SB 365 Summary

• Establishes a 15-member Response Activity Review Panel with professional qualifications to resolve technical and scientific disputes over environmental remediation, risk assessments, and cleanup reports, with a $3,500 petition fee and 45-day negotiation period before formal panel review.

• Requires "no further action" reports for completed remedial actions to include signed affidavits from the submitter and a qualified environmental consultant with specified insurance coverage (professional liability, pollution, and general liability with minimum $1,000,000 limits).

• Streamlines cleanup approval timelines by allowing no further action reports to be considered automatically approved if the department fails to respond within 150 days (or 180 days if public participation required).

• Modifies cleanup criteria development to make algorithms and toxicity factors publicly available on the department website rather than exclusively through formal rulemaking, while allowing the department to periodically update criteria based on new scientific data.

• Removes restrictions on site-specific cleanup criteria approval, allowing the department to approve numeric or nonnumeric criteria that better reflect facility-specific risk, including use of probabilistic methods and land use restrictions.