speaker are EJ advocate folks.

They they not only are advocates, they're experienced in these areas and understand the work before them. The governor's appointees from the Chair who has a history with the EPA, Alexis Strauss Hacker who has extreme experience in the water board and other technical boards lend so much, and Reese Williams who I think you made reference to.

I would just say a governor's appointment who comes with a similar background as I do from Appalachia, having to deal with coal and strip mining and mountain topping. He in Wales and The United Kingdom. So he brings his own wheelhouse of expertise, and I would just say that will be before the Senate Rules Committee, very soon in terms of his confirmation. But I would support him because this is his wheelhouse, and he can recuse himself. You understand what that process is like being elected officials yourself.

But I found his questions to be hard hitting of DTSC straightforward, and, I believe he's there for the right reasons. But that's a different day. I wanted to say in terms of some of the comments, I really appreciated the comments both by miss Johnson Massaros and also Miguel Alatorre. Miguel's in particular in terms of some of the capacity issues that BES has with the small team.

Miss Johnson, particularly as it relates to the fact that if structural change is needed, we really need to think that through.

The Chair talked about, really the tension that the natural tension in many ways that exist between DTSC, and the board and how it came into being. I felt that from day one. I felt and knew that everyone was trying to do their job. I appreciate DTSC more than I ever have. The staff are committed to the work they do, but it there is bureaucracy inherent in the work that they have to do.

There is process. There is, permits. There is the balance between, the, you know, holding facility facilities accountable and what the state needs in terms of these services by these facilities. If I were to say there are a few things that really need to be done, I'm gonna bring it back to the public, which is BES was put into being for a very important reason. The community then felt, finally, we have someone who will listen to us and represent us.

The issue there is I'll just give you an example of hazardous waste materials. We have two facilities in the state of California. One in Central Valley, one in Southern California. They've existed for decades. They science has, you know, continued to move on.

The state of California has put important regulations into place for protection of community, public health, and for workers. And yet, there needs to be catch up. So by the time BES is formed and comes to give greater transparency and ability for community to speak, the community is Fed up Fed up. And so their feeling is close these facilities. Well, therein lies the challenge that the legislature has as well as DTSC because where are you going to place those facilities?

And if we don't, it will go out of state where there are less regulations, less health protections, etcetera, in other states. So that causes the dynamic you see. More public participation is important. More education is important. And if I were to recommend, anything, it would be to your question, Chair and Senator Blake Spear, what could you do better as a legislature to have that relationship with BES?

I'm gonna say two things. BES needs their own legislative staff government relations person. DTSC has one, but they have to go between the two of them to actually then make contact. BES needs their own. They have an incredible ombudsperson who's here today.

And, I was part of that subcommittee and started to say you need to see that role more as constituent services. To that end, we wanna do this with the Assembly, chairman. But to that end, to the Senate, we, worked with secretary of the Senate, Erica Contreras. We did a flyer that basically says, BES was created by the legislature to be your resource and to put that out into all of the districts and with the district director so that they will call Lauren, the ombudsperson.

But then when she asked questions, she needs to be able to get answers.

So Aye, am here in support of BDS. Please continue to work with them. Please continue to invite them into your offices to, find out what they think. And I wanna congratulate, director Butler. I think she has really done a yeoman's job of of really trying to bring this into the current day, Tom, particularly as it relates to science.

I appreciate all the time you've given to me. I really hope that you will get more engaged, with BES because it is complex. But when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong. And if you haven't had a chance to visit the Exide site, I encourage you to do it and to see the cleanup that the state has largely done itself without assistance from the Federal Government yet. So I think you'll be impressed with the work they do and the relationship they have with the EJ community.

Oh, and lastly, I actually think BES should have a more direct role working directly with the EJAC versus just being a participant. But those are my suggestions. Thank you.

Thank you. Other speakers, come on up.

Hi. My name is Alexander Reyes, and I'm a youth intern from O'Neil's network from Kettleman City. And I want to talk about who's in the room. The BES has five members in the AGAC, advises them in both spaces. The people most affected by hazardous waste decisions over the next forty years is my generation.

