 Good morning. Welcome to this public meeting of the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission. We have one item on the agenda today. CPSC staff will brief the commission on our fiscal year 2016 operating plan. The three CPSC staff members who have joined us today for this briefing are Mr. J. Hoffman, our chief financial officer, Mr. James Baker, our budget officer, and our director of budget planning and evaluation, and Mr. J. Howell, our deputy executive director for safety operations. After the staff presents, we will turn to the commission for as many rounds as needed of 10 minutes each per commissioner to ask questions. So now with that, we'll turn it over to staff. Mr. Hoffman, if you want to begin, or Mr. Howell or Mr. Baker. Please, Mr. Baker. Thank you, Chairman Kaye. Good morning, commissioners. Let me start briefly with the presentation that starts with how we set up the operating plan document. On page one of the document, we have the summary of changes that lays out the changes from the fiscal year 2016 request to Congress to the fiscal year 2016 enacted. On page two is the overview of funding and FTE. This table provides the breakout of how the $125 million appropriation is proposed to be allocated to the organizations. On pages three and four, the budget key measure summaries, the budget key measures bridge the budget request to the operating plan. And they are outcomes or the results the staff and commission defined as most critical to measuring and describing the agency's progress to achieving the goals of the strategic plan. These measures are reported to Congress and the public. Starting on page six, we have the proposed voluntary standards activities. And on pages nine through 11, the proposed mandatory standards activities. Starting on page 11 of the document are the key chapters of the operating plan. Each chapter pertains to a major organization that has a bearing on direct mission activity. Each chapter has the same outline beginning with the resource summary, the funding and FTE, and corresponds to the table on page one of the document. Then the key priorities for that area are presented. Next, the table displays how each proposed project that fits into the $125 million enacted appropriation is aligned to the strategic plan. Next, followed by a description of each project that will receive funding or staffing. And after that are the budget key performance measures for the organization. And then the internal operating plan measures and annual milestone tables are presented. And these are management metrics and are not reported externally but are available if wanted. Slide four is a summary of changes from the fiscal year 2015 enacted to fiscal 2016 appropriation level. We started with an active level of fiscal year 2015 of $123 million and received an increase of $1.6% or $2 million. Of that $2 million, $1 million is for security requirements, of which $700,000 is for cybersecurity, $200,000 for the 24-7 security requirements at 5RP, and $100,000 for personnel security. This total of $1 million for security items was included in the FY 2016 commission approved request. In addition to the $1 million for security items, there is another $1 million for third-party testing burden reduction while assuring compliance work is required in the FY 2016 enacted appropriation language. This $1 million was not included in the FY 2016 request. And if I may point out at this point for you to note that in the 2016 budget request, there was an increase of $5 million for a nano center. And this was not included in the enacted appropriation level and is not included in this operating plan. Next, we have the summary of agency funding. And it corresponds to the Table 2 on page 2 of the operating plan. As you can see, we are, as we've said before, salary-driven, almost 65%, and then about another 20% for rent and IT needs, leaving around 15% for R&D or our nano technology activity and project support. And I just want to point out that we do have $1 million available or that was given for us in no-year funding for VGB grants. And of that million dollars, there was a little less than $800,000 awarded in grants in December of 2015. And with that, I'll turn it over to Mr. Howell. Good morning, Chairman Kaye, commissioners. I appreciate the opportunity to present the staff's operating plan for FY 2016 this morning. We'll begin with proposed commission priorities as identified by staff. Under the category rigorous hazardous identification, staff intends to continue meeting the mandatory CPSIA and public law 1112-28 requirements, including work on phthalates, children's products, continued burden reduction while assuring compliance work, and working on any other products that pose an unreasonable risk to the consumer. And of course, we will continue our very important voluntary standards activity. We will continue rulemaking and analysis on ongoing persistent hazards, including ATVs and window coverings. And we intend to maintain a rigorous data collection process, collecting mortality and incident data, and conducting follow-up investigations and documenting the results of our finding. And of course, one of our most important priorities to maintain the safe operation of our technical facility, NP Tech, out at 5RP. Our mandatory standard activity that's proposed for FY 16 includes several different categories. Under the CPSIA category, we have our ongoing Section 104 work that deals with durable children's products. We are proposing an NPR on ATVs and FY 16, and a final rule on phthalates in 16. Under our rule review activity, staff is proposing an NPR to initiate rulemaking on fireworks following the briefing package that was presented to the commission earlier this fiscal year. Along with the other briefing materials dealing with issues such as lead and our rule review plan. Other ongoing or potential rulemaking activity includes architectural glazing, continued burden reduction assurance while assuring compliance activities, crib bumpers, work on petitions that we have on flooring, organohalogens, and of course, continued work on portable generators and other activities. As I mentioned, one of our most important efforts is voluntary standards. As you look at the FY 16 request versus the operating plan proposal, you'll note a difference in the number of voluntary standard activities, a decrease from 77 to 70. That's a result of the change in the way that we define active participation. And what we have proposed to do is to remove those where we are merely monitoring and not actively engaged in some effort within the voluntary standards process to move some standard forward. Staff is proposed to add bicycles from aldehyde and MDF from Aldehyde and Particle Board and tents and propose removing firepots and fuel gels, carbon monoxide alarms, cooktops, electric heaters, gas grills, glass front glass or glass front fireplaces, playground equipment, portable pools, slow cookers, trampolines, and front loading washing machines. These are many of these efforts we've been engaged with for many years and have been quite successful in moving the voluntary standard forward. And while we intend to continue to monitor the activities of these voluntary standard efforts, based on our new definition, we will remove them off of the table. In the category of market surveillance and enforcement, staff proposes to continue to improve our internet surveillance capabilities using the integrated team approach and some technical enhancements to our capabilities. We are going to ensure that our regulatory compliance activities are fully engaged in monitoring the marketplace and continue to enhance our recall effectiveness