SECTIONS 71050 - California Statutes

PUBLIC RESOURCES CODE

SECTION 71050

71050. The Legislature hereby finds and declares all of the
following:
(a) Environmental data is currently required by, and submitted to,
a variety of public agencies with jurisdiction at the state,
regional, and local levels of government. The same information is
often submitted by the regulated community to different public
agencies, almost always on one or more paper forms. Since a different
format is now required for each such report, data items are required
to be reformatted one or more additional times at a cost of time and
money that brings no accompanying environmental benefit.
(b) The blizzard of incoming paper reports often exceeds the
capacity of a public agency to digest the information. In some cases,
the public agency cannot look at or evaluate all of the data
received on paper. That problem of data utility is aggravated further
by the current wasteful and error-laden practice of retyping data
from paper forms into the public agency's computer data base.
(c) In many cases, reported data originates in a computer data
base maintained by the company submitting the report. The retyping of
data by the public agency could be completely eliminated if business
entities were permitted to submit the data in a single electronic
format which every public agency could then use. That standard
approach would permit both business entities and public agencies to
save time and money that is now spent in reformatting, reentering,
and reediting data. The data would also be available more quickly to
any member of the public interested in using the data.
(d) Business entities already use common, standardized electronic
data formats and protocols to exchange commercial and technical
information on materials to be transported and used in manufacturing.
That application of electronic data interchange is an important
factor in determining the competitiveness of business entities in
this state. The imposition by government of barriers to, or multiple
incompatible data format requirements on, those existing electronic
interchanges impairs the competitiveness of business entities without
bringing any accompanying environmental benefit.
(e) It is the policy of the state, for environmental and hazardous
materials reporting purposes, to employ nonproprietary electronic
data formats and transmission protocols that already function
effectively for ongoing commercial and industrial data exchanges
between business entities and across different computer operating
systems instead of expending public funds to develop public
agency-specific formats and protocols.