Finding of Failure To Attain and Reclassification of Area in New York as Serious for the 2015 Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards-Shinnecock Indian Nation

<RULE> ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY <CFR>40 CFR Part 81</CFR> <DEPDOC>[EPA-R02-OAR-2025-0004; FRL-12573-01-R2]</DEPDOC> <SUBJECT>Finding of Failure To Attain and Reclassification of Area in New York as Serious for the 2015 Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards—Shinnecock Indian Nation</SUBJECT> <HD SOURCE="HED">AGENCY:</HD> Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). <HD SOURCE="HED">ACTION:</HD> Final determination. <SUM> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUMMARY:</HD> The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is determining that Indian country under the jurisdiction of the Shinnecock Indian Nation located within the New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island nonattainment area (Shinnecock Indian Nation area) failed to attain the 2015 ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) by the applicable attainment date. The effect of failing to attain by the applicable attainment date is that the area will be reclassified by operation of law to “Serious” nonattainment for the 2015 ozone NAAQS on September 2, 2025, the effective date of this final rule. This action fulfills the EPA's obligation under the Clean Air Act (CAA) to determine whether ozone nonattainment areas attained the NAAQS by the attainment date and to publish a document in the <E T="04">Federal Register</E> identifying each area that is determined as having failed to attain and identifying the reclassification. </SUM> <EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">DATES:</HD> This final rule is effective on September 2, 2025. </EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">ADDRESSES:</HD> The EPA has established a docket for this action under Docket ID Number EPA-R02-OAR-2025-0004 at <E T="03">https://www.regulations.gov.</E> All documents in the docket are listed on the <E T="03">https://www.regulations.gov</E> website. Although listed in the index, some information is not publicly available, <E T="03">e.g.,</E> Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) (formally referred to as Confidential Business Information (CBI)) or other information whose disclosure is restricted by statute. Certain other material, such as copyrighted material, is not placed on the internet and will be publicly available only in hard copy form. Publicly available docket materials are available electronically through <E T="03">https://www.regulations.gov.</E> <FURINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:</HD> Fausto Taveras, Environmental Protection Agency, 290 Broadway, New York, New York 10007-1866, at (212) 637-3378, or by email at <E T="03">Taveras.Fausto@epa.gov.</E> </FURINF> <SUPLINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:</HD> Throughout this document whenever “we,” “us,” or “our” is used, we mean EPA. <HD SOURCE="HD1">Table of Contents</HD> <EXTRACT> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">I. Overview of Action</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">II. What is the background for this action?</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">III. What is the statutory authority for this action?</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">IV. How does EPA determine whether an area has attained the standard?</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">V. What is EPA's determination for the areas?</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">VI. What action is EPA taking?</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">VII. Statutory and Executive Order Reviews</FP> </EXTRACT> <HD SOURCE="HD1">I. Overview of Action</HD> The EPA is required to determine whether areas designated nonattainment for an ozone NAAQS attained the standard by the applicable attainment date, and to take certain steps for areas that failed to attain ( <E T="03">see</E> CAA section 181(b)(2)). The EPA's determination of attainment for the 2015 ozone NAAQS is based on a nonattainment area's design value (DV) as of the attainment date. <SU>1</SU> <FTREF/> <FTNT> <SU>1</SU>  A DV is a statistic used to compare data collected at an ambient air quality monitoring site to the applicable NAAQS to determine compliance with the standard. The data handling conventions for calculating DVs for the 2015 ozone NAAQS are specified in appendix U to 40 CFR part 50. The DV for the 2015 ozone NAAQS is the 3-year average of the annual fourth highest daily maximum 8-hour average ozone concentration. The DV is calculated for each air quality monitor in an area, and the DV for an area is the highest DV among the individual monitoring sites located in the area. </FTNT> The 2015 ozone NAAQS is met at an EPA regulatory monitoring site when the DV does not exceed 0.070 parts per million (ppm). For the Moderate nonattainment area for the 2015 ozone NAAQS addressed in this action, the attainment date was August 3, 2024. Because the DV is based on the three most recent, complete calendar years of data, attainment must occur no later than December 31 of the year prior to the attainment date ( <E T="03">i.e.,</E> December 31, 2023, in the case of Moderate nonattainment areas