activities, one of the priorities I believe for the commission. In the area of import surveillance, we will monitor our targeting effectiveness and make improvements to our ITDS RAM pilot system, maintain and support the US government single window platform and our PGA message set pilot initiatives, continue to support CBP's automated commercial environment or ACE, and evaluate the results of our full production RAM requirements analysis and develop an updated implementation proposal for commission consideration. Another very important aspect of staff's effort in ensuring compliance of consumer products in the United States is our global outreach to the regulated community. There have been many, many advances in our international program efforts over the past few years. And one of the things we intend to do is increase cooperation on product safety with our NAFTA partners in Canada and Mexico. We intend to expand our overseas training of US product safety requirements for buyers and sourcing professionals representing US importers. We will continue to support our Beijing office activities. There is a lot of activity going on in China with our folks out there, including product safety training for industry and effectively coordinating with our sister agencies in China and other Chinese government officials. And of course, we intend to represent the US government in any multilateral product safety forums. Any area of communications, staff proposes that we will pursue new opportunities to raise awareness for several priority programs for the agency. Pool Safely Drowning and Drain and Trampment Prevention Campaign is one of our premier events and activities within the communications program. The new Anchor It campaign dealing with furniture tip over and our longstanding Safe to Sleep campaign, along with increased efforts in our minority and community outreach efforts. We propose to develop new messaging and events for 24 targeted education programs and to continue to reduce the time between the recall press release first drafts and the date that we issue those press releases and expand the agency's visibility on social media and continue working on the transition to new content management system for CPSC.gov. The backbone of the agency as a data driven agency is certainly our information technology team. Staff will ensure access to CPS data through continuation of our virtual desktop infrastructure and other initiatives to make us more efficient. To provide new data analysis capabilities and tools to improve and expand our ability to identify hazards in the consumer product marketplace to protect our data through implementation of mandated security requirements and to continue to support the import surveillance ITD as RAM efforts by completing a requirements analysis on a full production RAM system and develop future implementation plans, transition the pilot scale system to an open source platform and support the Alpha Pilot e-filing initiative. And with that, I'll turn it back over to Mr. Baker. Thank you, Mr. Halle. The performance measures and project codes. As I mentioned before, the performance measures are critical to achieving our mission. They indicate our progress and effectiveness in achieving our priorities. They help us plan, monitor, and evaluate our activities in achieving our goals and objectives and serve as a means of comparison and prediction. And the budget key measures bridge our budget request to our operating plan. Streamline project codes. July through September of 2015, EXFM met with offices to review the project codes. The codes that we reviewed and we consolidated those that were no longer used or had small immaterial resources or allocations. Appendix B annotates the project codes in the major offices and activities that were consolidated within the retained codes. The codes consolidated in the operating plan are in this appendix. With that, that ends our briefing and now questions. Thank you, Mr. Baker. Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Halle will now turn, as I mentioned, to questions from the commissioners. We'll have 10 minutes each. We'll go as many rounds as we think is necessary. I'm going to get going here. And I do want to start by really commending the work of the financial management division. Under your leadership, Mr. Hoffman and yours, Mr. Baker, this is a tremendous work product. From my perspective, and I'm sure my commissioners, at least Berkel and Mohorovic in particular, agree we're not funded at a high enough level to do our work. And you manage working with other offices and also particularly with Dr. Borlase from hazard identification and reduction to squeeze into what I think are woefully insufficient funds so much of the critical work that we need to do. And what you end up producing is an incredibly useful document. It's very transparent. I think it is a model for how agencies should proceed. I know that you have continued to evolve it over time, and it will continue to evolve, I'm sure. But I think you should be really proud of the work that you've done. This is excellent, and it was a great presentation. And the operating plan is probably the most critical document that we as a commission have a public hearing on each year. Because unlike the discrete work that is mentioned in it and that we are briefed on and vote on, this covers everything. And so this is the one time of the year where we really get to have a discussion, and it happened last year, we get to have a discussion about all the different priorities and talk through and work with staff on how the commission will go about doing its work. Again, I don't think that we are receiving enough funds to properly address the consumer product's safety needs, both acute and chronic, that are presented in this country. But with the limitations that we have, I'm really proud of the work that the staff has done. I want to turn, and I'll start, Mr. Owl, with you please, on some of the priorities that are in here. And one of my highest priorities for this year is portable generators. It's been an issue that has been dogging the agency and taking the lives of consumers for decades. And thanks to a critical investment by the staff and the agency a few years ago with the University of Alabama, we reached a technical breakthrough. And we're now in a position where we are aware of, in the marketplace, advancements that can significantly limit the carbon monoxide that is being produced by these machines in an attempt to save lives. And lives will be saved. There's no doubt about it. This work is directly tied to ending the unnecessary hundreds of deaths every year from these products. I noted in there, and you mentioned it, Mr. Owl, that we will be seeing work on portable generators. Can you be a little bit more specific about the notice of proposed rulemaking when we should be expecting to see it and what kind of timeline we're on and what kind of work is going on between now and then with other agencies to make sure that this package is solid? Technical staff work continues on the voluntary standard with UL, including refining the test method that will be used to measure the compliance rate of any particular generator. Work continues on preparing an NPR. And it is our projection that we will bring that NPR to the commission before the end of FY16. We are working with NIST, continuing to work with NIST on modeling and we expect that work to wrap up by the end of this month. And we are participating with the industry in a technical summit and meeting with specific manufacturers to understand their efforts to help reduce the risk of CO poisoning from these portable generators. We are also