From 2009 to 2013, NEWMOA worked with the Small Business Environmental Assistance Programs (SBEAPs) in the six US EPA Region 5 states (IL, IN, MI, MN, OH and WI) to develop and implement an Environmental Results Program (ERP) for autobody refinishing shops. The autobody sector was chosen because EPA issued an area source rule that affects the shops.

The Autobody ERP Initiative involved:

• Developing a common inspection checklist
• Randomly selecting a statistically valid number of facilities and conducting baseline visits at the selected shops
• Analyzing the results of the baseline visits to identify the areas where shops need additional assistance in understanding how to comply with state and federal rules
• Developing outreach materials, including a self-certification checklist, and performing outreach to shops
• Conducting following up inspections at another randomly selected set of shops after the compliance date (March 2011)
• Comparing facility performance before and after outreach to understand its effectiveness in raising compliance

The Project documented statistically significant compliance improvements over a relatively short period of time, and demonstrated the value of ERP as a compliance monitoring approach. In addition, the Project showed that:

• ERP can be an effective way to provide training and assistance to a large number of newly regulated entities, particularly those that are small businesses;
• a regional project can successfully combine efforts across states to reduce the burden on each agency, and make compliance assistance and monitoring more efficient than if each SBEAP had to conduct a program individual; and
• a coordinated effort among SBEAPs and EPA Regional staff can achieve compliance improvement results.

The final project report is available at: http://dnr.wi.gov/topic/SmallBusiness/documents/ERP/Region5AutobodyERPFinalGrantReportSept2013.pdf.

Outreach and other materials developed during the project are available at: http://dnr.wi.gov/topic/SmallBusiness/Resources/AutoBodyShop.html.

For more information, contact Jennifer Griffith at .