Advocate Summary

Issue:  Effluent Limitation Guidelines (for Transportation Equipment Cleaning Industry)
Advocate:  National Tank Truck Carriers – John L. Conley
Date of Interview: 5/29/02

Basic Background
What it is, we ended up with a settlement type or an agreement from Environmental Protection Agency on how a certain regulation would be implemented.  Two things that could set that off is if EPA monitors it for a while and decides we were a little too lenient or we shouldn't have gone this way.  They could go back and issue another proposal.  The other side would be if somebody out of the community, in this case might it be one of the environmental groups were to say this isn't as strong as it should have been.  But neither of those has happened and I don't anticipate it.
	The issue will always be on, it's an ongoing regulatory requirement.  It's always subject to being changed, it's one that we'll follow.  But the amount of time and money that went into it over the last three years or so hopefully will not continue.

Prior Activity on the Issue 
What basically happened is the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Water Act was told to regulate many industries, just about anybody who produced some kind of pollution.  
Our industry is the tank truck transport industry.  So when trucks like that one up there and the one behind you, they haul chemicals and food products and petroleum products in bulk, the most common being gasoline.  But also do a lot of chemicals, acids.  What will happen is that's a stainless steel trailer basically.  It will go into a facility where it will be cleaned.  It will be cleaned depending on what it was hauling with different types of detergents.  Whatever comes out at the end of it is a wastewater.  That wastewater has to be accounted for and treated.  Obviously you don't just go out in the yard with it.  In many cases, those waters are used by local sewage treatment facilities for their balancing.  So whatever one of our facilities may put out will balance something else that's coming out.
What the EPA was told to do was because transportation equipment was identified as one of the industries that standards had to be developed for, they had to write one.  Initially they didn't write one.  They took a look at the industry and said, based on how things are being handled by that industry and what's going on now, we'll go to another industry.  There's a whole slew of them, eighty industries I guess, everything from airports to garbage facilities.  So they kind of stayed away from ours.  One of the environmental groups sued them and said you haven't written regulations for the following industries and we were lucky enough to be one of them.
[Do you recall who –]
Who did it?  I don't, I could go back and find it.  I'd be guessing, so I don't want to say.  It was something like Friends of the Earth, one of those type of interest groups.  So EPA said okay, the judge told them they're right, you were told by Congress this is an area you have to write regulations in.  So they decided they had to write a regulation, as they did.  
Where we got involved is, we were notified that they were going to be doing it.  They put out some preliminary stuff which we felt was kind of off and not necessary, too stringent.  So that's kind of where the issue came from.  Now we have this proposed regulation that will – the EPA estimated I think $5 million a year compliance costs, which of course we felt was way low because they didn't consider a lot of things that we would say, if you're developing new ways of cleaning and new monitoring systems and things that aren't [inaudible].  We felt those numbers are low.  So for both operational and cost reasons, we obviously had to get involved as an association, because so many of our members were affected.  