They have no formal seat. The landfill near near my town is expected to reach cap capacity somewhere between 2,034 and 2,039. I will be in my thirties at during that time. We are asking for two things, a designated youth or young adult position on the EGAC and paid youth fellowships so students from Kettleman City, Buttonwillow, and Los Hills can actually participate instead of choosing between a shift and a meeting. Representation without a stipend is representation only for wealthy communities.

Thank you.

Thank you.

May I bring these up?

Sure.

Hi. My name is Melissa Bumstead. I'm with Parents Against Santa Susana Field Lab. And I'm pleased to speak on behalf of my community. Over 700,000 people with living within miles of one of California's most toxic and radioactive sites, the Santa Susana field lab.

I'm gonna explain that for you in just a Sec. My daughter is a two time cancer survivor. She's one of over a 100 children in our community who have not just pediatric cancer, but exceptionally rare forms of pediatric cancer. My daughter is very fortunate to be a survivor, but we have buried most of her friends from treatment.

My site, if you're familiar with it, has independent peer reviewed, even a federally funded epidemiological study that shows that contamination from the Santa Susana field lab comes off-site into our communities, into our environment where it causes harm.

In fact, earlier this year, the water board, the LA Regional Water Board, calculated fines for up to $15,000,000 for Boeing company for polluting the LA River and our surrounding watersheds. So we know even with sister agency data that the contamination does come off-site at the Santa Susana field op. However, when you look at that paper, that little part I highlighted shows nothing. This is Boeing's document. This is the cleanup document that they are basing the cleanup for my community on.

And they say there is zero potential for off-site migration. That defies basic science. We know about erosion. We know where the soil is located primarily from fallout in the topsoil and in the groundwater. So through wind, through rain water, through fire events, the the contaminants migrate into our community, and that federally funded study did find direct correlation between residents living closer to the site having elevated cancer risks.

This is not a mistake that Boeing accidentally left potential pathways off of this cleanup agreement. This is a legal strategy. The problem is, I I mean, you kind of expect it from polluters to say that there's no harm to the community, no responsibility, no no reason to do a full cleanup because they're saying it can't reach off the invisible line of their property line. The problem is is that in this draft document, the DTSC said nothing. Their toxicologist made no remarks.

She said, doctor Hanley said that she did not necessarily agree with it nor did she disagree with it. There was no comment. This is this is critical information, and this is just one example. I've been involved in this fight since my daughter was diagnosed since 2015, trying to get a health protective complete cleanup. Boeing is now saying with this document, they will start the cleanup this fall of the Santa Susana field lab.

Independent analysis shows that they will leave 90% of the contamination behind, primarily based off this one page that there is no reach of that contamination to harm the community or the environment despite independent data, despite CalEPA data. And and we are we have done everything. I have pretty much devoted my life since my daughter's cancer to make sure other families don't have to go through what my daughter went through. Because if I were to share the stories with you, we would all be traumatized.

No child should have to suffer the way that my daughter has and there are 100, over a 100 children in our community, preventable cancers.

So what I wanna point out is that we we like we like the BS board. We didn't think we would, to be quite honest. We think that the members I'm not entirely sure right now about having a lobbyist on the board. I think that is ill advised, even though he seems like a servant of the people. But the rest of the BES board, they are they have listened to us.

They hear us. They have a subcommittee for my community. However, they seem to have no power. They look at it. They say we agree with you, and and that's as far as it goes.

And it was said earlier that that is exhausting to community members. We we generate this is my co director. We generate reports. We come to every meeting. We sign every I mean, I cannot even tell you how many hours we have invested in trying to get some real actionable change into this cleanup document that represents actual science, academic advisors coming in, experts coming in.

Nothing is changing. The BS board has no apparently no ability to move the DTS to do it anything else, and and we're left with no tools. Even though it's our children that are dying, even though it's our groundwater that's being polluted, even though it's our air being polluted, we have no real power and no agency. So I'm going to ask that you would please increase the ability for the BES to make actual change to the DTSC board even more than just advisement or letters.

