Click here to read the latest UECA Newsletter Latest edition 04-18-08

UECA Legislative Activity Chart. Latest update: 02-19-08
UECA State Activity Map. Latest update 04-07-08

UECA Powerpoint Presentation
UECA Power Point LTSRT – San Diego 04/05/07

***

UECA Task Force founded

With more than 19 state delegations indicating plans to introduce UECA legislation in their states in the upcoming year, the NCCUSL commissioners who served on the UECA drafting committee, together with several of the observers and advisors from that project, have formed a taskforce to promote the act. Members of the taskforce will be available to answer questions about the act and institutional controls, and various education and outreach events are planned for 2006-07. Please contact Michael Kerr at 312-915-0195 if you would like materials or would be interested in setting up a study of the legislation or an event to discuss its substantive provisions.

National Institutional Controls Coalition

A national coalition of groups interested in promoting the use of institutional controls formed in 2004, and has endorsed the nationally uniform adoption of UECA. The NCCUSL UECA Taskforce will be working with the members of the NICC to provide information about UECA to state stakeholders. Please visit the NICC site for more information about the NICC and how get involved.

--------------------------------
Message from the Chair, 2004
--------------------------------

The Uniform Act drafting process has been completed, and the act has been promulgated and distributed to the several states for consideration and introduction into thier respective legislatures. To date, the UECA has been considered in Ohio, Pennsylvannia, and Nebraska. Beginning in the Fall of 2005, please check this space regularly for updates. The text of the final act is available at the tab at the the top of this text.

-------------------------------
Message from the Chair at the inception of the project
-------------------------------

WELCOME to the website of the Uniform Laws Conference’ Drafting Committee on the proposed Uniform Environmental Covenants Act. In this introduction, I’d like to summarize our work and tell you how we work.

GOALS – So-called “risk based” clean-ups are an important tool in the nation’s efforts to re-mediate contaminated property and return that property to economic use. We expect UECA to provide clear rules for the States and federal agencies to create, enforce and modify a valid real estate document – an “environmental covenant” - to restrict the use of contaminated real estate.

The Act will make these covenants enforceable by eliminating legal doctrines that cast doubt on the covenants’ validity. UECA also applies traditional real estate law principles to these environmental covenants to insure they will be preserved over the very long term and be enforceable in accordance with their terms against successive owners of the property and against the parties liable for maintaining “institutional controls” on the property and performing other duties identified in the covenant.

If all parties to the covenant are confident that site-appropriate activity and use limitations in the covenant will be enforced, it is more likely that environmental regulators and the owners of contaminated real property will allow those properties to be developed, rather than continue to stand as abandoned and dangerous monuments to our industrial past. Development of the property, particularly in America’s urban centers, will help revitalize those cities and serve the economic and social interests of their residents.

Equally important, by identifying practical, affordable and sustainable means of cleaning up dangerous contamination, the Act can help reduce the dangers such contamination poses to our citizens, and improve the quality of the environment in which we live.

HOW WE WORK - Most outside observers believe the two unique aspects of the Uniform Laws’ drafting process are, first, the broad net we cast in identifying interest groups likely to be affected by a possible Uniform Act, and second, the extreme care the Conference exercises in honing a statute that addresses the interests of those parties in a considered and balanced way.

We think we’ve done that here. The Conference has identified thoughtful representatives of all the affected interest groups – federal and state regulators, parties legally responsible for environmental clean-up, current owners of the property, private environmental groups, real estate and environmental lawyers and law professors, title companies, future buyers and the banks who loan them money to develop the land, and the municipalities in which the property is located. These representatives have met with a drafting committee comprised of Uniform Laws Commissioners – lawyers and law professors from around the country. The group is assisted by a “Reporter” – a law professor specializing in environmental law who has primary responsibility for preparing and amending the draft. To date, this group has met for four - two and one-half day meetings, each time reviewing successive drafts of the Act on a line-by-line, section-by-section basis.

THIS WEBSITE – Our drafting process continues. On this website you’ll find various memoranda detailing the membership of the Committee, the names and affiliations of those participating in our work and descriptions of how we work. You will also find the successive drafts of the Act, reports that preceded our work, and memoranda commenting on our efforts. We hope the innovation of this website will further enhance the Committee’s ability to identify interested parties, and take advantage of those parties’ insights in our drafting process. Please join us.

Sincerely,

WILLIAM R. BREETZ, Chair [wbreetz@law.uconn.edu]