Notice of Enforcement Discretion Termination Offers ‘Housekeeping’ Opportunity

In a June 29 memorandum, Susan Parker Bodine, assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance assurance at the EPA, announced that relief granted by EPA’s March 26 Enforcement Discretion Policy will terminate on Aug. 31, 2020. As discussed in our previous blog post, EPA issued the policy to provide relief to regulated entities that might have difficulty complying with permitting and regulatory requirements because of the pandemic. It grants broad temporary relief to entities “for violations of routine compliance monitoring, integrity testing, sampling, laboratory analysis, training, and reporting or certification obligations in situations where the EPA agrees that COVID-19 was the cause of the noncompliance and the entity provides supporting documentation to the EPA upon request.”