A second national conference call was held on July 13 to discuss the EPA Consent Agreement (CA) for agricultural air emissions. The guest speakers were Mr. Robert Kaplan, Director Special Litigation and Projects Division, Office of Regulatory Enforcement at EPA and Dr. Albert Heber, Professor in Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University. Each gave a very informative presentation that was followed by a question and answer session.

There are a few key items that were discussed by Mr. Kaplan on July 13th that require immediate attention if the industry wishes to be in a position to learn more about and have input on the CA and the process before accepting or rejecting it. They are:

1. EPA will accept comments on the March 23rd draft of the CA from the dairy industry. (We have a copy of the CA here). In a subsequent conversation that I had with Mr. Kaplan on July 16th, he indicated that comments are needed within about two weeks. Is there a group that wants to work on this?
2. EPA will consider proposals to allow the dairy industry more time to learn about and evaluate the consent agreement. If we want to do this, then we will need to indicate so to EPA in our comments and quickly follow up with a plan of attack. Karl Czymmek and myself have begun to think about what a plan would look like if the industry wants to act on EPA's offer. Does the industry want to work together on this?
3. As a follow-up to any comments offered to EPA in step 1 above, EPA would like to meet with the key representative of the dairy industry to discuss the CA and the dairy industry's participation.

Additionally, we talked about having a mechanism for dairy producers to express their desire to be part of the CA without initially doing so through EPA. If this is desired by the industry, then we need to identify how to best set up this process.

If you have any comments, thoughts or suggestions on the above I encourage you to contact me by July 22nd so the other key dairy industry members can see what is being communicated. I will aggregate all communications and prepare a summary to distribute at a later date.

Sincerely,

Curt Gooch