Comment submitted by Deborah Scott

My name is Deborah Scott and I live in Oregon. I am a concerned citizen and I am submitting this comment in opposition to the proposed Federal CCR Permit Program, docket EPA-HQ-OLEM-2019-0361, as it is currently structured. I grew up in rural Arizona and only had access to well water. This was our only option and having to worry about groundwater contamination from a coal plant upstream would have been devastating not only for our family, but for the community as a whole. I know permit requirements can affect the thoroughness and protectiveness of both the thing being permitted and the community surrounding that industry. This permit program is the process through which those determinations will be executed for the vast majority of states in the country. Only four states currently have EPA-approved CCR permit programs. The design of the federal program, its deadlines, its tiering criteria, and its data requirements, will determine how much tolerance written into the April rollback will translate into weakened protections in practice. The questions the EPA is asking in this comment period have a direct consequence for public health. The EPA is asking whether to shorten the deadline for first-tier permit applications from 18 months to six months after the effective date of the final rule. I strongly oppose shortening the application deadline to six months. The April 2026 proposed amendments require facilities to submit complex, site-specific technical analyses to justify alternative requirements for groundwater monitoring, cleanup levels, and closure timelines. Producing accurate, complete applications for those determinations requires months of data analysis and in many cases site-specific risk assessments that take a year or more to properly create. A six-month window will produce incomplete applications which expand permit authority discretion in ways that historically benefit operators rather than affected communities. The EPA should retain the 18-month deadline at minimum. The EPA is asking which facilities should submit permit applications first, and has suggested prioritizing CCR units in states that do not intend to pursue their own permit program approval. I oppose tiering criteria based on state administrative preferences. States that opt out of running their own CCR permit program are typically those with the least regulatory infrastructure and the least political will to protect residents from coal ash contamination. Processing those sites first, under a compressed timeline, with a reduced agency workforce, does not protect the communities most at risk. It processes them fastest under the least favorable conditions for careful review. Tiering criteria should be based on documented risk to human health and the environment: sites with confirmed groundwater contamination above federal health standards, sites located near communities with no alternative drinking water supply, and legacy sites that have never been subject to any federal permitting oversight should be prioritized. The EPA needs to base its tiering decisions on contamination risk and community vulnerability rather than state administrative decisions. The EPA is asking whether to require states implementing their own CCR permit programs to enter permit data into EPA's centralized RCRAInfo database, or whether states may maintain separate data systems. I do support mandatory participation in the federal database for all CCR permit authorities and urge the EPA to make this a requirement rather than an ask. The 2020 proposed rule included development of a CCR module in RCRAInfo for federally issued permits. Extending that requirement to state-issued permits is necessary for public accountability and national data consistency. Under a permit-driven compliance system, the most consequential decisions about coal ash management will be made at the permit level rather than through uniform national standards. If those decisions are not publicly accessible in a centralized system, affected communities have no practical way to know what protections or exemptions are in place at sites near them, and environmental organizations lose the ability to identify patterns of weakened enforcement across state lines. A permitting system without centralized, publicly accessible data cannot function as an accountability process. The EPA should require all state CCR permit programs to enter data into the shared federal database that is fully accessible to the public. The communities living near coal ash disposal sites have waited decades for meaningful federal oversight. The design of this permit program should reflect and support that obligation. Thank you, Deborah Scott