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EPA Releases Annual Report for Fiscal Year 2004

Release Date: 11/17/2004
Contact Information: Cynthia Bergman 202-564-9828 / bergman.cynthia@epa.gov

(11/17/04) EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt released the Agency’s Annual Report for Fiscal Year 2004 Nov. 15, meeting the requirements of the Government Performance and Results Act and other management legislation. The 1993 legislation requires each agency to report annually to Congress on the results of its activities in each fiscal year. The agency received an unqualified or clean audit opinion on its financial statements from the EPA inspector general. Among the report’s highlights:

· EPA announced a suite of clean air rules for mercury, smog, fine particles and interstate air pollution.
· EPA issued a new rule classifying communities by the severity of their smog conditions and establishing a deadline for state and local governments to reduce ozone levels.
· The agency promulgated the Clean Air Non-Road Diesel Rule, requiring strong pollution controls on diesel engines used in construction, agriculture, mining and other industries. This regulation will reduce the sulfur content of diesel fuel by 99 percent and cut emission levels from nonroad diesel equipment by more than 90 percent. The program is expected to provide dramatic health benefits each year, preventing 12,000 premature deaths and hundreds of thousands of respiratory problems.
· In May 2004, the president signed an executive order directing Administrator Leavitt to establish the Great Lakes Federal Task Force, made up of nine Cabinet agencies, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Council on Environmental Quality to coordinate the federal effort to improve water quality in the Great Lakes. The order calls for regional collaboration to develop action plans to address priorities, identify resource needs, develop an implementation schedule and make possible a cohesive management process.
· The percentage of Americans served by U.S. community water systems that meet all EPA health-based drinking water standards increased from 79 percent in 1993 to 90 percent in 2003, the last year for which all numbers are available.
· The agency issued industrial water pollution control permits that prevented the discharge of approximately 136 million pounds of pollutants into the nation’s waters. Part of this success came from states and EPA issuing permits at animal feeding operations to protect surface water from waste.

The report is available at: https://www.epa.gov/ocfo/finstatement/2004ar/2004ar.htm . Paper copies will be available in January through EPA’s National Service Center for Environmental Publication (NSCEP) at 1-800-490-9198 or by ordering on-line at: https://www.epa.gov/ncepihom/ordering.htm .
The report title is “Fiscal Year 2004 Annual Report, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency” and the publication number is: EPA-190-R-04-001.