State regulators yesterday called on the Department ofTransportation (DOT) to put a hold on any proposed changes to aprogram that gives states authority to act as agents of the federalgovernment to conduct safety inspections of interstate pipelines intheir respective states.

The resolution, which was adopted by the gas committee of theNational Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) atits winter meeting in Washington D.C., further proposed that anyrevisions to the program be made only after “full consultation”with the states, and that the DOT’s Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS)be instructed to accept “additional interested states” asinterstate agents.

The NARUC gas committee took this action after the OPS announcedin letters last December that Arizona and Nevada were beingterminated as interstate agents, and that the entire interstateagent program would be phased out over three years, according tothe resolution. “This action was taken unilaterally and withoutnotice to or consultation with the affected states,” it stated.

In the wake of Arizona’s and Nevada’s terminations, this leavesonly eight states with interstate agent status: Connecticut,California, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio and WestVirginia, the resolution said. Four states — New Hampshire,Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia — requested but were denied suchstatus, it noted.

Richard B. Felder, associate administrator for pipeline safetywith DOT’s Research and Special Programs Administration, called thecommittee’s resolution “somewhat premature,” and further chargedthat NARUC’s gas pipeline subcommittee, where the resolutionoriginated, had “kind of jumped the gun” by proposing this action.He tried to assure state commissioners that the OPS had no plans toeliminate the interstate agent program in its entirety, but wasunsuccessful.

“No, this [resolution] is not premature. This is very timely,and it’s important that everybody in this room” and in the naturalgas industry “make certain that this agency finds out that we’reall opposed” to phasing out the interstate agent program, counteredCommissioner Leonard A. Weiss of the New York Public ServiceCommission.

“We in New York have got 10 interstate pipelines” criss-crossingthe state, and it can’t rely solely “on the once-in-seven yearinspection from the federal government” to ensure the safety ofthese lines, Weiss said.

DOT’s Felder conceded it dropped the interstate agent programsin Utah, Nevada and Arizona but only after the commissions in thestates mutually agreed with OPS that their staff resources would bebetter spent by addressing the problems facing some of the fastestgrowing cities in the United States that are located in theirstates, such as Salt Lake City, UT, and Flaggstaff, AZ.

He said he rejected the applications of Texas and Oklahoma forinterstate agent status in 1995. The OPS just decided that if it’s”not conducting the interstate inspections in the state of Texas,we might as well fold up our tents and go home.”

The decision to drop certain states from the interstateinspection program, Felder said, was based on whether “we [OPS]actually had sufficient resources [in those particular states] toconduct all of these inspections,” which he stressed isn’t the casein every state.

Consequently, “we have no intention of not renewing theinterstate agent status [for] the balance of the states that areinvolved in this program,” he said. In fact, Felder noted that aprovision in a pipeline-safety reauthorization proposal now beforeCongress would allow every state with a pipeline safety program to”join with us” in conducting inspections, and be reimbursed on a100% basis.

The resolution’s “suggestion that anything was done here withoutnotice or was done unilaterally is highly misleading,” he said.”This is a policy that started to change in 1994,” when the OPS puta freeze on the interstate agent program because “we could seeright away that we would not need additional assistance from thestates to conduct inspections of interstate facilities.”

It was around that time that several “very high-profile” gaspipeline explosions occurred, which caused Congress to more thandouble the annual budget for OPS to $37 million in a single year.This enabled OPS to double its number of federal inspectors, whichreduced the need for states to inspect interstate gas pipelines,Felder said.

The interstate agent program “was borne of necessity in the ’80swhen the Office of Pipeline Safety had a budget in the singledigits and had 20 inspectors” for the entire nation. “We reachedout to the states…..and we created a program that did not givestates authority to do anything other than be ourinspectors…..And we took the enforcement actions. It was a verygreedy program” by OPS “because we gave very little and we goteverything for it,” he noted.

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