Six States Appeal Settlement Pact Ordering EPA To Issue SO2 Designations

摘要

A group of six states led by North Dakota is appealing to an appellate court an EPA settlement agreement with environmental groups requiring the agency to make long-overdue designations by 2020 on which areas are attaining or exceeding the agency's sulfur dioxide (SO2) air quality standard. EPA has only designated 29 areas in 16 states as either in attainment or nonattainment for the SO2 national ambient air quality standard (NAAQS). This delay prompted advocates and some states to sue, charging that the agency missed a 2012 deadline for the remaining designations. The settlement, entered March 2 .by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, creates a three-stage process for finalizing the remaining designations, with deadlines ranging from July 2016 through December 2020. But the group of states - North Dakota, Arizona, Kentucky, Nevada, Louisiana and Texas - filed an April 30 notice appealing the settlement to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.See page 2 for details. (Doc. ID: 181082) The notice of appeal does not elaborate on the reasons why the states seek to overturn the deadline pact. But a successful appeal could potentially benefit the states by requiring quick designations in areas that do not have sufficient monitoring networks to show nonattainment with the SO2 standard, placing them into "unclassifiable" status that would avoid a "nonattainment" designation.