testing new technology that we have become aware of this in the industry to better understand how that technology will help to reduce the risk. So the bottom line is we continue to be engaged actively with the industry to develop a voluntary standard. But at the same time, we continue with our mandatory rulemaking activity and propose to have a draft NPR for commission consideration before the end of this fiscal year. And thank you for that. I would never expect to get into the specifics of any NPR but do you at least anticipate at this juncture that the NPR that we see will, as we usually do it, as staff usually does, it will be a performance standard that would allow many different ways to achieve that result as opposed to being particularly prescriptive? As staff always strives to do is to present to the commission and to the regulated community a set of performance requirements that allows the industry the flexibility to achieve those requirements in any way that they see fit. Thank you for that. And again, time really is of the essence with portable generators and so I'm gonna urge staff again to move as expeditiously as possible but also in a manner that doesn't impact the underlying package and the integrity of the package. Building off of that and really relating to the research that I mentioned with the University of Alabama, section two of the Consumer Product Safety Act states that the fourth purpose of the act is, quote, to promote research and investigation into the causes and prevention of product related deaths, illnesses, and injuries, end quote. And I am extremely impressed with the work that the staff did because that really was the breakthrough. That University of Alabama research changed the entire dynamic and it was because of staff's foresight, Susan Vathalon of the staff, Janet Byer and their leadership that got us to where we are. And I'm curious to know, Mr. Howell, are there other areas that are either reflected in this operating plan or if we had the funds, we would be devoting them to that type of research to create that type of game-changing breakthrough so we can solve some of these persistent hazards that the commission is dealing with for a long time? Well, some of staff's current activities, as you're aware, include research into window covering design to reduce the risk of entanglement hazards. We are researching the possibility of using barriers on a postured furniture. We've been working on failure mechanisms for gas range control panels. And of course, our long-standing nanotechnology research that we're doing and of course, ongoing chronic hazard research with some of our contract partners. There is an opportunity, looking at it in the future, to include work on items such as crumb rubber and turf and playground materials. I think as the hoverboard scenario brought up this Christmas, work on unprotected lithium ion and lithium polymer cells and battery packs. ATV vehicle dynamics is an area we learned quite a bit in our work with the ROVs that we believe may be transferable to ATVs. There's an opportunity there. And we've also proposed, or we're looking into, research into behavioral factors impacting consumer decision-making with a particular focus on consumer choice, how they make those choices, whether to comply with a recall and how they make those decisions that may impact ultimately the recall effect in this question. So there's plenty of opportunity out there. I will also note that recently, we have formed a small 90-day technical review team. This is an offshoot of our normal program area team activity. This is a cross-functional team and their charge is to identify emerging products and technologies along with the risk that these products and technologies may present to the consumer. And they are looking out to a three- to five-year horizon to identify what are those potential emerging hazards that we need to be thinking of now. It may provide an opportunity to engage with industry early in the development process to set voluntary standards up, but certainly allows us to maintain a constant vigil and be watching as these products enter the marketplace. Thank you, Mr. Hall. And both of those points that you mentioned are very important to me, the first being the research and now that we have moved out of the primary implementation of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, I'm hopeful, and I see Dr. Borlase back there, I'm hopeful that staff will continue to think big and to think ahead and to look for opportunities to come up with these type of game-changing research like we saw and have seen on portable generators. And I'm also grateful, as you mentioned, Mr. Hall, for the emerging technology sprint that you're gonna be doing over the next 90 days. And I look forward to seeing that. That's obviously important as well as we've discussed. Mr. Wolfson, our Director of Communications, Scott Wolfson, if I can ask you a question in my remaining time. We've got one minute, so you might have to keep this tight. I think as we've seen in Flint in particular, not all communities are impacted by something the same way. And because we have such a tight budget and we have so few communications dollars, how do we get even better at trying to reach those communities where instead of blanketing the country and potentially not hitting where we should, how do we refine that so we're doing the type of targeting that we can really impact those who need to hear the messages the most? Chairman, it's a great question. I think your call for us to do micro-targeting is where the future of the agency should be. To really understand a community's needs and how to relate to the community, we need to have either connections to the community or be there on the ground. So the work we did last year in Ohio, I think was really groundbreaking work for us, but the key is not just CPSC delivering the message, but having partners, respected voices on the ground that can carry our message forward. So that relationship building to be really pinpoint with the message, so it's relatable because sometimes if it's just Washington talking to a community, there's gonna be a disconnect. So that's the key issue there. Excellent, thanks. My time has expired during a later round up. I'm gonna ask you, Mr. Wolfson, about how we measure effectiveness. If you could be prepared for that, please. Thank you, Commissioner Adler. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and I do wanna join you in congratulating the staff on a superb document and terrific work in explaining the document to us. As somebody who's been observing the commission for over 40 years, I can think back to some of the budget documents that we've seen over the years in the operating plans, and I have to say that what we have before us, to me, is one of the most well-written, clear, informative documents that I've seen over the years and I cannot commend the staff enough for such excellent work, and I really do appreciate it. And I did wanna make one quick observation and then a question. About a year or two ago, I raised the question about incremental change and change over time because my memory is not good and I always wanted to see what's different, what's new. And so when I look at Appendix A and Appendix B, you're telling me what's been changed and what's new. And Mr. Hoffman, when you were in my office, you did an excellent job of explaining Appendix B and how that reflects changes over years and a very long conversation that you've had with staff and I was wondering if you could just give us a succinct summary of how we've ended up with Appendix B, which again, I think is a very clear part of the document and I