Paying for PSM – California Style

The state of California is having some trouble funding their oversight of their state PSM rule: CalARP. Don’t worry though, they have a solution…

The Department of Industrial Relations, Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) is proposing to adopt emergency regulations to implement a methodology for determining and collecting an annual assessment to fund the DOSH Process Safety Management Program (Labor Code sections 7855 – 7870). —DOIR

Their intent is to levy a pro-rated “assessment” (read that as “fee”) on the oil refineries in the state to fund their operations. It will be interesting to see if this works well for them. If it does, I would expect a program like this to roll out across the state plans and perhaps even at the federal level.

The refineries have quite a bit of political pull though, so I would also expect this burden to be spread a little bit to all covered processes, not just the refineries.