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.