We would ask that you would fund them to be able to have an independent scientific site review.

That is that is what we want. We want, to have scientific advisers. We want community members to be on that panel. We want it to be collaborative, because right now, the DTSC is only required to accept polluter created data. And if we had time, I would sit down with you line by line and show you where that data has been manipulated.

They do not accept any independent science unless they choose to. There is no mandate, And that is of a huge disadvantage with paperwork like this that is so obvious any layperson can see that this is this is dangerous to my community. So on behalf of my community, I ask that you tell the DTSC to stand down on this cleanup document until an independent advisory board can get involved.

And I would ask that for I don't think there's time now, but we want to see the BS board with more authority, more power, and more funding. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello, Chairs and Members. My name is Yovanni, and I'm actually from Kettleman City. I'm 23 years old, and I've kind of been involved in my community at a pretty young age. So I'm here to say that we're here to support the BS, but we also want it to be improved. One of the things that I'd like to mention is in 2022 to 2023, the budget change proposal, DTSC asked for 37 permanent positions and $7,200,000 and promised five priority project listings a year starting in 2023.

The state has 10 priority products total in sixteen years. We see the same pattern in permitting where the SB 673 criteria on community vulnerability and setback distances have been pending eleven years. We ask this committee to require DTSC to report its budget change proposal against actual outcomes and to set a firm completion date for those criteria. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. I'm Jenny Nack. I'm her co director at Parents Against Sanofi Lab. And while the issues of our site are the ones that are most important to us, through engagement continued engagement with DTSC and the BS board, we're realizing that that hazardous waste management plan that got so much press, has the ability to affect so many of us. I guess I wanna start and say much of the community's perspectives and our perpetual issues are admitted from the DTSC's reports that come across your desk.

So I think it's really easy to design priorities that you know that you can deliver on and omit the realities of frontline communities that don't at all reflect the successful post reform story that I think is most comfortable for the agency to project. January and the creation of the board, part of that outside of the fees was to amplify frontline environmental justice voices. But I think what we expect from that isn't just amplification, it's consideration.

And what we are not seeing five years in is that implementation of our perspectives and concerns or for them to be significantly or sufficiently addressed. I think the easiest way for all of us to see this is through the hazardous waste management plan, process and the decision making.

Yes. It was planned. That is a metric, a box checked. The plan was passed. There was community engagement.

There's another metric that we can check off. But what that omits is the fierce and widespread opposition from every frontline community across the state, from communities living surrounding generators of toxic waste, cleanup sites that have toxic constituents on them, and the end destination, the Cuddlmen and Buttonwillow communities. We all came together to advocate for a comprehensive health protective plan that prioritize source reduction. That is not what we got.

So when the BAS got the draft, which was a paltry it's not even it's an outline a a semi outline of a plan.

When that was submitted to the board, they sent it back, which is what we wanted them to do. One piece was omitted. That was a significant piece, but that was not all that the state the people of the of California wanted. DTSC staff refused to make the amendments that the board was asking for. And from our perspective, from the frontline community's perspective, all across California, it looked like BS threw up their hands and said, okay.

Well, we're gonna pass it. Just because it's the first plan, I want us to all keep in mind we are five years in. It took us five years to get an insufficient plan on work they're already doing. That isn't acceptable. There were there was a lack of metrics to achievable goals.

There were lofty aspirations of what they would like to say they're doing, but there was no definite pathway to achieving source reduction. And if we don't push towards that, the impacts to community members will not be lessened. So I guess what I'm asking for is for you to empower the board because I don't feel that they feel powerful. I don't know if they all agree on the extent of their purview.

What I do know is that their perceived extent of their purview is not giving us access to change in decision making that we seek because our impact the impacts from DTSC decision making is not changing.

Our experience is not post reform. Our experience is very much still at the status quo. BES board deference to DTSC staff cannot achieve what SB 158 was set to achieve. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair and Members of the committee. My name is Daniel Talamantes speaking on behalf of the Clean Air Coalition of North Whittier and Avocado Heights in East Los Angeles. Our members live beside EcoBAT, the second battery the only secondary lead battery smelter left in Western United States since Exide was forced to close in 2013. The Board of Environmental Safety was created to fix a captured agency. I'm here to tell you that I fear it is being captured as well.

