Equal Protection of the Laws Beaver County Times, March 4, 2003
Rep. Susan Laughlin has once again stood forward to represent her constituency. She introduced House Bill 433 to clean up a defect in our Solid Waste Disposal Act. The operative language is:
	"The (Department of Environmental Protection) shall find that an applicant has shown a lack of ability or intention to comply with the provisions of this act with regard to an application for a specific facility for fly ash on a specific site for fly ash when that applicant has filed at least two permit applications for a specific facility for fly ash on a specific site for fly ash that were denied or not administratively complete within one year of the final departmental request for information from the applicant."
Simply stated, if someone applies for a permit to dump fly ash somewhere, and they cannot meet the stated requirements after three tries, the application is denied with finality. Three strikes and you're out. The Conference of Consumer Organizations has been striving toward this for a long time. Susan introduced a similar Bill in the 2001/2002 legislative session. It was unanimously passed through committee, and got through two readings in the House. No one, including the coal industry, objected to it. DEP supported it. It simply died on file. Susan's Bill provides finality to everyone concerned. The applicant, the DEP, the consumers, and the host municipality all need to know what the rules are. Then they would know when the rules have been met. Years of grief, and piles of paperwork, would come to a stop. There would be objective criteria, and a known point, at which the answer was either "yes" or "no." "Equal protection of the laws" and "equal enforcement of the laws" are the same concept. Agencies do not make up the laws as they go along, and no one receives special treatment. Everyone knows what he rules are, and everybody gets the same treatment. This is exactly what Susan is trying to do, and she's good at it. Roger Thomas Harmony Township The author is a director of the Conference of Consumer Organizations