Advocacy Activities Undertaken
One of the things we tried to do, one of the first things we did was try to help educate the EPA on what it is they were regulating.  It's being critical, but it's a fair criticism, that you have people sitting in Washington writing regulations about any industry, who probably didn't come out industry, they probably came out of college and went into government or went into whatever discipline took them into the EPA.  So they know the science and that kind of stuff, but they don't know the industries.  
We got very good cooperation from people at EPA.  A woman named Gina Matthews was our first real contact, she eventually went to another agency.  She was a chemical engineer by training and she had a couple more career bureaucrats working for her.  One of the things we said is, do you know what a cleaning facility is?  Do you know what a tank truck cleaning facility is?  They said, no, not really.  So we said, would you like to go visit some?  
So we set up a number of visits over in Baltimore, up in New Jersey, and did some field trips, literally went out and watched the truck come in, they see what's in it, they put a spinner in it, they put different caustics or different kinds of washes in it.  Comes out back here, goes into these treatment tanks, settling tank, wherever it's going to go to the public sewer system, if there is one.  Not into the sewer, off to the treatment plant or anything like that.  So probably the first step once we knew where we were headed was worked with people from EPA who we knew were going to be writing the regulation to try to help give them a better understanding of what it is that we were talking about.  
We also took a look at some of the data that they had developed, kind of wherever they could find it.  Said we don't know where you got this, but it's not realistic.  We will help you develop data, what do you want to know?  So we basically, it was a very thick questionnaire, I don't know if we still have copies around anymore.  But we sent them to all our members, we got them lists of people who might be able to fill it out.  It had everything in there from number of washing, how are you doing it, what are you producing.  So we helped them develop other data, other than what they already had.  
So that was another step where we did involve our members, call people and say, can we bring the EPA out to your facility?  Of course, the first reaction was, are you crazy?  But it worked out.
The other thing that we did that involved our members, we have a Tank Cleaning Council.  It's the people from our different carriers who are responsible for having their tank truck – I'm talking about the interior of the tank now, not the outside.  Think of a tank truck as a thermos bottle.  It's got insulation and stainless steel and you can keep things warm or cold, the stainless protects the tank itself from whatever chemicals they haul.  So you have people at the carriers who are responsible for insuring those tanks are properly cleaned, either by the carrier or out on the road.  
There are a number of commercial cleaning facilities where that's their business.  If a truck leaves Baltimore and goes to St. Louis with a certain chemical, delivers that chemical, wants to pick up another load, you don't want to come back to Baltimore empty.  So you go somewhere and you get it cleaned out.  If you don't have a facility there, you got to pay somebody to do it.  So you have the carrier-owned facilities and then the commercial-owned facilities.
So we've got a group of people together and we do it every year, we call it our Tank Cleaning Council.  We basically spend a couple days talking about cleaning issues, whether it's environmental disposal issues.  Tank entrance is another area where you have people going down in who maybe are going to do scraping or cleaning in certain instances.  They need to have the right protection, OSHA protection gear and breathing apparatus and all that stuff.  So we invited the EPA to come attend those meetings, talk to the people who were there.  Again, trying to educate them on what it is they were writing regulations about.  
That worked pretty well.  We found that once they wrote a regulation, they took all this data back.  We had a core of about seven or eight really strong people who really know tank cleaning, they all probably have chemical backgrounds or industrial backgrounds.  They know the whole chain, environmental regulations.  They get into all these other, parts per billion of this, parts per billion of that.  Things that we as the staff don't have expertise in.  So we made that core of seven or eight people available to the EPA to answer their questions.
	It's certainly a self-interest type thing, we thought that if you're going to write a regulation about it, you ought to know what it is, what we're doing and who we are.  So that went along.  
