Opinion ID: 1192266
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: The Three-Year Waiting Period

Text: The EPCA establishes a mandatory three-year delay between the date of the DOE's grant of a waiver and the date on which the state standard takes effect. 42 U.S.C. § 6297(d)(5)(A). The CEC's petition contained two different dates on which the requested regulations would have gone into effect: January 1, 2007, for regulations requiring an 8.5 WF ratio, and January 1, 2010, for regulations requiring a 6.0 WF ratio. Because the CEC's application for a waiver was not accepted as complete until December 23, 2005, and not ruled upon until December 28, 2006, the DOE clearly could not have issued a waiver for the first set of regulations that complied with the EPCA's three-year delay provision. If, however, the DOE had chosen to approve only the second set of regulations, their implementation would not have violated the three-year rule. There is no argument between the parties that the starting date for implementation of the first set of state regulations did not comply with the three-year rule. The dispute is over what should have been done about it. Some possible responses to the problem were: (1) rejection of the entire waiver petition, (2) rejection of the portion which would have violated the three-year waiting period, or (3) the acceptance of the waiver petition with an effective date re-drafted by the DOE sua sponte or by agreement with CEC. The CEC argues that the California efficiency standards are drafted with a nominal effective date, which is necessary to advise the persons affected as to when enforcement is scheduled to begin under state law. Whether or not the proposed date of implementation was explicitly termed nominal in the CEC's initial application, California appliance regulations provide that such standards take effect only upon the effective date of a DOE waiver. Cal.Code Regs. tit. 20, §§ 1605(b), 1065.2(p)(1). California asserts that, within the meaning of its regulation, the effective date of a DOE waiver is three years after the grant of the waiver. The DOE maintains the position, however, that in order to meet EPCA's requirements, the CEC's petition as submitted would require that the DOE sua sponte craft[ ] a different state regulation . . . [and] come up with its own effective date for such a regulation. The DOE claims that it lacked the power to do so because the statute imposes a burden of proof on the state seeking a waiver of federal preemption to demonstrate that the proposed state regulation satisfies the statutory standards, and the three-year minimum lead time is an essential element of those standards. Thus, in its decision the DOE held that the CEC did not comply with the EPCA because the CEC has provided information only in the context of the compliance dates of the California regulation, and has not provided the information necessary for DOE to promulgate a rule with an effective date that would be compliant under the EPCA, i.e., a rule with an effective date three years following the date of issuance. 71 Fed.Reg. 78,157. We find this conclusion to be both unsupported by the record and so implausible that it could not be ascribed to a difference in view or the product of agency expertise. Envtl. Def. Ctr. v. EPA, 344 F.3d at 858 n. 36. The EPCA requires that a state applying for a waiver establish a compelling state need by a preponderance of the evidence. 42 U.S.C. § 6297(d)(1)(B). The DOE's rejection of underlying analysis and data provided by the CEC, without any consideration of whether this analysis would still hold force if implemented slightly later, was arbitrary and capricious. The DOE made no attempt to determine whether the analysis provided in the application would reasonably support a waiver, but instead dismissed it as part of an inflexible rule demanding a strict parity between proposed implementation dates and the research supporting the proposed standards. The CEC correctly argues that a rule demanding strict parity between the analysis provided and the proposed timeline would be unworkable in practice. The DOE does not generally provide a specific date by which it will have ruled upon a waiver application, and it did not do so in this case. It took DOE a year to rule on CEC's application. Because states seeking waivers cannot be prescient as to the date upon which the DOE will approve or deny a given application, some flexibility is patently necessary in order for the petitioning state to provide any analysis that is reasonably timely. The DOE's claim that the CEC was obliged to demonstrate that a different effective date would satisfy EPCA's statutory criteria, or at least to provide data that would allow DOE to make such a determination is unconvincing when the record demonstrates the DOE made no attempt to apply the data that were provided to a permissible implementation date. Because California appliance regulations provide that proposed regulations take effect only upon the effective date of a DOE waiver, it would have been reasonable to assess the sufficiency of the data provided in terms of a projected date three years after the likely date of decision on the waiver. Whether the data and analysis provided were sufficient ultimately to support the CEC's waiver application is a separate issue that is outside the competence of this court to determine in the first instance. The DOE argues, in effect, that it was entitled to reject the CEC's data and analysis as entirely irrelevant and inapplicable because the proposed implementation timeline could not be granted under the EPCA. This argument is contrary to the preponderance of evidence standard, as well as common sense. We therefore conclude that the DOE's wholesale rejection of the CEC's analysis on the basis that the proposed waiver could not be implemented according to its proposed timeline was arbitrary and capricious. It therefore cannot constitute a justification for the DOE's denial of CEC's waiver application.