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California's hazardous waste regulator added hundreds of pages of federal road accident reports to a rulemaking record — then gave the public a broken link to access them and directed anyone who wanted to read them to submit a public records request.
The documents, obtained by Earthjustice through such a request and shared with CalMatters, describe years of incidents involving hazardous materials on public roads – including crashes, spills and other accidents.
The reports were added to the record for a proposed rule that would make it easier for companies to transport hazardous waste along public roads between properties they own — without certain tracking and documentation requirements currently mandated by state law.
The Department of Toxic Substances Control said it added the documents because Earthjustice pointed them out in previous comments and the department found them valuable. A department spokesperson said that the agency is following state law and encourages public participation.
DTSC’s decision not to post the documents on its website may not be illegal, but it is out of step with how agencies usually handle public comment periods, one administrative law expert said.
Deregulating hazardous waste
Last year, state hazardous waste regulators proposed a rule that would make it easier for companies to transport hazardous waste on public roads between properties they own. The rule drew criticism from environmental advocates who questioned the need for the exemption.
Regulators said they were updating California’s rule to match less stringent federal regulations that allow companies to transport hazardous waste without certain tracking requirements when moving the waste within their property but along public roads.
Pedestrians and cars pass through Le Conte Avenue, a major road near the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, on March 17, 2026. Photo by Lauren Justice for CalMatters The exemption would help large universities, including the University of California system, transfer hazardous waste with less paperwork from research laboratories to storage sites on campuses, before the waste moves offsite. Tesla and Pacific Gas & Electric Company also wrote to the department in support of the rule.
Environmental advocates with Earthjustice said they don’t think the benefits to universities and other businesses are a good reason to weaken the rules and fear that the move signals a broader strategy to weaken regulations as a way to manage the state’s growing waste problem.
“Once somebody picks up a box or a barrel or a container of hazardous waste and they put it on a truck, you want to know that it’s being tracked,” said Earthjustice attorney Angela Johnson Meszaros. “Because once it's on the truck, anything could happen to it.”
A lack of public access
DTSC didn’t make any of the documents public on its website. Instead the department offered a broken link to the documents and directed the public to submit a formal California Public Records Act request — a process that can take weeks or even months to yield records.
In a letter to the department, several environmental groups including East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, the Center for Environmental Health and the Clean Air Coalition, said the added documents actually undermine the case for the proposed rule – what the letter called the "manifest exemption" from tracking requirements.
“DTSC’s notice of additional information and the documents referenced therein do not support DTSC’s proposal and only underscore the deficiencies in this rulemaking,” the letter states. “Nowhere in the notice or any other document on the rulemaking website does DTSC explain what it thinks this additional information means, let alone how it would support adoption of the manifest exemption.”
Alysa Pakkidis, a spokesperson for the department, declined to say why the department considers the documents valuable or how they support the proposed rule.
The comment period regarding the rule including the added documents officially closed on Feb. 17. CalMatters requested the additional documents from DTSC on February 25. On March 6, department officials said they would provide records on or before April 1. CalMatters still hadn’t received the documents as of March 24, more than 15 business days later.
Earthjustice requested that the department upload the documents to its website so they would be easily accessible to people who wanted to comment on the rule based on the whole record. “DTSC respectfully denies your request to upload the rulemaking file to its website,” a department official wrote in an email reviewed by CalMatters. California code requirements, the official said, “do not include posting such files on an agency website.”
Dave Owen, an administrative law professor at UC Law San Francisco, said state administrative law does not require DTSC to post the documents online, but that state agencies often do more than the minimum to make sure the public has access.
“In general with public comment periods, there are often norms that go beyond what specific laws require and there’s certainly a norm of trying to give people access and give people time to respond,” he said.
Pedestrians and vehicles pass through Gayley Avenue, a public road where UCLA trucks carry hazardous waste between different parts of campus, on March 17, 2026. Photo by Lauren Justice for CalMatters Beyond their criticism of the rule itself, advocates said DTSC’s handling of this and other public comment processes indicates a disregard for community input.
"It is baffling that they're throwing up these extra hurdles for efforts to understand the agency's decisions and to understand how they think they're supporting those decisions, when we really know that the work that DTSC is responsible for has really significant impacts on real people,” Johnson Meszaros said.
The documents
The documents DTSC added to its rulemaking record include a short email exchange between officials with the U.S. Department of Transportation and DTSC, along with hundreds of pages of reports outlining traffic accidents involving hazardous waste.
In one incident described in the documents, a drunk driver caused a crash that sent a tank-carrying truck off the road and into a ditch. Fuel in the truck leaked for three hours before a clean-up crew arrived. The crew used sand and oil absorbents to soak up the fuel and prevent the gas from seeping into the ground.
In another incident, a driver carrying nitric acid from Phibro-Tech, a toxic waste recycling company based in Santa Fe Springs, didn’t ensure the tank was properly secured before he started driving.
“Nitric acid splashed out of the tank when he hit the brakes hard on I-10,” the document states. “Some spilled on the ground and some made contact with a couple cars driving by.”
These kinds of incidents, Johnson Meszaros said, highlight the dangers of transporting hazardous waste on the road, where it could come into contact with other drivers or pedestrians. The department is supposed to keep people safe by documenting where hazardous waste is at every step.
“How does it go together that you're making people safer by stripping away visibility about hazardous waste being moved?” she said.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
