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Parent Category: Safety Info Posts

Category: Chemical Process Safety (PSM/RMP)

Published: 13 May 2016

VIA ELECTRONIC FILING

May 5, 2016

Mark J. Langer, Clerk

The United States Court of Appeals

District of Columbia Circuit

333 Constitution Ave., NW

Washington, DC 20001

Re. 28(j) Letter – Agricultural Retailers Association, et al. v. United States Department of Labor, et al., Nos. 15-1326 and 15-1340

Dear Mr. Langer:

Respondents write to advise the Court that earlier today OSHA initiated Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act proceedings, the first step in a comprehensive rulemaking to update its 20-year-old Process Safety Management (PSM) Standard (see attached representative letter to Mr. Auger). As part of this rulemaking, OSHA is considering whether to codify its current interpretation of the term “retail,” i.e., the interpretation contained in the July 22, 2015, memorandum that is the subject of this litigation, in the text of the PSM Standard.
For the reasons explained in Respondents’ Brief, the interpretation of “retail” adopted in the challenged memorandum is an interpretive rule (not an OSHA standard), so it is not subject to pre-enforcement judicial review in this Court and need not be issued in accordance with the rulemaking requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act or the OSH Act. Nothing, however, precludes OSHA from codifying its interpretation through rulemaking, cf. 80 Fed. Reg. 25365, 25420 (May 4, 2015) (adopting an interpretation of Confined Spaces Standard
for General Industry in the analogous provision of Confined Spaces in Construction Standard); 79 Fed. Reg. 20315, 20506-07 (April 11, 2014) (codifying longstanding enforcement policy in text of electrical standard), nor does the commencement of rulemaking moot the present proceedings.

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