A couple things happened.  The EPA, I guess every government agency, the EPA within the agency has a small business entity of some kind.  They have a person who works there who's basically almost like the business advocate within the agency.  They're the ones that are supposed to, as the bureaucrats are sitting around the table saying let's do this, that person basically says, I'm here representing the industry or the person who's going to be regulated, and here's why I don't think you should do that.  Or if you're going to do that, do it this way.
They had somebody from that office, I think it's small business – I can find the name.  They were extremely helpful.  They sat in on some of the meetings.  They were almost like an advocate for us even within their own agency.  It was an entity that I had not worked with before.  I didn't even know they existed.  The reason we found out about some of these people we ended up using, they invited us down, the small business group, and said this is something that's affecting you and here's what we do.  
One of the people who attended that meeting, and why I'm jumping ahead a little bit, we got well beyond the expertise of the staff here.  My boss has a journalism degree, I have a journalism degree, the other fellow has a communications degree.  My boss has thirty-five years in the industry and I have close to thirty.  So we've learned a lot of things over the years about transportation, about safety, about regulations that govern truck drivers, equipment.  I never took science classes, was terrible in math.  So when we started getting to parts per billion of this chemical and parts per million for that, and carbon testing and all these different terms, we were well beyond our scope.  Which meant we had to go out and hire somebody who did know.
Attending that small business meeting at EPA was a fellow who had represented a couple other associations as they were going through this same process, when the rules were being written for those industries.  There was a fellow who was a consultant out of Tennessee who had worked with a couple other ones.  Actually, I met him there.  We had other people who knew what was going on, they came up to us and said you're going to need help, environmental help and analysis and laboratories and all that.  Would you use us?  It turned out, my boss said this guy's already done this rulemaking with other organizations.  Very expensive in the long run, but I think we picked the right person.
We used a consulting firm.  They work out of Tennessee and that's all they do is environmental chemical analysis of waste streams and other things.  But he was very helpful.  We had to have some kind of technical expertise and they were able to lend that to us.  What that meant really was again going out to our members and getting samples of wastewater.  What is it that comes out of the back of the tank?  What is it that you're ultimately discharging into the line that's going to go to the sewage treatment plant?  So they did that.  They would go out to facilities themselves and take tests and samples.  That was all important, because part of the reason for doing that was challenging some of the data that the EPA had developed.
One of the things that became the most contentious was EPA wrote a regulation that would handle pesticides, that would make it extremely strict.  We did not  haul pesticides for years.  They just don't do that.  Yet they were saying this could show up.  That was one of the things that we had to attack from the technical side, was that all the analysis of all these waste streams, nowhere has anything shown up that looks like a pesticide, yet you have a regulation here that says treat this wastewater as if it had pesticides in it.  So they became part of our effort and had very good relations themselves with EPA, because they had gone through some of these other rulemakings.
The other thing we of course had to do is we went out and hired a law firm that specializes in environmental issues.  The reason for that mainly was they know the structure down there, what's the administrative law procedures down there.  
So for a small association, which we are, it got to be a very expensive proposition.  We probably spent over $800,000 on consulting fees and legal fees.  For a group our size, that's monumental.  We got no help from anybody else, no other associations, anything.  That came basically out of our dues payers' pockets.  
	But in the long run, the final document that was developed between EPA and the rest of this process is one that I think and EPA seems to think met the requirements that the judge put on them, that the law put on them, yet accommodated our objections.  I guess that's in a nutshell the issue.  

