A dozen days into a special session on West Virginia's budget crisis, the Tomblin administration on Wednesday resurrected a broad-ranging environmental rules bill that lawmakers let die earlier this year in a fit of opposition to state adoption of a federal regulation aimed at making wood-burning stoves more efficient.
Just hours after Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin added the Department of Environmental Protection "rules bundle" to the special session agenda, a House committee had passed the bill (HB 117) - complete with two key water-quality changes sought by the coal industry - after stripping from it an air-quality rule containing language to require manufacturers of wood stoves to reduce the amount of pollution those devices emit.
Tomblin had not previously included the DEP measure as part of the special session, but spokesman Chris Stadelman said that Tomblin added it this week after, "There has at least been some serious discussion regarding the budget, which remains the governor's top priority."
"This bill is important to the DEP and a number of major employers in the state, so he thought it was appropriate to add it to the special session call," Stadelman said.
The bill would implement more than a dozen new or amended DEP rules governing everything from air quality to hazardous waste to water pollution controls. It also includes rules DEP would use to enforce the state's new chemical tank safety law, which lawmakers approved after the January 2014 chemical spill at Freedom Industries in Charleston, and changes the agency wanted for the rules on natural gas drilling and waste disposal.
Among other things, the bill would adopt relaxations of water quality standards for toxic selenium and aluminum that the coal industry has depicted as a way to help the state's ailing mining industry.
"It's important to get this moving," said Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association. "It was all prepared and ready to be passed in the regular session."
While the changes might reduce the costs of water pollution treatment, no one has explained how they would reverse a coal decline driven by a variety of factors, such as cheap natural gas and the depletion of Southern West Virginia's easier-to-mine coal.
Angie Rosser, executive director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, said she was disappointed that Tomblin chose to put the rules on the special session agenda.
"It's regrettable the governor and Legislature sees the way of helping the state is to allow the coal industry to increase pollution in our waters," Rosser said. "The state is already facing a hard road ahead to pay for the clean-up of streams damaged from coal mining. Endangering stream health with more pollutants stands to create more problems instead of solve them."
State officials and the industry have been most concerned about the changes to the selenium standard, with mining companies hoping that DEP's changes would be made law and approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency before EPA comes out with its own expected changes to the recommended federal selenium guidelines.
"We're basically playing chicken with them to see if they approve ours or come out with their own," DEP general counsel Kristin Boggs told lawmakers Wednesday afternoon.
This year's annual DEP rules package legislation died when some lawmakers objected to the inclusion by DEP in a long list of state air pollution standards language adopting new EPA guidelines for wood-burning stoves.
Opponents of the language depicted it as regulating the burning of unseasoned wood, calling it another example of "bureaucratic micromanagement," and said they would "not sit back and let overzealous federal bureaucrats run roughshod over our state."
Actually, the EPA rule governs the manufacturers of wood-burning stoves and sets new limits on the amount of pollution that wood heaters that are manufactured in the future can emit. The new rule, last updated in 1988, does not affect current heaters already in use in homes.
Under the rule, new wood stove air emissions - which can include soot, volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide and air toxics - will be reduced by roughly two-thirds, the EPA said when it issued the final rule in February 2015. EPA estimated that for every dollar spent to bring new, cleaner heaters to market, the American public would see between $74 and $165 in health benefits. The rules will also make stoves more efficient, so consumers will use less wood to heat their homes, EPA said.
Before unanimously advancing the DEP rules bill, House Judiciary members removed from it the section that includes the wood-stove rule. They said they would take up that measure as a separate bill during a later meeting. A companion version of the rules bill is pending in the state Senate.
During the regular session, House members had removed the wood-stove language from the DEP rules package, but then refused to act on the legislation after the Senate put the provision back in the bill.
Reach Ken Ward Jr. at kward@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1702 or follow @kenwardjr on Twitter.