really appreciate you're doing that. Sure, well thank you for the question and thank you for the kind compliments. You know, consolidating MIS codes is something that's been on my radar for two or three years and there's sort of two reasons for that. One is in looking at the execution data against those codes. There is a tremendous amount of error in the smaller projects and the phrase garbage in garbage out is really appropriate and I can get into some of those statistics if you're interested, but for the second time I won't right now. And the second piece is, as you know, we've put forward a proposal for a product safety user fee and one of the requirements for a user fee is correctly aggregating your costs that can be applied, the fee can be applied to cover. The codes that we had for import surveillance were incredibly confusing and not being used evenly and so what we did is part of the consolidation was also to make more intuitively obvious how the import codes work in offices outside of import surveillance and we standardized three codes for the non-import surveillance offices. I don't know yet how well it's working because we've only been active a couple of two or three months, but I do hope by the end of the year we'll be able to look back and say okay, was this change something that improved data quality and did we get better reporting on import specifically? I have to say one of the things I've most admired about Jay Hoffman is this whole commitment to ongoing quality improvement and each time we get a new document I find it more readable and more understandable and to the extent there are things that are unclear it's usually my lack of understanding and Jay is incredibly patient about explaining stuff to me. Now with respect to appendix A, again I can't tell you how much I appreciate giving me the information about what's changed from previous operating plans and what I did was I actually, some of the changes are very obvious and understandable, some of them not so much. I don't intend at all to ask you to walk through the changes that I didn't understand but I have given a list to the staff and I have been assured by Mr. Howell that he will come in and sit down and explain the rationale behind the changes and I have to tell you how much I appreciate that. I have to also say how pleased I am overall Mr. Chairman with the direction of the budget and the operating plan. Maybe it's just because we've been here a while but it does seem to capture not just my priorities but the priorities of the commission as a whole. So I just think you've done a marvelous job with extremely limited resources in capturing at least the sense of the commission and the commissioners about future direction which I'd love to believe is primarily because we are a data-driven body and I have to tell you how much I agree with that. I have to say just in passing and I'm sure some of my colleagues will not agree. I was disappointed to see the Appropriations Committee put in limits on finalizing a standard for ROVs but I am assured because we are making such great progress on a voluntary standard that the staff continues to work on the voluntary standards with ROVs and Mr. Howell could I, if I could just ask you, are you comfortable that you have sufficient freedom and flexibility to continue working with the industry to work to develop a voluntary standard for ROVs? Yes, I do. It's our reading of the congressional direction that while we are precluded from any work in advancing a mandatory standard that our work on the voluntary standard can move forward and we are actively engaged with the industry and are hopeful to have voluntary standards validated in the not too distant future. And I'm delighted to hear that and I hope that we achieve success in developing the voluntary standard and speaking of voluntary standards, I have to commend the chairman in selecting an absolutely outstanding individual, Patty Edwards, to be our voluntary standards coordinator. She's filling some big shoes in Colin Church's departure but I think she will be a very proactive and a very entrepreneurial person. And I have a special warm spot in my heart for voluntary standards work because if you look at the operating plan, we've got 70 projects that are voluntary standards and we have just a handful of things that we're working on that are mandatory standards, some of which may actually end up as voluntary standards. So I'm very, very supportive of our activities and voluntary standards. In the one area, if I were asked, would I change what I sense is in the operating plan, it would be to expand resources dedicated to the Office of the Voluntary Standards Coordinator. And so I'm just going to express this as a hope, Mr. Chairman, that to the extent Ms. Edwards gets into the position and comes to staff and to her superiors and to you for added resources that you will be open to expanding resources in order to fill the workload that she's gonna generate. And I will direct that question to the Chairman just for a second. Thank you, Commissioner Adler. I echo your happiness with Ms. Edwards being selected. I do have to correct the record. That was actually Dr. Borlaise's suggestion and the Office of the Executive Director selection, not my selection because they are the hiring authorities in this case, but I absolutely support it. Ultimately, the buck stops with you and ultimately you're the one I come and yell at. So you get to take some credit as well, but I do need to extend the congratulations to Dr. Borlaise as well and I really appreciate it. And I also want to echo your remarks and applaud your remarks on portable generators. One of the projects that I am equally concerned about with portable generators is TableSauce and I know that UL continues to struggle with what they're going to put in a voluntary standard and if I understand it correctly, they're about to have a revised vote on a voluntary standard and I guess my question, Mr. Howell, is with respect to the inclusion of technology known as Ames Technology, known as Active Injury Mitigation System, is that one of the components of the draft mandatory standard that the staff is working on and if so, is that something that we can communicate to UL at least the staff support for Ames Technology? Certainly staff is aware of and interested in the Ames Technology. I am not going to get out ahead of staff on what they may or may not propose to the commission. I will say though that we are familiar, we do realize the benefits of the technology and certainly it will be considered among all of the other options available for staff to present to the commission in terms of performance standards for TableSauce. Thank you for that very thoughtful and diplomatic response to a direct question. It's one of the things I like about Mr. Howell. This is just a very small question and I should have asked it before but I will ask it now. I see that trampolines is one of the projects that's been removed from voluntary standards and my recollection of trampoline hazards over the years is that trampolines can be extraordinarily dangerous and I know there's been a lot of voluntary standards work but my sense is that the injuries, the severe injuries associated with trampolines have not substantially lessened so if somebody could disabuse me of my notion or if somebody could explain why it is that trampolines has been removed from those where we're actively participating, I'd appreciate it. Certainly I would like to come to you after this briefing and discuss it in greater detail. At this point in time, staff has no active proposals before the Voluntary Standards Committee. There is little activity on that committee