Introduction
Over the past five years, the use of the internet and the worldwide web has dramatically increased. The use of these computer sources for environmental regulatory information is no exception. While the ChemAlliance web-site (www.chemalliance.org) has steadily increased in popularity as a primary source of regulatory information for manufacturers, distributors, technical assistance providers and government officials working in the chemical industry, it largely focuses on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and other federal sources. For environmental health and safety officials and others in the trenches, state-level regulatory information may be just as important or even more critical. Consequently, we decided to conduct an on-line survey of the web-sites of the 50 state environmental quality or protection agencies to determine how well they have attempted to make their regulatory information, especially timely updated information on rules and regulations, user-friendly to facilitate awareness of impending regulatory requirements. This short article summarizes the results of our on-line survey.
Ranking Criteria
Most of the state environmental agencies make rules and regulations readily readable and often downloadable from their web-sites. Even so, the quality and accessibility of this information is highly uneven. While some state agencies put this information on their homepage, in other cases the regulatory information is spread out among various sub-agencies. After closely examining the state web-sites, our on-line survey focused on three principle criteria:
- the timely availability and quality of news releases, "what's
new", and "hot topics"
sections; - direct links to rules and regulations; and
- the details and explicitness of proposed, updated, or final new rules and regulations.
Based on these criteria, we grouped the 50 states into three major categories: ones with excellent web-sites, ones with helpful web-sites, and inadequate ones (more than half the states fell into this category). While some judgement went into our taxonomy, we believe that this review will provide a useful overview of what makes some of the best state environmental agencies have excellent web-sites, and what the other states can do to improve so that they become much more useful to the regulated community.
The Elite Eight
Of the eight state environmental agencies found to have excellent web-sites, four of these have large and active chemical industries: the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. The New Jersey site is very well organized, if conventional. Rules and regulations can be found on the scroll down menu on the homepage, which lists current rules and regulations, notice of proposed rules, and a rule making calendar and additional information. The Pennsylvania site includes very clearly indicated proposed and recently finalized regulations. On the Texas site, rule links can be found right below the agency title, so it is very easy to find. A distinct category is marked What's New in Policy and Rules, with new rulemaking information regularly added to this page by date. The Louisiana site has a feature called Monthly Regulation Changes on its rules and regulations page. This includes notices of intent, proposed rules, emergency rules, final rules, public hearing notices, and a monthly electronic subscription service.
The others to make the top eight list include: Arizona, Montana, South Carolina and Washington. No attempt has been made to rank order the states in this and the other two categories, since the differences between the sites within each of the groups are minor. Nonetheless, six general points can be made about the strengths of the web-sites on the elite eight list:
- rule and regulation links or PDF files are found on the homepage;
- new rule-makings, final rules, or rule changes are clearly organized
by date with the
status indicated; - new rules and regulations are clearly separated from the preexisting ones;
- the web-site is generally parsimonious with information and easy to navigate;
- the desired regulatory information can be found in 2 or 3 clicks; and
- clear instructions are included.
Other Helpful Web-Sites
States in this second grouping include: Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma and Vermont. While the web-sites for these state environmental agencies are generally user-friendly they often lack the latest and most conveniently organized regulatory information from the regulated user's perspective. In addition, the organization, design and instructions on the web-sites are slightly inferior to those of the top 8 group. The common characteristics of these web-sites are:
- rule and regulation links or PDF files are found on the homepage;
- current and proposed rules are usually separated;
- the issue or effective date of regulatory changes are clearly show on-line; but:
- rules are normally organized by code number or chapter number rather than by date; and
- the new updated final rules and regulations are not separated from the preexisting ones.
For New York State the rules and regulations are listed by official codes rather than by date. However, twice a year this web-page provides a calendar of regulations that may be proposed for adoption or amendment within that calendar year, including those based on a 5-year review. Similar features can be found for several other states. In the case of the Illinois Pollution Control Board the user can easily find Rulemaking Update and Semi-Annual Regulatory Agenda categories that list somewhat useful (though dated) statuses of rulemaking activities. But this information is not current and proposed rulemakings are combined with new amendments. For the State of Georgia, the web-site clearly separates existing and proposed rules in two tables. The second table is marked with the issue dates and statuses for each proposed change, organized by official code number. However, it only lists revision to existing rules as opposed to new rules, so it is difficult to determine in advance how significant or new any revisions are.
Overall the states in this grouping could improve their web-sites for the regulated community through some minor improvements. These include grouping all of the latest rules together, using the effective or issue date as the index, separating these rules and regulations from preexisting ones, and creating clear links to all of these rules and regulations.
Need to Improve
We found that the remaining web-sites of the state environmental agencies (of more than 30) fail to effectively update regulatory information on-line. This can be attributed to confusing web-site designs, confusing (if any) regulatory categories, missing or unreadable dates of updated rules, limited news releases, and untimely web updating. Fortunately, some of the sites only need to do a small amount of work to improve their usability to the regulatory community, though most will require more extensive revisions. The major changes required would be to add and effectively mark the dates for proposed and newly adopted rules and regulations, and to clearly separate new proposals from the current rules and regulations.
For example the Florida Department of Environmental Protection web-site has a clearly marked rules section that shows all of its rules, which are listed by numeric order and program area. The state could simply add the dates for one column in this table and create another independent list to show all the new rules and amended or repealed rules. Similar situations can be found on the sites of Ohio, Missouri, Delaware and New Hampshire. In other cases users may feel confused after searching the basic regulations of a state, let alone the updated rules information. In the case of the California Environmental Protection Agency, the largest state in the nation, there are a very large number of sub-agency links and an excessive amount of information on the homepage alone, similar to how the U.S. EPA web-site had once been organized. Users cannot find any rules-related information on the main page and they would have to search many different sub-agency sites to acquire the updated rules information. While perhaps understandable for such a large state, information on rules and regulations could certainly be streamlined. Finally other states such as Connecticut, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, North Dakota and Tennessee either do not normally provide regulatory updates, or only list them clearly for one environmental media, if they list them at all! Meanwhile, during the period of our survey, January and February 2002, attempts to access regulations listed on the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality site resulted in an error message.
In sum, it would be very useful for these states in this last grouping to compare the advantages and disadvantages of their web-sites with those in the first two groupings and work toward improving their standards.
Conclusions
State environmental agencies have several customers besides the regulated community, and must balance the needs of these different groups. Yet it seems clear that most of the states can reform and improve the web-sites of their environmental agencies to make regulatory information easy to find and use without sacrificing the needs of the general public. In our 50 state survey we found that eight states can provide good models of how to organize this information in a user-friendly manner to meet the needs of the regulated community more effectively without sacrificing other important parts of the mission of the state. We hope that the other states will follow these leads.