What came out at the end of it was, the regulations are there.  They gave different options on how to comply with them.  One of the options was basically to go to your POTW, the publicly owned treatment works, and work out an agreement with them as to what you're bringing in and how you're supposed to do it.  Which was really what a lot of people were doing anyway, just formalized it more.  Now you do need to have a formal agreement showing that this is what we're doing.  Again, these are products, wastewaters that are going somewhere else to be treated, they're not just going out in the river or something.

Future Advocacy Activities Planned
None mentioned.

Key Congressional Contact(s)/Champions
Not applicable.

Targets of Direct Lobbying
EPA

Targets of Grassroots Lobbying
None mentioned.

Coalition Partners: Names/Participants
Not really.  We tried to get other associations involved.  The American Chemistry Council is one of the major shipper groups.  They represent the DuPonts and the Dows and those are who our people haul for.  DuPont and Dow, they don't generally own their own tank trucks.  They will call one of our members and say, come pick up my chemical and take it to so and so or somewhere.  We said, you all are involved too, some of you have cleaning racks.  They just didn't want to get too involved.  Don't blame them, I guess.  So there really was no other interaction with other associations.

Other Participants in the Issue Debate
None mentioned. 

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence
There were a couple of them.  When EPA listed all the different industries, here's the ones you've done so far.  When the Congress passed the law, they said write regulations on the following industries.  One of them was called the transportation equipment cleaning.  What we're talking about are called effluent limitation guidelines.  So the regulation I keep referring to was basically an effluent limitation guideline, which said that the effluent that's produced from the process of cleaning this equipment, here's what can be in it, here's how you have to treat it, here's how you have to handle it.
When EPA's own people went and looked at all the things they could regulate and spend their time and money on, they looked at our little segment and said, there's just not that much there.  What's being done already is working.  Part of the reason it was working is if you go to the Alexandria treatment facility or wherever, anywhere that the local authority is letting you send liquids in there, they're monitoring it in their own self-interest.  The EPA understood that.  Yes, this tank truck facility is putting X amount of gallons a day or gallons a month into this facility, and of course it's all being monitored as it comes in.  If my facility did something that's going to mess up your treatment plant, you don't need EPA.  You're going to be shutting me down anyway.
So it really was a case where EPA felt there were other places to go.  So one of the arguments that we raised even initially, we knew it wasn't going to work, was that you don't really need to regulate us.  But that wasn't up to them or us, the judge said, yes, you do, because that's what the law says.
The other argument that we then had was the way they originally wrote the regulation, it covered petroleum products, food products – our people haul orange juice, milk, liquid sugar, syrup, wine, lots of food products.  Then of course the whole range of petroleum products, gasoline for fuel.  You don't generally wash petroleum product trailers.  The gasoline trailers that you see going to the Texaco station, that's really all they do.  If you have home heating oil, it delivers home heating oil, that's really all they handle.  The chemical trailers do haul a variety of products and they're a lot more challenging to clean.
So the first thing we said was let's limit this to chemical cleaning.  They did that, in the rule that came out.  They reserved the right to go back in the future if they want to, but they said, we buy that argument.  So the regulation as it came out does not affect food and had very limited effect on petroleum, almost none.  So blowing your own horn from an association standpoint, we could go to those members and say it cost us a lot of money and time and everything, but you're not under these regulations.
Chemical is different.  There are some other things in the rules, some of the dollar figures.  They were proposing treatment systems from other industries, carbon absorption, which I don't pretend to know about.  We were able to show that first of all it's not being used now and if it were to be brought in, what the costs would be.  So we used some of those approaches.  
So the objections were we thought it was too broad, we thought it was too expensive.  In some cases, [inaudible] believed it wasn't necessary.  But once we knew it was going to happen, then our job really became to work with them as much as possible to develop something we could live with.  That pretty much happened.  It was not a letter writing type thing, it wasn't you're going to put me out of business, which a lot of associations will go to their members and say everybody write their congressman and say if you do this you're going to put us out of business.  I'm sure you've heard from the research you've been doing, the congressmen don't listen to that stuff.  To a degree I guess they do, at a certain point it becomes ear-numbing.
Interesting, we did nothing with Congress on this.  We're a trade association in the Washington area.  This was strictly an agency type initiative.  We didn't go back to Congress and say will you amend the law and take us out, which maybe wouldn't have been a bad idea but it wouldn't have happened, I don't think.  But it wasn't a case of going to congressmen and trying to have them put pressure on EPA.  Down the road, had things not worked out, had EPA taken an attitude of we know best and you dirty old industry people are just trying to keep getting away with stuff – that attitude never existed, which was helpful.

But I guess maybe different on some other issues, some other groups you're talking to, we really did not get involved with Congress at all.  It wasn’t feasible to do a letter writing campaign, because we don't have that many members, it doesn't affect that many people.  So this was one where you really had to go out and argue the science and economics of it, and hope that people on the other side would at least listen.  And they did.

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence
None mentioned.

Targeted Arguments, Targets, and Evidence
None mentioned.

Nature of the Opposition
No.  We thought there might be, only because there are people in Washington who their whole job is to oppose things.  Certainly, my nephew works for cleanwater.org and Greenpeace.  There are a lot of organizations like that whose existence is based on opposing things.  Certainly on the safety side and every side that an advocates group or whatever.  For whatever reason, and this stuff was all done in public, there were public hearings, stuff published in the Federal Register.  Our meetings had to be open to anyone who wanted to come, when the EPA was there as a speaker.
We testified at EPA. As far as real organized opposition, I think the opposition was the initial one where somebody at one of these groups basically said here's an industry you're supposed to regulate and you didn't.  There again, I think probably their main objective was not, is this industry really doing something, but there's something else you should have covered.  

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition 
Not applicable. 

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition
Not applicable. 

Targeted Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition (and Targets)
Not applicable. 

Described as a Partisan Issue
No.

Venue(s) of Activity
EPA

Action Pending or Taken by Relevant Decision Makers
The final rule came out in August of 2000, but it was the final rule that generated a lot of the follow-up work.  This is a document that they came out with in 2001, which basically gives some of the options.  The final rule came out but it's what led to a lot of this other stuff, and there were some changes made.  I would say the actual compliance – there's still compliance deadlines that haven't come in yet.  When they pass a rule like this, they give you a certain amount of time.  But the final rule was published in August 2000, but it led to a lot of the action we're talking about, challenging what was in the rule.  They came back and made some accommodations.  
	This here, this transportation equipment cleaning category guidance document came out in March 2001.  There again, EPA came to some of our meetings and the consultant came to some of the meetings.    The final rule analysis compliance time, that was done in April 2001, where he kind of went through.  Here's the real history of it.  September 13, 2003 – there are just different levels of compliance and different ways of complying.  It's still kind of an ongoing thing in that respect.  

