Draft Summary if the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA)

Science and Technical Support Work Group Conference Call

November 4, 1997

The Science and Technical Support Work Group (STSWG) of the FACA Subcommittee held a conference call on Tuesday, November 4, 1997 between 1:00 pm and 3:15 pm EDT. A list of participants and a summary of the meeting follows.

Work Group Participants

Name	Affiliation

Tom Helms, Co-Chair	U.S. EPA

Diana Andrews	Kentucky DEP

David Chock	Ford Motor Company

Cyril Durrenberger	TNRCC

Bruce Hill	Appalachian Mountain Club

Russell Koch	TCL

George Lauer	ARCO

Dave McNeill	Utah DEQ

Tom Moore	Arizona

S. Trivikrama Rao	New York ARB

Jay Turner	U.S. Department of Transportation

Dan Weiss	Cinergy/UARG

Jeffrey West	GPU Service Corporation

Steve Ziman	Chevron

Work Group Members Not Participating

Name	Affiliation

Harvey Jeffries, Co-Chair	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

John Cabaniss	AIAM

Glenn Cass	Cal Tech

Kirit Chaudhari	Virginia DEQ

Ellis Cowling	SOS

Ken Demerjian	SUNY

Jay Hudson	Santee Cooper

David Kelly	Navajo EPA

Jeffrey MacGillivray	New Hampshire House of Representatives

Rich Poirot	Vermont DEC

Jay Rosenthal	U.S. Navy

Pradeep Saxena	EPRI

Mark Scruggs	DOI

Manop Vanichchagorn/Michael Smithwick	Lousiana DEQ

Non-Work Group Member Participant

Name	Affiliation

John Silvasi	EPA/OPSG

Summary of the Meeting

Discussing the RAMP/AOI/AOV paper

John Silvasi announced that the RAMP/AOI/AOV paper was first on the agenda. Changes to the paper had been circulated.

John Silvasi read S.T. Rao's comments out loud, since some had not received them.

Diana Andrews described that her changes concerned mostly tone and not substance. On point Number 2, she had started to address some of the same comments as S.T. Rao's. She also described her changes to Number 7, where she was concerned about being more positive when commenting on OTAG. She agreed with S.T. Rao's comment on this.

Diana Andrews did not have a chance to address Number 6 in her revisions, made prior to the meeting. She agreed with the header in Number 6, but not the substance. She also felt that Number 7 had problems with the two stages of RAMPs concept.

Steve Ziman did not find many problems with the revisions. Regarding presumptive controls, he wanted to emphasize the iterative process.

Bruce Hill said that requiring more information is a trap that scientists can fall into, where they will not do anything until more information is available. Hill thought this paper left out a discussion on presumptive controls for secondary pollutants. He wanted the paper to say that presumptive controls will be put in where the solution is obvious, such as with primary pollutants. Bruce Hill also pointed out that a cost efficiency trade off can be made with presumptive controls, and the cheapest solution may not solve the problem.

Steve Ziman said that at the September FACA meeting in Chicago, STSWG agreed that scientific modeling will be necessary prior to implementing presumptive controls for secondary pollutants.

Bruce Hill said STSWG will always be arguing over this point.

John Silvasi suggested that STSWG could try a majority/minority vote or re-discuss the points.

Diana Andrews said that the limitations in scientific modeling should be recognized.

Steve Ziman said the STSWG group was basing their comments on the comments of two other groups. He was not sure they could find a middle ground. A minority opinion can be attached to the paper. He did not want to water down the paper.

John Silvasi pointed out that this group must make some progress on this paper or it would not go forward.

Tom Moore said there were a lot of mixed issues within point Number 6. The paper could have a principle about the tradeoffs. If more data is not collected, controls would always be presumptive. A level playing field is needed. He suggested having a second point about the need to have the presumptive controls grounded in science.

Bruce Hill agreed with that approach. The difficulty is that in a lot of cases, the cheapest control solution will not solve the problem.

