Business and environmental leaders are gearing up for a September regulatory hearing that will mark the next flash point over Colorado air-pollution regulation — the establishment of health-based standards for air contaminants that can sicken state residents.
Colorado Air Quality Control Commission members identified five priority toxic air contaminants in January; determining the levels of those contaminants that constitute threats to the public health is the next step in the process. Only after that is done at a hearing scheduled for Sept. 17-19 will the same body come back later and determine, in conjunction with the Legislature, how the new standards will be used in permitting.
The five priority TACs — formaldehyde, benzene, hexavalent chromium, ethylene oxide and hydrogen sulfide — come from a wide variety of sources, including oil-and-gas wells, medical-instrument-manufacturing facilities and wastewater-treatment plants. Colorado’s effort to regulate and limit them, stemming from a 2022 law, makes a significant new step for a state government that’s focused its air-pollution efforts so far almost solely on greenhouse-gas emissions.
How officials will develop health-based standards
In setting these health-based standards, the AQCC will determine the exposure level to each TAC that creates adverse health impacts, explained Amanda Damweber, air toxics regulation supervisor for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. The standards will set maximum allowable exposure levels across a person’s lifetime, and they will take into account the cumulative effect of exposure to other TACs in conjunction with them, she said at a May 15 AQCC meeting.
The benchmark standard will be achieved by multiplying toxicity value by risk level, explained Tara Webster, CDPHE toxicology and environmental epidemiology officer. It will look both at the cancerous effects of the TACs and at non-cancerous effects, which could include increased risk of birth defects, worsening risk of respiratory disease, exacerbation of asthma symptoms and other health consequences.
Tara Webster, toxicology and environmental epidemiology officer for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, speaks during the May 15 AQCC meeting.
For leaders in the industries that will be impacted by the health-based standards on the priority TACs, the issue isn’t so much about setting the standards but about the timing of establishing them. Why, they have asked state officials, would they set standards before saying how those standards will be used in the permitting process, as that won’t give affected employers the knowledge of how those standards will be used when determining how technically and economically feasible it will be to meet the standards?
“We’ll know what the health-based standards are in September. At the same time, we’ll have no idea how they’ll be implemented,” said Julie Rosen, an attorney and chairwoman of the Colorado Chamber of Commerce’s Regulatory Affairs Council. “It feels problematic from a process perspective in multiple ways.”
Environmental advocates cheer health-based standards
The timing is necessary because the 2022 law mandating the regulations requires that the AQCC deliver the standards to the Legislature in 2026, which will allow legislative input on whether and how to attach them to permitting requirements, Damweber said. Were the AQCC to delay setting standards until December, as several business groups requested, it would give CDPHE little time to review the standards with legislative legal officials before presenting them to committees during January SMART Act hearings.
For environmental advocates who have waited for years to see the state clamp down on toxins they say are harming residents around drilling and industrial facilities, the development of health-based standards is necessary for reasons beyond permitting. Theya Stockman, an air-quality specialist for Adams County, told the AQCC that the standards will jumpstart the state’s process of reducing exposure to toxins that are both manmade and from wildfires, and that result is something that can’t be delayed.
“Health-based standards have broad applications beyond permitting,” adding Tykee James, senior environmental justice campaign manager for Conservation Colorado.
What happens next
Still, Damweber acknowledged to the AQCC that most other states that have established health-based standards for TACs have linked them to permitting requirements. And she noted that any delay in the Legislature approving the new health-based standards could cause a delay in any permitting program that incorporates the standards.
The initial proposed values for the health-based standards that Damweber presented to the AQCC show differing levels of exposure to the five priority TACS that Coloradans can be deemed safe to have. People, for example, could be exposed to a higher level of formaldehyde without crossing the line for cancer risk than they could be exposed to hexavalent chromium compounds.
This chart, shown during a May 15 Colorado Air Quality Control Commission meeting, offers proposed health-based standards for five priority toxic air contaminants.
Annareli Morales, the air-quality policy analyst for the Weld County Department of Public Health and Environment, asked that the setting of the new standards be put off at least until after CDPHE’s October release of a report that will showcase data collected from 2024, the first year of monitoring TACs at three sites around Colorado. That report will inform officials in her county what kind of exposure levels they are looking at and give them some ideas about what those levels mean toward health, she said.
AQCC members, however, said they want to move ahead with the planned September hearing. Commissioner Martha Rudolph emphasized that the commission will be asked at that meeting to set standards on what would protect the public health — not rules based on what is technically achievable or fiscally reasonable.
Business concerns
Still, business leaders will approach the coming hearing with an eye toward ensuring that any standards approved by the AQCC are implementable, and that they are not set so stringently that companies must cut production or spend excessive amounts to comply.
In requesting party status for the Colorado Chamber of Commerce, regulatory affairs advisor Dave Kulmann said he hopes to address a “lack of information on the relationship between the (health-based standards) and the permitting needs assessment and any future compliance obligations that may be imposed on businesses operating in Colorado.”
“The Chamber also wants to ensure that Regulation Number 30 is accompanies by agency transparency, accountability and efficiency, and that the health-based standards adopted are consistent with statutory mandates, is based on some underlying science and does not put an undue economic or regulatory burden on Chamber members and impacted businesses,” Kulmann wrote.