New Duties Imposed by Federal Regulations

Bruce Vernyi, Editor-in-Chief E-mail: bvernyi@penton.com

It’s a clich that, when the government steps in, things often go from bad to worse.

That seems to be the case with new regulations for gas storage that are being pushed by the Department of Homeland Security, and the deteriorating situation is the fact that the regulations are going to cut into distributors’ profit.

In its effort to protect us from the threat of terrorism, Homeland Security, early last year, issued lists of chemicals and gases that would have to be monitored, and for which tracking reports would have to be provided to the government on a regular basis.

The list was so extensive and the threshold amounts for the chemicals and gases were so small that distributors, and even the home repair retailers that sell tanks of propane for home grills, could have had spent more time and money safeguarding and reporting on those products than selling them.

However, the Department of Homeland Security apparently was open-minded enough to listen to reason.

Informational and lobbying efforts by trade associations, including the National Propane Gas Association and the Gases and Welding Distributors Association (GAWDA) pointed out to the government that, not only were the proposed regulations extraordinarily burdensome, they were futile because the supposed threat from many of the products in question was particularly low. Those efforts succeeded to some degree – the Department reduced the number of gases and chemicals for which it will require monitoring – but many of the Department’s threshold limits remain the same.

The trade associations are continuing their lobbying efforts with the Department in the hope to raise those thresholds, but as Michael L. Dodd, the Department of Transportation and Homeland Security consultant for GAWDA, points out in an article that begins on pg. 8 in this issue, it now is up to gas distributors to register with the federal government and to monitor and report on the gases they sell.

Sharing the burden to ensure public safety in the face of terrorism shouldn’t be a problem, but the government does have to be challenged when it goes to extremes in posting regulations that don’t make sense.