The prioritization process laid out in EPA Actions directs EPA regional offices to prioritize permits. Regional offices will consider prioritizing all EPA-issued permits that have (1) significant environmental impacts; and (2) impacts on overburdened communities. The order in which the prioritization criteria are examined may vary from region to region. EPA Actions does not expect a regional office to assess whether there are overburdened communities prior to assessing whether a permit has significant environmental impacts, or the reverse, because the assessment of each prioritization criteria is independent of the other. Thus, a regional office could make a determination that a permit does not have significant environmental impacts and decline to perform an environmental justice screening to analyze whether a potentially overburdened community will be impacted by the permit because the permit has not triggered the criteria for prioritization for enhanced outreach. Alternatively, a regional office may choose to examine whether a permit impacts a potentially overburdened community prior to assessing the significance of the environmental impacts. In that case, all permit applications in the Region would undergo an environmental justice screening.