for the 2015 ozone NAAQS). As such, the EPA's determinations for each area are based upon the complete, quality-assured, and certified ozone monitoring data from calendar years 2021, 2022, and 2023. In 2024, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut each submitted a request that EPA reclassify the New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island ozone nonattainment area from Moderate to Serious nonattainment for the 2015 ozone NAAQS. <SU>2</SU> <FTREF/> EPA finalized the reclassification in a July 25, 2024 <E T="04">Federal Register</E> notice, 89 FR 60314, in which we made clear that since the Shinnecock Indian Nation, which is located adjacent to Southampton, New York, had not requested reclassification of the Shinnecock Indian Nation area of the New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island nonattainment area for the 2015 ozone NAAQS, it would retain the Moderate classification. This action addresses the Shinnecock Indian Nation area in New York that remains classified as Moderate for the 2015 ozone NAAQS Table 1 provides a summary of the DVs and the EPA's air quality-based determinations for the Shinnecock Indian Nation area addressed in this action. <SU>3</SU> <FTREF/> <FTNT> <SU>2</SU>  Connecticut requested reclassification from moderate to Severe or, in the alternative, to Serious if the States of both New York and Connecticut did not both submit requests to reclassify the area to Severe but did submit requests to reclassify the area to Serious. See 89 FR 60314 (July 25, 2024). </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>3</SU>  Since the Shinnecock Nation is located within the geographic boundaries of the New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island nonattainment area, that nonattainment area's design value and the EPA's air-quality based determination will be used as a basis to determine if the Shinnecock Indian Nation attained the August 3, 2024, 2015 ozone NAAQS Moderate attainment date. </FTNT> <GPOTABLE COLS="3" OPTS="L2,nj,i1" CDEF="s100,12,r50"> <TTITLE>Table 1—Summary of Nonattainment Areas in New York Classified as Moderate for the 2015 Ozone NAAQS</TTITLE> <CHED H="1">Nonattainment area</CHED> <CHED H="1">Attainment by the attainment date</CHED> <ROW> <ENT I="01">New York-N New Jersey-Long Island nonattainment area (including the Shinnecock Indian Nation)</ENT> <ENT>0.082</ENT> <ENT>Failed to attain.</ENT> </ROW> </GPOTABLE> The EPA is finding that the Shinnecock Indian Nation area did not attain the 2015 Ozone NAAQS by the August 3, 2024, Moderate area attainment date, because the area's 2021-2023 DV is greater than 0.070 ppm. If the EPA determines that a nonattainment area classified as Moderate failed to attain by the attainment date, CAA section 181(b)(2)(B) requires the EPA to publish a notice in the <E T="04">Federal Register</E> , no later than 6 months following the attainment date, identifying each such area and identifying the applicable reclassification. Under CAA section 181(b)(2)(A), the effect of this determination is that the Shinnecock Indian Nation area will be reclassified by operation of law as Serious on the effective date of this final rule. The reclassified areas will then be subject to the Serious area requirement to attain the 2015 ozone NAAQS as expeditiously as practicable, but not later than August 3, 2027. Under the CAA and the Tribal Authority Rule (TAR), tribes may, but are not required to, submit implementation plans to the EPA for approval ( <E T="03">see</E> CAA section 301(d) and 40 CFR part 49). Accordingly, the Shinnecock Indian Nation will not be required to submit any Tribal Implementation Plan (TIP) revisions applicable to Serious areas established in CAA section 182(c) and in the 2015 Ozone NAAQS SIP Requirements Rule ( <E T="03">see</E> 83 FR 62998, December 6, 2018). Tribes that are part of multi-jurisdictional nonattainment areas are also not required to submit implementation plan revisions applicable to Serious areas. The EPA has conducted outreach with the Shinnecock Indian Nation in regard to this final action. Specifically, on November 25, 2024, the EPA sent a consultation letter to the Shinnecock Indian Nation notifying the Nation of the EPA's intent to reclassify the area to Serious nonattainment. This consultation letter offered a 30-day period in which the Shinnecock Indian Nation could request government-to-government consultation with the EPA during development of this rulemaking. A copy of this signed consultation letter is provided in the docket of this rulemaking. Finally, on January 17, 2025, the EPA published a final rule to streamline state planning and air quality protection requirements under the current and future ozone NAAQS. This separate final rule establishes universal deadlines for submitting SIP revisions and for implementation of relevant control requirements that will apply for reclassified Moderate, Serious, and Severe nonattainment areas. <E T="03">See</E> 90 FR 5651. <SU>4</SU> <FTREF/> <FTNT> <SU>4</SU>  On June 3, 2025, the EPA announced its reconsideration of the 2025 State Implementation Plan Submittal ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Preview showing 10k of 37k characters. Full document text is stored and available for version comparison. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━