THE COHEN GROUP
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The Cohen Group Newsletter - Volume 18  Issue 3, Article 1.  September 2007

  AB515 Update
By Joel Cohen, CIH

I believe the most important bill impacting California employers’ health and safety program in this legislative session is AB515 (Lieber), which would establish a new and relatively inflexible process for setting Permissible Exposure Limits (PELs) for hazardous airborne contaminants.  The bill was strongly endorsed by WorkSafe, a labor organization.

As you may know, Cal/OSHA periodically convenes an Advisory Committee of technical people to review changes made to other nationally-recognized exposure limits, like the ACGIH Threshold Limit Value list (TLVs) and determines to what extent Cal/OSHA should adopt those changes or develop their own proposed PELs.  While the process worked fairly well, especially relative to the Federal government’s reviews, it was subject to the arguments that its decisions were sometimes not clearly supportable, not all interested parties were represented, and interested parties could be overly influential. To that end, Cal/OSHA convened an Advisory Committee in late 2006 to help develop a PEL process that would provide a rational framework for a revitalized standard-setting approach.  This process, now in place, addresses the concerns cited above partly by establishing a Health Expert Advisory Committee composed of occupational health specialists (toxicologists, physicians, industrial hygienists) from management, labor, and academia. This committee is scheduled to meet for its second meeting on November 2, 2007.

AB515 essentially gives the authority to set exposure standards to the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) in Cal/EPA, as opposed to leaving it in Cal/OSHA’s hands where it belongs. This move would eliminate the collaborative standards setting process of OSHA as it applies to PELs.

September has been an interesting month for this bill.  AB 515 was amended twice since leaving the last policy committee, including amendments occurring right before the Senate floor vote.  The Chairman of the Senate Environmental Quality Committee objected and referred the bill to his committee for a hearing on the recent amendments.  At the same time this was occurring, it became apparent to Lieber that she had insufficient votes to get the bill off the Senate floor, so she decided to leave the bill in committee, making it a "two-year' bill.  Seeing the writing on the wall, staff and sponsors agreed to meet with the opposition during the interim months and attempt to craft compromise amendments. 

Those of you who wrote letters in opposition made a difference and stopped a poorly crafted piece of legislation.