so we moved it back to the monitoring stage the fact that we're monitoring does not speak to the issue of do we believe or not that there is a hazard present but certainly we can discuss this later in greater detail. Yeah, I appreciate that and I'll just ask one last quick question that I should have asked before but the issue that we're focusing on with respect to tents, is that flammability? Thank you, no more questions at this time, Mr. Chairman, thank you. Thank you Commissioner Adler, Commissioner Robinson. Thank you, I would like to thank all of the staff who put so much effort into this, many who are not in front of us and I would like to thank Mr. Baker, Mr. Howell, Mr. Ray and Ms. Adkins for meeting with me for a very, very long meeting, unusually long to try to explain much of what's not clear from this document. Unfortunately, I've not had a chance to talk with you, Mr. Hoffman and I know you're the driving force behind the document and obviously the two commissioners who've gone before me did have that opportunity so perhaps some of this will be clearer that the things I don't understand when we get into some later questions. Frankly, I did not find this transparent, clear or informative as the people who met with me Monday understand but we will get into that later. Let's start with the easy stuff. Mr. Baker, I just wanna make sure that I'm clear. I'm turning to table two on page two and my understanding from our meeting is that the difference, the 2015 OP plan had $3,776,000 in the Office of Hazard Identification and the 2016 has $2,226,000 and my understanding is that that figure in part is different because of separating out the million for burden reduction, is that right? That is correct. Okay, thanks. And the other quick question on table two has to do with the Office of Information Technology and as I understand it, the $6,955,000 for IT includes some amount of the million dollars that you spoke about or maybe it's 700,000 for cybersecurity, is that right? It is $700,000 for cybersecurity. And that's included in that amount. Okay, thanks very much. And Mr. Hall, I think this will be your turn just quickly on the voluntary standards. And that was a great explanation you gave about the active participation and the definition and I don't need to go through each of the things that you listed for us in terms of there isn't, that it doesn't require additional attention in terms of monitoring and attendance. I just would like to point out in terms of the CO alarms, when I first saw that I of course flashed on portable generators since that's been part of that. But this particular voluntary standards activity as I understand it only has to do with the alarms. The portable generator activities as the chair so thoroughly pointed out is still going forward. That is correct. Very much so. Thank you. Okay, the mandatory standards table on pages nine and 10. As you know, the main driver at the commission for our rulemaking work is how the project is described in the mandatory standards table. So I wanna just spend a few moments on this with respect to fireworks. As you know, I've been following what we've been doing on that and I have not had an opportunity to thank staff publicly for the excellent briefing package that came through. It was very thorough and thoughtful and I know on page 10 that under the fireworks, it states that there will be a briefing package as well as an NPR. Obviously, we have the briefing package since we're well into the fiscal year at this point and is the NPR as we anticipated going to be launching off of that briefing package as you understand it? Yes, it is. Okay, great. And do we have a ballpark on when we will be expecting the briefing package on that? We are expecting a briefing package before the end of this fiscal year, as noted in the table. Okay, but we don't have any more specific time on that. Okay. And there are a few other areas that I'd like to see if there's any more specificity with respect to when we could expect it. I've been focusing recently on crib bumpers. I know we're supposed to get a briefing package. Do you have any more specificity other than before the end of September for when that might come down? We are thinking sometime mid to late summer, the July-August timeframe. We expect that briefing package to come forward. And the same question on residential elevators. I noted that there was only one comment on that. We're thinking the third quarter before the end of the third quarter on that. Okay, and table saws we're expecting in NPR. Fourth quarter. Fourth quarter. At the end of this fiscal year. And the voluntary recall package. There's an FR with an asterisk. Are there actual hours being allocated to this project? I do not believe so, but I'll need to get back with you on that and check the detailed data to verify that. Okay, I noted recently there have been out, well, not just recently, but there have been outside organizations lauding the fact that we are not going to go forward with that package. And as everyone in this room knows, it's very important to me that we do go forward with that project. But your understanding is that even though we have final rule down, that there are no resources allocated I am uncertain to that. And that's why I need to check the data and get back to you on that. On page 23, there is a priority listed and this is under compliance for recall further enhancements of recall effectiveness. Do you, can you tell me what that means and what you're including in recall effectiveness? Recall effectiveness is really going to entail for this one particular effort. This is outside of the broader research study that we talked about earlier is really the enhanced monitoring and engagement with firms on recall effectiveness in those situations where there's a belief that the number of consumers responding to the recall is lower than one might expect in that situation to reengage with the firm and find a way to move forward and perhaps get a greater response. We have modest resources to devote to this. It is an FTE, Beshki 10 staff months to devote to this as one of their more primary focuses but there should be an understanding among the commissioners that recall monitoring and effectiveness is the responsibility of every compliance officer. And there are hours that are charged to the broad hazard categories within compliance that are driven by recall monitoring and effectiveness activity. So these 10 staff months I talk about are on top of that and an enhancement to that particular effort. We don't have a person assigned to monitoring caps at this point, do we? I have every compliance officer in compliance monitoring. Their own caps, but we don't have a person whose job is to monitor. At this point I do not, but we are looking into that possibility. Okay, because my concern is I'm becoming more familiar with caps is not only in making our caps more effective in terms of getting unsafe products off the market but also once they're in place monitoring not only the response to what we have done whether it's called recall or repair but whether that cap that was negotiated was in fact effective. And at this point we're just leaving that up to each compliance officer who actually negotiated the cap to monitor. Is that right? I guess I'll only say just leaving it up to them is probably not a bad thing. They are the most knowledgeable person in the agency as far as the negotiations went. However, in the spirit of continuous improvement and driving some significant level of improvement in this recall effectiveness, we are going to devote higher level attention to this to assist the compliance officers and provide some oversight and see