PITTSBURGH (TNS) — An effort to put stricter limits on the amount of manganese that can be released in wastewater from Pennsylvania mines and other industries was rejected by a state regulatory review board.

Pennsylvania environmental regulators are proposing to lower the allowable limit of manganese in streams in response to research showing that elevated exposure to the mineral can be irreversibly harmful to children’s developing brains.

But the state’s Independent Regulatory Review Commission voted 4-1 Thursday that the rule is not in the public interest, largely because it does not comply with a 2017 state law that directed environmental regulators to loosen restrictions on manganese pollution, not tighten them.

That law, a wide-ranging state budget bill known as Act 40, directed regulators to change the rules so that the limit for manganese only had to be met where drinking water suppliers pull water from rivers, not at the point where it is released from coal mines, quarries, steel mills and other sites.

The language was added to the budget bill at the request of the coal industry, which says that meeting the existing treatment standard at the point of discharge is expensive and unnecessary given federal limits on manganese pollution from coal mines.

The law spurred the state Department of Environmental Protection to thoroughly reanalyze the health effects of manganese for the first time since 1979. It found that even its existing standard was not sufficient to protect the most sensitive population — infants and children — from harmful manganese levels in streams if it made its way into untreated drinking water sources, such as springs and wells.

It proposed a new standard designed to protect public health that would limit the amount of manganese to 0.3 milligrams per liter, less than one-third the amount that is currently allowed, while retaining discharge sites as the compliance point.

The review commission’s rejection does not necessarily doom the rule. DEP now has the option to withdraw the rule or resubmit it to the commission with or without revisions. If DEP continues to pursue the rule, it will be challenged in the Republican-led General Assembly, which can ultimately kill it with a two-thirds majority vote to override a veto.

A DEP spokesman did not indicate which path the agency will choose, only that it is “evaluating and considering the reasons for IRRC’s disapproval.”

The environmental resources and energy committees in both the House and Senate had urged the regulatory review commission to reject the proposed rule and 61 legislators in both chambers wrote to oppose what they said would be the most stringent in-stream manganese standard in the nation.

Mining industry representatives criticized DEP Thursday for creating an unworkable treatment standard and overblowing the health risks of manganese in waterways.

”Individuals do not make baby formula by dipping water from a stream,” said John St. Clair, manager of permitting for Kittanning-based Rosebud Mining Co.

An analysis of the proposed rule performed for DEP by a Penn State engineering professor found that it would be expensive for the mining industry — costing it an estimated $137 million to $143 million in upfront capital costs and $33 million to $46 million in annual treatment costs.

But the analysis found that public drinking water treatment facilities — and their customers — would be forced to bear similar costs if they had to treat similar loads and flows of manganese downstream.

{p class=”krtText”}Water suppliers were alarmed by the passage of Act 40, which the Pennsylvania section of the American Water Works Association said would shift the burden for treating manganese discharges “from those polluting the water to those using the water.”

{p class=”krtText”}The burden for treating manganese would not automatically be shifted downstream if DEP’s proposal is defeated.

{p class=”krtText”}A DEP attorney said during the meeting Thursday that if the rule is ultimately disapproved and the state’s existing regulation is retained, the current water quality standard would continue to apply at wastewater discharge points.

{p class=”krtText”}©2022 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

{p class=”krtText”}Visit the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at www.post-gazette.com

{p class=”krtText”}Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

{p class=”krtShirttail”}