Environmental Law

Comment Period on UECA regulations

By Joel Bolstein

Troy Conrad, the Director of PADEP's Land Recycling Program, has told me that the proposed  regulations implementing UECA (Chapter 253) will be published in the PA Bulletin on Saturday, March 6.  The comment period will run 30 days.  I have not heard much at all from my fellow brownfield practitioners concerning the proposed UECA regulations.  On the several occasions that I have made a presentation on UECA, I still get looks of disbelief when I talk about the never-ending reporting requirements that morphed from being optional to mandatory.   UECA becomes a point of discussion in virtually every transaction involving the sale of contaminated property, and in many instances it is a subject that requires negotiation over who will have the responsibility for preparing the environmental covenant and for compliance with its terms.  I've even had several properties that were being remediated with USTIF funds where the desire to avoid perpetual reporting obligations under UECA prompted the property owner to continue performing USTIF reimbursed monitoring, in an effort to meet the statewide health standards rather than take the quickest route to a release of liability by using the site specific standard.    Other transactions had UECA issues resolved by the parties agreeing to postpone the submission of any environmental covenant until the last date possible for converting an existing deed restriction to an EC (which is sometime in 2013).

 As Troy Conrad has said, the proposed regulations are pretty vanilla.  There is no reason, however, to avoid letting the Department know what issues have come up as a result of its implementation of UECA and requesting that the regulations do more than is proposed to address its shortcomings.    

Full post as published by PA Brownfields Environmental Law on February 22, 2010 (boomark / email).