if we can't find some new approaches to improve that level of effectiveness that you speak of. So these added staff months, are you envisioning those as I'm not sure where they're coming from? Are they coming from the compliance officers or from home? No, actually there are enough hours within the, I believe the category is compliance management and administration is the MIS code description. Within that MIS code, there are a total of 103 staff months. When you look at the number of managers in there along with other projected personnel, there are basically 13 staff months that are available for this recall effectiveness effort. And if you look at how the rollup went, recall effectiveness was rolled up into that category. What was a separate line item last year is now rolled into that category. So we are being true to the category, the hours are there for use. So as once again, being the acting director of compliance, this vision that you have of perhaps having someone, maybe I misunderstood, but I thought you were at least thinking about having someone assigned to that task. These resources that you've asked for would give you sufficient resources to do that? It certainly gives us the resources to dig in and start to find out what the broader effort might be. But I do wanna make it clear that it is probably unwise to define a position as simply a 40 hour a week recall effectiveness. We will design any position description in a broad way that allows the individual to spend a significant portion of their time on this, but it will be much broader than just monitoring and working recall effectiveness. And my specific concern is whether we're giving you enough resources to do that. At this point, I believe we have allocated sufficient resources for an initial effort. Okay, and my time's expired. Thank you, Commissioner Robinson. And a number of the areas I appreciate you raising. Gonna follow up on as well. Thank you, Commissioner Buerkle. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And again, thank you to all the staff for the preparation that goes into the document and especially for the hearing and the briefing this morning, having access to this kind of a conversation is very important. I'm just gonna pick up where Commissioner Robinson left off with regards to recall effectiveness because that was identified as one of the 2016 key priorities for compliance. Continued improvements in internet surveillance capabilities and further enhancements in recall effectiveness. Are there costs associated with those two priorities? You know, of course, any effort that involves staff or contract work, there are costs associated with that, but as I said, we have set aside and planned to reallocate some resources to this effort. It's, at this point, we don't envision that long-term, it will be a full-time 40-hour-a-week job to monitor recalls. It may start out that way, but I think as we make improvements, we will learn just exactly what kind of resource allocation we need to make to not only continue the improvement, but perhaps to increase the momentum in a reasonable way. I think there are a lot of things that we don't fully understand. For example, what is a sufficient recall effectiveness number? Right now, we see numbers, I've seen them as low as 2%, 3%, I've seen them as high as 30% or 40%. And what the data seems to indicate at this point in time that the life of the product, the price of the product, the time in distribution are all factors that potentially impact recall effectiveness, and we wanna better understand those. And I agree, there are many, many factors, as was evidenced by our last hearing on the Hill with the Senate, they were very interested in recall effectiveness and how we measure it and what's an effective way to measure it. So I am glad we're looking at that. I'm wondering if the ability to submit the CAP reports, whether they're monthly or quarterly or whatever the, whether being able to submit them electronically and have them go into a single spreadsheet, would that enhance, I would guess, rather than having individual reports coming into us, would that enhance our capability of tracking recall effectiveness or at least getting to the point where you're talking? Absolutely, it makes us more efficient and that is something we're looking at. So it does make it more efficient to track the progress of any individual firm. However, I think where the rubber meets the road is going to be what we do with that data and how we re-engage with the firm in an attempt to drive that number up to someplace where we believe it should be. Well, and with all due respect, I think if they're coming in individually and there's no process electronically for them to go to one sheet, one spreadsheet, one place where one person can look at them, I agree the compliance whoever is handling that cap that certainly is appropriate. But if we're looking at this process overall, I think you've got an FTE that you, I think at least for the time being, there's enough uncertainty regarding how we can even measure recall effectiveness that it would require some effort and someone dedicated to that issue. I want to go back and I'm not sure if it's Jay or James, but with regards to import surveillance, on page two, it shows the import surveillance budget at 1.115 million. So it's $50,000 less than last year, last year's ops plan, I believe. I'll stipulate to that. Thank you. So my question is, and maybe it isn't import surveillance, maybe it's IT because I'm not certain. So last year, the registry got built and that was at a close approximately $650,000. Did that come out of IS's budget or did it come out of IT's budget? So on import, as I recall, that came out of the $3.6 million line item for the RAM. So what we do, that we handle the RAM a little differently than everything else, because we want to have control and fence the 3.6 million and not spend over that. So what we did is we took the 3.6 million, we allocated the O&M, and then we used the remaining balance to fund the project that you just referenced. So as I'm looking at last year's table one, the risk assessment methodology import, that 3.450, that is where the registry came out of. Right, registry O&M and yes, those two. Okay, and so that's not reflected in the overall budget for IS. That's a separate piece, the RAM piece. It's, I wouldn't call it separate, I just say it's included in the RAM. I think if I had the ideal way, I would just include the registry in the RAM, but because I know it's of interest to the commission, we keep it separate. Well, I will say I didn't vote on a RAM, I didn't, excuse me, I didn't vote on a registry or prove a register, even have knowledge that the registry was being built. So I think that kind of reflects what Commissioner Robinson is bringing up about the difficulty in actually understanding sometimes what these numbers mean, and I'll just express concern here that consolidating codes for us, I think that'll add to. I'm not sure how it adds to accuracy when you're clumping things together and you're not breaking them out carefully in order to make your case, which it's no surprise that I disagree with the user fees, but I'm concerned with consolidation of those codes, maybe is gonna lead to more difficulty in actually understanding the document. Would you like me to respond to that? Sure. So we didn't consolidate codes lightly. In fact, we didn't even apply a hard and fast rule on consolidation. So those projects that I knew there was significant commission activity on, even if there were smaller resources, we tried to retain those. We had a probably a bias toward retention on those sorts of projects. That said, I couldn't ignore the data on the 51 projects that are in Appendix B. So let me just kind of provide some information and you may not feel like you lost as much as maybe it appears. So of the 51 projects, six of the projects were redundant management project codes, meaning that we were capturing the same information in different codes. And so it didn't make sense to have multiple codes. 