Diana Andrews asked if this was similar to item Number 4.

Tom Moore said they had talked at great length about this. Bruce Hill's point is valid.

Diana Andrews pointed out that number 4 is similar to Bruce Hill's point.

Steve Ziman said STSWG should remember that they were addressing ozone, PM, and regional haze, all secondary pollutants.

Bruce Hill thought there were secondary pollutants such as ozone and PM which could have presumptive controls. He did not think that they could go forward with this comment in the current form.

David Chock asked how one would be sure that the AOV needs to be controlled.

Bruce Hill repeated that the STSWG comment says that no presumptive controls should be used.

Steve Ziman thought that STSWG was asking to not implement presumptive controls before the planning requirement. That approach would only put off presumptive controls for a limited amount of time. The scientific information should be used to determine appropriate controls.

Bruce Hill would have been more comfortable with presenting the tradeoff between science and presumptive controls. Presumptive controls may trade off the cost efficiency.

Tom Moore suggested adding another point to address this.

Steve Ziman said that STSWG could try to work in Bruce Hill's point.

John Silvasi asked if they should let the contractor work on adjusting point Number 6 to include Bruce Hill's point.

Bruce Hill said that was fine.

Steve Ziman acknowledged that they did not have to attack OTAG.

Bruce Hill asked if he had heard that OTAG was not perfect science but worked as policy.

Diana Andrews said they had a tremendous amount of data from OTAG.

Tom Helms asked if this discussion was to promote or criticize OTAG. He asked if the group wanted to attack OTAG.

David Chock said there was no need to attack OTAG.

Steve Ziman said the comment could be that OTAG would not be the model that they would choose to pursue in the future. It was not the model that this group recommended.

Bruce Hill asked what STSWG agreed to regarding OTAG.

Tom Moore suggested maybe STSWG could say that no perfect model existed and here was the process they saw working.

Bruce Hill said that his concern with presumptive controls was that they are cheap.

Cyril Durrenberger stated that the comments he submitted said that good science would try to solve the problem. OTAG had 37 different opinions. Durrenberger thought that groups needed to start small and build up from there. Based on what was available and the timelines, OTAG achieved all it could.

George Lauer thought OTAG was too big.

Diana Andrews asked if these issues were addressed in point number 6. She thought they were trying to reiterate this with number 7.

Steve Ziman said that Number 7 was the third paragraph of Number 6. It should be stated that OTAG was too large. The process could need revision later.

George Lauer said RAMPs should be based on natural airsheds, not state lines.

Bruce Hill asked what the boundaries were for natural airsheds.

Steve Ziman said that determining this criteria was the first step for defining the airsheds.

Diana Andrews said the formation of RAMPs was defined in earlier documents.

There was some general discussion about which stakeholders should be included in the RAMP.

Cyril Durrenberger said experiences in Atlanta and New York showed the effectiveness of using the two-level approach to RAMPs.

Tom Moore pointed out that the name of OTAG (Ozone TRANSPORT Assessment Group) indicated that the group was supposed to address transport.

George Lauer indicated that there was not a common-sense approach which could be taken here.

John Silvasi suggested that they step back and let the contractor work it out.

Cyril Durrenberger agreed with Silvasi's suggestion.

Bruce Hill also agreed. In point Number 6, the economic model comments could be a separate bullet. Models undergoing rigorous testing should be up front.

George Lauer mentioned that Ms. Browner just published the timeline for the next PM review. He believed that there was not enough time. He could draft a paper addressing this point.

John Silvasi was not sure if, under this FACA Subcommittee structure, they could address this issue. He did not think they even had health effects experts on this committee.

George Lauer indicated that Silvasi had answered his question.

John Silvasi said that new data would not be available for the PM2.5 review in time for CASAC.

Bruce Hill said no new PM2.5 data would be available under the Federal Reference Method, but other studies will be reviewed.

