On January 6, 2014, TCEQ requested comments on a proposal to revise the agency’s penalty policy. See Revised Penalty Policy (PDF). According to TCEQ, the proposed revision to its Policy simply incorporates recent statutory changes and documents existing enforcement practices.
Recent Statutory Changes
House Bill 2615 (PDF) (83rd Legislature, 2013) significantly increased the administrative penalties for a water right holder’s failure to submit an annual water use report to TCEQ. Under the new statutory structure, a large water rights holder may have to pay as much as $500 per day for this violation. TCEQ has revised its penalty policy to incorporate this change.
Similarly, the Texas Legislature gave TCEQ the ability to assess administrative penalties to aggregate production operations that fail to register with the agency. Here, “aggregate” refers to commonly recognized construction materials. TCEQ can now assess penalties of up to $10,000 per year for this violation. The revised penalty policy incorporates this change.
Documenting Existing Practices
The revised penalty policy includes information about specific conditions that must be met for the agency to consider a request for payment deferral for an administrative penalty. In addition, the executive director is given discretion to recommend a conditional deferral of up to 100% for certain violations. Penalty deferral is contingent on compliance with the corresponding Administrative Order.
The revised penalty policy will allow for consideration of good faith efforts to comply in the penalty assessment for each violation, regardless of whether it is a discrete or continuous violation. Finally, the penalty policy has been reorganized to better correlate with the TCEQ Penalty Calculation Worksheet.
The deadline for submitting comments to these Policy revisions is February 5, 2014.