13 of the codes had zero resources applied to them at all, no staff hours, no contract dollars at all. Of the remaining codes, when you look at those, only three of the 51 had any contract dollars associated with them at all. And those contract dollars were only 150,000 in aggregate, which is less than one half of 1% of all contract dollars. We don't manage to that level of precision. And the last piece that really concerned me was the way labor hours were being charged. There were so many codes, and these projects had so few staff hours. The median number of staff hours on these non-management codes was 106 hours. That's one half of one staff month. What we were seeing was that there was a 67% error rate in the labor hours executed versus the labor hours planned for the 51 consolidated codes. When you compare that to all the codes across the agency, the error rate is only 1.5%. That tells me, as the guy looking at the data, this is broken. I understand what you're saying, and you are the expert here, but I just, my concern is, so we're consolidating, let's just talk about fire hazards, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, might, oh, thank you, Todd, into one code. And so how will we know where staff, whether it's what they're working on? I mean, now it becomes a general, right? It's a general charge to fire hazards. So there's no precision in terms of which project they're working on. But with respect to the codes, I'll concede that, but I'd like to think, and we can have feedback on this. I'm certainly open to- And we can discuss this further. I just- Not trying to necessarily just defend the way we're doing it. I'm open to any changes that will make your job easier to do. The counter that I would give to that, though, is that I think that the mandatory standards table really gets in to the hazard areas and product areas as is required by the reg that we're working on. And so I hope that that counter balances some of the information. And then, I mean, I think it's incumbent upon staff in using these broader codes to make sure that we're descriptive. And I did try to go out of my way this year to not only include the crosswalk in Appendix B, but also show which codes had been eliminated within the projects themselves. Maybe that worked. Maybe it didn't. But that's kind of the plan of attack. Okay, thank you. How am I doing on time, Todd? One minute? Okay. Well, I'll go back and then I'll get on to my next question because I'm gonna run out of time here. But just again, we're not experts in finance, in any of this. And so the more clarity, the more upfront information we can be given, it makes our job easier. And I will, there are a couple of other issues I'll address just about process, because it's no surprise to anyone, process is very important to me that we'll talk about later on when I have more time. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Buerkle, Commissioner Mohorovic. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, gentlemen, for a very competently produced and presented operating budget. You have my compliments. I will also say that in something with regard to something Commissioner Adler mentioned is from his perspective, this is a reflection of shared priorities around the commission. From my perspective, it is as well. And that's a very wonderful thing to see. But I will also recognize that today's date is February 10th. I think we're scheduled to vote on this operating plan for this fiscal year by the end of the month. So doing some quick accounting math, that'll be five months into the fiscal year. I reckon, or my opinion, is that this is generally a function of dysfunctionality elsewhere in other parts of the government, so perhaps our legislative and executive branch not getting together in a more timely fashion with their budgeting and appropriation exercises, which then allows us to carry on into our operating plan. But we all do recognize that the operating plan is a very significant and important document for the agency, but also for stakeholders to really get a clear understanding of where we're putting our resource dollars. As a former appropriator in New Mexico, I particularly loved that job in appropriation because I found it provided the ability to weigh in in terms of policy matters as a function of where we're putting our resources. So with regards to it being so late in the day, I think it'll be only a month perhaps or two before we get our mid-year report and vote on some of that. I hope in the future we can just do everything we can within our power. We don't have the ability to impact things outside of our control on Capitol Hill, but perhaps we might be able to do a bit more to anticipate what likely budget amounts are so we can move this process up as soon as possible, just as soon as very possible because while I do agree that this is a very well-produced document, I don't want to be presented with the same question I get from my home improvement contractors when they say, do you want it done right or do you want it done on time? I and I think perhaps others on the commission would like it done both right and on time. So I hope we can do everything we can there. In regards to reflection of shared priorities, I'm very pleased that the chairman mentioned portable generators in particular. I hadn't planned on talking about this, but I'll have to concur that I also was very, very pleased to see Mr. Howell that there is an indication for an NPR for portable generators in this fiscal year in evaluating that particular hazard and product class. I also want to echo the chairman's compliments to months of, if not years, but months of staff work in a very, very difficult technical area in evaluating whether or not there is something that we can look to for a future performance standard. And the reason why this particular hazard is particularly relevant for me is looking at it through the lens of risk-based decision-making and while that's more thoroughly teased out in our regulations in a nutshell, kind of echoing a previous CPSC document on risk-based decision-making, a three-punk prong test, the degree of hazard presented to the public, number two, the susceptibility of that hazard to remedial action and three, the cost of achieving that mitigation effort. And that is a general framework for risk-based decision-making. I think in looking at the hazard of carbon monoxide and portable generators in particular, the latency of that particular hazard, of course the severity we're talking about, lethal environments and fatalities primarily. But I'm also informed by the consideration of foreseeable misuse or user behavior. I'm particularly concerned about some of the users behavior scenarios that we very, very often see. These are not the exceptions, but I think more of the norms where I see user behaviors where users will be operating these products in what I would consider to be a rational approach to safety in recognition of the hazard of carbon monoxide, but the amount of carbon monoxide that these products produce is such that it goes even beyond reasonable measures. So what I'm not talking about is somebody operating a portable generator in their basement or in their kitchen, but in scenarios that have proved to be lethal, even while there was some obvious thought and