George Lauer felt that 2 to 2.5 years was too short to do the CASAC review. George Lauer then dropped the request that this work group discuss the issue. However, George Lauer said he would appreciate John Silvasi's passing this point of view on to the EPA.

John Silvasi said there was a requirement in CAA that the EPA encourage monitoring.

Tom Helms said that EPA is required to separate the standard from questions on implementation. He thought this point about the timeline for the next PM review was outside the charter of this work group.

Steve Ziman just emailed the contractor (SAIC) a change to point number 7.

Cyril Durrenberger questioned whether the AOI/AOV concept would be used. He thought that presumptive controls might occur too soon.

Bruce Hill gave an example for why one would not wait to impose presumptive controls. He asked the work group how much modeling would be considered enough.

Cyril Durrenberger felt that it was fine to use presumptive controls if some scientific demonstration had been made.

Bruce Hill asked again how much modeling would be sufficient.

Cyril Durrenberger said STSWG was now talking about easy fixes. Determining how to control PMfine may require speciation.

Steve Ziman said that unless it can be demonstrated that presumptive controls are effective, they should not be introduced. STSWG just wanted to point out problems.

Bruce Hill said that when reductions are made for sulfur, this would gain a benefit in terms of PM. They should consider acid rain, etc. He asked how Ziman responds to the fact that fine mass is a good surrogate for the pollution.

Steve Ziman asked Hill if this was not why George Lauer brought up the future CASAC review of speciated data.

Bruce Hill said that, in reducing sulfur emissions, there is an added benefit of reducing haze. These other programs should be considered.

Steve Ziman pointed out that controls were being implemented during this period.

Additional RFP comments

John Silvasi took the agenda to the topic of additional RFP comments. The group needed to talk about the fact that Cyril Durrenberger would develop a one-page header to this document.

Cyril Durrenberger said it was an executive summary of what the group came up with. It basically just described what was in the document.

John Silvasi recommended that the group just put it into the paper and up on the TTN.

Steve Ziman had no problems with that course of action.

Conceptual Model

John Silvasi introduced the next topic, the Conceptual Model, which included three points for discussion.

Executive Summary

John Silvasi said that Harvey Jeffries was going to put an executive summary together. John Silvasi had not heard anything further about that yet.

S.T. Rao on NARSTO State-of-the-Science Meeting

John Silvasi said that S.T. Rao had spoken about using papers from NARSTO's meeting in the Conceptual Model.

S.T. Rao said there was a NARSTO assessment meeting this month where a number of papers would be discussed. It might be interesting to the FACA people in terms of the State of the Science.

John Silvasi asked if S.T. Rao could give a synopsis after the meeting and see if this would be appropriate in the Conceptual Model.

S.T. Rao thought it would be useful to include in the Conceptual Model, but most of the STSWG people would be there. Jeff West could summarize the meeting before December 6 while S.T. Rao was out of the country.

John Silvasi said the group would discuss the summary at the first meeting in December.

Bruce Hill said it might be good to do this summary at New Orleans.

Steve Ziman thought the group may be able to extract some abstracts that should be part of the Conceptual Model.

Tom Moore said that in the Environmental Manager, the FACA process has been summarized. He asked what the group thought of this treatment. Tom Moore thought the writers viewed STSWG as being a big part of the FACA process.

John Silvasi said he would try to send out copies of the article.

Steve Ziman on API PM models review

Steve Ziman said that the API Review was a paper they gave out at the Source Attribution Workshop. The executive summary might serve well in the Conceptual Model. They had not received any external comments.

John Silvasi asked if there was an electronic version.

Steve Ziman indicated that he would try to find out more today.

John Silvasi asked if there were any other actions.

Tom Moore asked if there was any formal determination yet about continuing this group.

Tom Helms said that there was no formal determination yet.

Tom Moore felt that the group needed to know definitely if they were to continue this work formally.

The meeting adjourned at 3:15.