EPA, Activists Set Deadline For Decisions On Contentious NSR Air Plans

摘要

EPA has signed deadline agreements with environmentalists to issue long-pending final decisions on several Western states' air quality plans that include controversial Bush-era new source review (NSR) reforms, with activists hoping EPA will disapprove the plans as a way to strike the reforms which were upheld by a federal court.rnThe deadlines will require EPA to propose and issue between later this year and 2012 final decisions on the Western state implementation plans (SIPs), which are air quality blueprints for meeting federal air quality standards. EPA committed to the deadlines to resolve a suit environmentalists filed last year over the agency's failure to meet a Clean Air Act duty to either approve or deny a SIP within 18 months of its submission to EPA.