Policy Objective(s) and Support for/Opposition to the Status Quo
[Worked against extremely restrictive effluent limitation guidelines for transportation equipment cleaning.]

Advocate’s Experience: Tenure in Current Job/Previous Experience
I worked for a trade magazine for twelve years, longer than that, that covered the tank truck industry.  I was the editor of that for a long time, then came here in 1989 as vice president.  My boss has been here since 1965.  We both have a long time in the industry so we know the language real well.  We know people, particularly at the DOT.  I think we know how to ask questions without being offensive or accusing them of things.  Some of the members come in, they just want to go to war at times and you can't allow that.  But for expertise stuff, when you get to the parts per billion of this pesticide or that chemical, we knew we were well out of our league.  But a very typical association.

Reliance on Research: In-House/External (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
I'd say 90 percent of what we do is in-house.  Most of what we do is with the Department of Transportation and it's stuff that we're pretty familiar with.  We don't have any engineers on staff, there's only three "professionals" and then the administrative staff.  There are other issues that come up on the trucking industry side.  Again, because of what we're hauling, the chemicals and the gases under pressure and things that the Department of Transportation has regulations on how a trailer like that should be built and maintained.  They have regulations on drivers.  Particularly after 9-11 there's a lot more questions, you can imagine a lot more security-oriented stuff.  Most of those things we are familiar enough, we go to our carriers and safety directors and develop positions.  Again, we're lucky we have a real good relationship with the Department of Transportation. 
So about the only place there that we probably would have to go and get an engineer is, and it sounds like a silly example, but at the back of a trailer you've got a bumper.  They talk about what should that bumper absorb, how many g-forces or whatever.  Do the bumpers that we have, we think that they meet that criteria, and the DOT or somebody says we don't think they do.  
	At that point, we may have to go and say – or they might say, they have what they call overturn protection, so that if that trailer were to roll over, there are things on the top of it that will keep it so they don't snap off pipes or something and let the liquid come out.  So they can roll over without damaging that.  I think the record will show that they've been successful.  But I could see if an engineer came out and said they could be three times as safe if they were three times as big.  We would probably in that case hire our own engineer to go in and say why that's not necessary.

Our members are a great resource.  We're a very narrowly defined industry.  You have the trucking industry, which is if you sit and watch all the trucks go by on the Beltway, fifteen truck freight boxes are going to go by hauling television sets or Coca Cola or Giant Food for every one tank truck that goes by.  So we're really narrowly defined in that respect.  So we do rely on our members for their expertise when it comes to regulations, in terms of it affects the equipment or the drivers or the communications, the stuff you have to put on a trailer that shows what's in it, that kind of stuff.  We make light of the fact that we're a bunch of –

Number of Individuals Involved in Advocacy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Three 

Units in Organization Involved in Public Affairs/Policy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
We don't have any engineers on staff, there are only three "professionals" and then the administrative staff.  

Advocate’s Outstanding Skills/Assets (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
None mentioned.

Type of Membership: None, Institutions, Individuals, Both (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Institutions – Tank Truck Companies  

Membership Size (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Organizational Age (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Miscellaneous

The woman who originally headed up was named Gina Matthews.  She got transferred.  The consultant was a guy down in Tennessee named Jack Waggener.  His phone number is 615-224-2133.  He was a real asset because he had gone through this with other associations, so he knew the ropes down there, he knew the people, he knew the language.  So he was real helpful.  If you want to talk with somebody at EPA – there's a guy, if he's still down there, named John Tinger.  He was in the engineering analysis division.  He was 202-260-4992.  The other fellow who was really interesting, if he hasn't retired, he was an economist.  He went and [inaudible] the original numbers that we challenged, but he was very interested in why we were doing what we're doing and challenging them.  He came to several of the meetings.  His name is George Denning, his number is 202-260-7374.
I wish I could find – it's called SABRIFA, it's even got a name.  If you were to talk to John or anybody down there and ask them about the small business advocate agency within EPA, they could tell you who it was.  If you talked to Jack Waggener, he would very much know who it was, because he worked with them before.