No free passes to polluters. The LDEQ needs to hear from you!

07.26.2023

Public Meetings

Public Comment Opportunities

The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) is preparing rules for the voluntary environmental self-audit program.

This program allows industrial companies to voluntarily report their permit violations to LDEQ and places limits on the fines/fees imposed for violations.
The law allowing for this self-auditing process passed last year, but now the LDEQ is also considering keeping the details of these permit violations confidential by not requiring companies to submit full environmental audit reports unless officially requested by the agency.
That means companies could pollute, violate their permits and avoid fees, all while leaving neighboring residents in the dark about it.

Every Louisianan should feel secure, wherever they live and no matter their background, in the knowledge that state agencies are doing everything in their power to ensure their safety and to preserve public health.

Unfortunately, the very nature of self-reporting and auditing of environmental and public health violations – particularly when state law requires that those disclosures are made confidential, even if only for a few years – creates more barriers to building trust, particularly for communities and residents in closest proximity to industrial sites and who have borne, and continue to bear, the greatest risks from exposures from those violations.

The Alliance made the following recommendations in our comments:

The provisions that determine whether or not a violation is eligible for the self-audit program are, in our view, insufficiently specific. We encourage the LDEQ to provide greater clarity with regard to what constitutes “serious actual harm to the environment” (§7007.A.1), either within these regulations or in future promulgations of departmental rules pertaining to the self-audit program.
The Self-Audit program should notify communities identified by the federal government as overburdened and underserved of any nearby self-reported violations to allow residents to report any health or environmental problems that could be related to the violation.
Another area of concern is that under proposed provision §7009.D.1, “full environmental audit report should not be submitted to the department unless specifically requested by the department in writing.” We strongly urge the Department to revise this entirely, and instead require that all full environmental audit reports be submitted to the department.
Additionally, we recommend that the Department require that all environmental audit reports received as part of the Self-Audit program be made publicly available after the two-year period or after final action has been taken, as required by state law.

The LDEQ needs to hear from you as well! Tell LDEQ that we demand the right to know what we’re breathing and what’s in our water. There is a virtual LDEQ hearing scheduled for tomorrow Thursday, July 27, at 1:30pm. Join The Alliance at the hearing via Zoom using the link: bit.ly/jul27ldeqvirtualhearing. The password to enter is 985711.

Can’t make it to the hearing tomorrow? You can also submit comments via email to DEQ.Reg.Dev.Comments@la.gov, just be sure to include the subject line “Comments on proposed regulation OS101.” The deadline for written comments is August 3 at 4:30pm.

Tell the LDEQ: No free passes to polluters! No to voluntary self-audits!

LDEQ Notice of Intent

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