The compliance assistance centers provide web-based user friendly 'first-stop-shops' where regulated entities can find comprehensive, easy-to-understand information pre-packaged to fit their special…

The compliance assistance centers provide web-based user friendly 'first-stop-shops' where regulated entities can find comprehensive, easy-to-understand information pre-packaged to fit their special needs. The grantee will partner with EPA, industry groups, environmental groups, and other interested parties to support the continued operation and maintenance of the center program. The grantee will maintain a web portal for all centers, support the development of new web-based tools to support the understanding of and compliance with regulatory obligations, and seek effective approaches and partnerships to maintain the centers.activities:the assistance centers program is an important element of oeca's enforcement and compliance assurance role at EPA. The centers program provides compliance information targeted to specific industry and government sectors via 11 centers/portals and IT helps bridge the GAP between federal and state regulations by means of 20+ state resource locators for specific environmental topics. The centers cover a range of businesses, including many small industrial shops. The state resource locators cover a range of environmental pollution and related issues and are applicable across all sectors, not just those covered by the centers. All centers program resources are accessible from a single gateway, complianceassistance.net. Our management approach for the centers program over the next five years involves the following tasks, in conjunction with the EPA's strategic goals and objectives core objectives - establish core team - create a FY24-FY28 centers plan with goals that are based on environmental results (outputs/outcomes) and a tracking system - maintain close working relationships with EPA oeca and program offices - maintain existing partnerships and establish new partnerships with associations, non-profit organizations, state agencies, for-profit businesses and other potential stakeholders - promote awareness and use of centers - maintain/update centers, srls and center gateway - assist with tackling the climate crisis - mobile device considerations subrecipient:no subawards are included in this assistance agreement.outcomes:outputs, outcomes and performance measures. Ncms has selected outputs that are meaningful and can be accomplished within the grant's budget without impacting the planned compliance assistance activities. Ncms will report quarterly on progress for each outcome unless otherwise noted. Tables 3 and 4 list our outputs, outcomes, goals, and performance criteria that will be used to guide and monitor the progress of the grant. Additional details are further explained as follows. Our experience indicates that IT is difficult to obtain direct evidence of improved practices resulting from information gathered from centers program sites, as users do not tend to volunteer whether they were non-compliant and became compliant because of visiting and obtaining compliance information from the site(s). Additionally, a direct measure of whether the environment has improved through the information sharing process provided by the centers, while theoretically possible, would be extremely difficult to obtain due to cost and limited sample size. However, we have identified several surrogate methods that we feel will be very useful in determining effectiveness of the ncms-managed resources as discussed below. The primary public benefit from the proposed project is improved compliance with environmental laws and regulations. As such, the project contributes to EPA's overall goal of protecting human health and the environment and the strategic plan goal of detecting violations and promoting compliance. Our plan includes a proven approach to compliance assistance that has contributed to EPA's overall compliance assurance success for more than 25 years. We have also included new methods and tools to further enhance thes