THE ASSEMBLY STATE OF NEW YORK ALBANY

CHAIRMAN Environmental Conservation COMMITTEES Education Rules Veterans Affairs

December 10, 2012

Commissioner Joseph J. Martens New York State Department of Environmental Conservation 625 Broadway Albany, New York 12233-1010 Dear Commissioner Martens: We write to you to express some of our concerns regarding the proposed revisions to the Departments high volume hydraulic fracturing regulations. As we have indicated repeatedly, protection of human health and the environment remain our top priority. We continue to believe that the regulations should not be issued until after a thorough, professional health impact assessment is completed. We urge the Department to withdraw the regulations until that process is complete. If the Department opts to pursue the proposed regulations, additional steps need to be taken to provide the public with greater opportunity for meaningful involvement. The current comment period the mere minimum required by law -- is insufficient, given the sheer size of the regulations, the numerous revisions and the complexity of the issues. The Department is not restricted from providing additional time for comment, and the public should not receive less time than they need to review substantial changes simply because an agency waited until the last minute to seek a 90-day extension of the rulemaking. The comment period should be extended to give the public at least 60 full days for effective review of the revised proposed rules posted on the Departments website on November 29th. In addition, the shortness of the comment period is compounded by the difficulty of unraveling the proposed revisions. The originally proposed regulatory text is no longer available on the website and neither is a detailed description of the proposed revisions. Many of the revisions receive either cursory or no mention in the assessment of public comment and other regulatory analyses. Efforts to decipher the revisions are also hampered by changes in format.

Commissioner Joseph Martens December 10, 2012 Page 2

We have been told that the regulations proposed initially did not follow the Department of State guidelines for regulations, but the revised version does. As a result, conducting a simple side by side comparison has become challenging. At a minimum, the Department should repost the original proposed regulations on its website as well as a detailed line by line comparison. Thank you in advance for your consideration of this request. Very truly yours,

___________________________ Robert K. Sweeney, Chair, NYS Committee on Environmental Conservation

___________________________ Richard N. Gottfried, Chair, NYS Committee on Health

___________________________ Charles D. Lavine, Chair, NYS Administrative Regulations Review Committee