By 2023, we felt that BES worked. The founding board vacated DTSC's authorization for EcoBeth's dewatering equipment, ruling four to one that bypassing public comment on a facility with this much community opposition was clearly erroneous. That was a real win built by real people who read the record. By June of this year, with a reconstituted board, the BES reached the opposite result on the same equipment through a stay order without ever engaging its own 2023 precedent. History repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.

DTSC tracked twice to authorize that equipment without public comment and lost both times. BES handed to them anyway. In that same hearing, the board refused to stay the full permit, refused to turn over the records we requested, and prejudged conditions that we haven't even argued yet, echoing the same language that Ecobat and DTSC used to oppose us. A board member told our attorney on the record or sorry, off the record that they haven't time to read the file. This isn't an accident of turnover.

It's structural. Board member Williams is concurrently registered the lobbyist for the firm that represents DTSC regulated entities, including Clean Harbors operator of the Buttonwill Hazardous Waste Landfill. He sat on the board the same week DTSC issued Clean Harbors final permit. PES statute has no recusal requirement to stop that. And last November, despite its own stated criticisms and one member's dissenting revote dissenting vote, PES approved DTSC's hazardous waste management plan over frontline communities, a unanimous opposition, a plan with no timelines or no measurable goals.

A board with no binding authority over the agency at Overthiefs, no obligation to honor its own prior rulings, and no bar on its members lobbying the very agency that sit in judgment of its of it is a trap. It's a farce. Our community fought for years to get a body that would look over Ecobat's record honestly and hold DTSC to account.

Please don't let the board quietly become one more arm of the agency that spends time and money researching skis and snowboards over the harm and real assessments done by lead to our communities. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is Francisco Bonilla. I'm the chief finance officer for O'neil's Network. I am from Huron, not Kettleman, but we are a small farming community that's located 20 miles from Kettleman and 23 miles away from the nearest hazardous laced land landfill. Being from Huron, we we also bear a lot of similar environmental concerns.

As my work in El Nido's, we hosted many toxic tours to these facilities, and I'm still surprised of what we're allowed to do to communities that they grow most of our food. They are hard workers, immigrant families, but they are bearing most of the environmental issues that we are facing. So I support SB 158 and the BES. SB 158 created a more transparent and accountable DTSC, and the board is helping ensure that those reforms are implemented.

I encourage, legislator, to strengthen the board so they can provide provide strong oversight and keep our communities at the center of DTSC's work.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Hello. My name is Heidi Bonilla, and I'm sorry about that. Hello. My name is Heidi Bonilla, and I'm from the city of Huron. And I am a intern at O'Neil's network in Kettleman.

And I read that the environmental toxic substance control does not have the funding for sorry. Does not have the funding for supporting environmental justice of our region for much longer. And I want to say plainly that what that would mean for us and the this this advisory and I'm so sorry. But the eject, it would mean for us that it will close so many doors that we as a community, like Huron, Kettleman, Bunuela, that let us allow us to talk to decision makers like you.

But if that were to not be funded, and that would close many doors for us.

Thank you.

Thank you. Other members of the public? I wanna thank everyone who testified, and also the everyone who came out to the hearing, of course, our witnesses. You know, this is in part, due to a statutory requirement that the board Chair and DTSC director appear before the relevant policy committees at us, at least once a year. But wanna really make it clear, today's hearing was a first, but definitely not the last.

We want this to be a ongoing conversation. We wanna have stakeholders engaged, and we can continue a dialogue throughout the fall and next year. We're very interested. I think a lot of concrete proposals arose today, a lot of thematic evidence that we are going to be considering. So I anticipate this process to be one that we continue to learn, grow, improve as we go forward.

I wanna really thank my colleague, Senator Blake Spear as well. And once again, thank you to everyone for being here today unless you have some closing remarks. Alright. Well, this hearing is adjourned.