Stakeholders Meeting on UCMR
On June 25th, EPA convened a stakeholders meeting/webinar on the Unregulated Contaminant Rule (UCMR). The meeting was attended, in person, by ASDWA staff, and by webinar, by several states and other stakeholders. The principal purpose of the webinar was to gather pre-proposal input into UCMR 4, but the EPA speakers also provided a retrospective look at the various iterations of the UCMR and its overall role in the regulatory development process.
The UCMR is the principal means by which EPA gathers occurrence data to inform the regulatory development process. To date, most of the data that have been gathered under the UCMR have supported negative regulatory determinations. In other words, UCMR data confirmed that contaminants in question did not occur at a frequency or concentration such that their regulation would represent a “meaningful opportunity for health risk reduction” (per the Safe Drinking Water Act).
At present, EPA (with state and water system assistance) is implementing the third iteration of the UCMR. Monitoring activities for UCMR 3 are scheduled to end in December 2015 and the collected data are to be finalized in 2016. On the heels of these actions, EPA plans to propose UCMR 4 in late 2016 and take implementation preparation steps in 2017; with monitoring expected to begin in January 2018.
During (and after) the June 25th meeting, stakeholders were asked to provide any input they may have into the particular contaminants EPA is contemplating for UCMR 4 as well as thoughts about key procedural questions, such as: Should UCMR monitoring data continue to be reported by water systems in their CCRs? And, Should the UCMR monitoring period continue to be three years or should it be shortened to two years? The slides used in the webinar are attached.
ATTACHMENT: UCMR4StakeholderPresentations