consideration to the hazard, but yet it wasn't significant to mitigate. So I'm very much looking forward to that particular activity. I'd like to also, I think I have, how am I doing on time, Todd, five minutes. If I can, I'd like to also speak to an element in the budget and the office of communication. So Mr. Wolfson, I'd like to compliment you and your entire office on your work in developing and implementing a very innovative, anchorate campaign and I&E campaign designed to leverage our limited resources with the extended community of television, furniture, tip over, prevention advocates. I think it's noteworthy, which is why I'm making note of it right now. You have my full compliments. I think the agency through your leadership is off to a fantastic start on this effort and I'm pleased to see that it is identified as a priority in FY16 in the operating draft plan. I do have a few particular questions if you could. Could you provide some of the results and share some of the empirical measurements you have and that you watch in terms of the success and the availability of the anchorate campaign? Thank you, Commissioner. Let me start really with commending you as well as Commissioner Robinson for your leadership on the campaign. We've reached a point where the anchorate campaign is the nation's leading prevention campaign for tip overs and that's because of the support we've had across the commission and the work you've done on media and outreach in terms of symmetrics and let me also praise one more person, Kim Dulek, who is leading the campaign effort. She's doing an outstanding job. So we are seeing success at a higher rate for this campaign than we have seen for pool safely. So in just the first six months for our public service announcement alone, we're at 877 million impressions, which is just terrific. So I think the work of our contractor, they've seen how to do their job better for us through pool safely. Just last week in the lead up to the Super Bowl, 1.4 million impressions through great interviews that Commissioner Robinson did as well as outreach to the campaign. So we're going at a very good pace and I think we're gaining a lot of respect and awareness of the campaign. Yeah, thank you for the compliment. I'm proud to have contributed to some radio work on the subject, but I think Commissioner Robinson has been far more effective with the television interviews that she's conducted. That's because she's got a face for TV and I have one for radio. Now with regards to the anchor campaign, I think because of the modest amount of funding that we've provided it, is it true we're going to run out of funding almost any day if not weeks from now? Our issue is that we found, well we made some tough decisions at the end of FY15 to have an extension. It's not an option year on our contract with our PR firm, it's an extension. It does go to the end of the fiscal year, but starting next month, there's going to be diminished resources and services provided. And these are significant services that will impact the success of the campaign that starts next month and it'll continue throughout the summer. Okay, what would be your estimate of the amount necessary to fund the campaign for the full fiscal year then? The $400,000 that we received at the inception of the campaign, that's a very good rate for us to be at. So we're at only 114,000 currently to get us to the end of the fiscal year. That is not enough to keep up our rate of success. Okay. Well, some foreshadowing for things to come later as we mentioned with the mid-year review, I'll be doing everything I can to see if we can scratch and claw for some more there. And looking at a campaign like this in a multi-year way, would you say there is a funding level that we can look at to be able to have significant penetration? I recognize that we're a part of efforts in your, as we said, leveraging other activities. And I certainly hope other stakeholders that have gladly contributed to education on the dangers of furniture and TV tip over will continue that funding and that effort. I'm very pleased to see things in the insurance community and others as well as other NGOs contributing. Please don't leave it to the CPSC and our very modest funding to try to get it all done. But how many years will it take for a campaign like this funded at the levels you mentioned to have an impact in behavior? Sustainability of these education campaigns is key. So let's look again at pool safely. Five years into that campaign with around $12 million in total funding, we are now starting to see some promising signs in the epi data that we may be making a difference in reduced fatalities. So higher funding level, but five year period. I'm not calling for a million dollars for anchor it, but sustainability is the key because we really want to get to that point where the next epi data is showing reduced acid injury. I'm not asking for a million dollars yet either too. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Wolfson. Congratulations on that one and to Kim Dillek as well. Thank you, Commissioner Moorovic. Stay put, please, Mr. Wolfson, but don't get too comfortable. We're going to stay on the subject. So hear me out, if you will, on the larger, I'll try to contextualize my thoughts on this. Nothing what I'm going to say in any way represents that I don't believe in the value of education campaigns. I think it's actually hazard specific and technology specific, meaning in some situations pool safely, I think is the best example of it, maybe brain injury and new sports. When there is not a product that will solve the problem in the immediate or reasonable future and there is a widespread issue, I do believe that education campaigns properly funded and properly scoped are the way to go. When there is an issue like window coverings or even tip overs where there are technological improvements that are available, but they won't take effect for a period of time and there are in-home scenarios that continue to present risks that will not be addressed by those technologies. Again, I think that there is a value to a companion education campaign that's properly funded and scoped. But then there are some times when I don't believe that an education campaign really gets to the root issue and I know that Commissioner Adler in particular, he might speak on it, he's written about it extensively and my frustration has been an attempt to have an over reliance on education campaign when I think that there's a root problem that can be solved and I think again, tip overs is a good example, furniture should be made more stable. Ultimately that is the solution in my mind not trying to over time gently guide consumer behavior. I do have concerns with impressions, you know that. We've had this discussion many times. I'm not impressed with impressions. And as Dr. Jonathan Midget, a human factors expert on my staff has said many times including about three minutes ago in my ear, just because you hear it doesn't mean you're gonna heed it. And so what can we do? I'm getting to a question. What can we do to actually feel like these things work? And the Anchor campaign, I get that you need an initial investment to build out an inventory of materials that work across platforms and you've done that. And they're beautiful materials, they're very effective looking materials but as we continue to bless the spending on education campaigns whether on their own or in conjunction with other hazard identification and reduction work, how do we know that that's money well spent and it actually does make a difference? It's a great point and I agree with you and Commissioner Berkel and I talked about this yesterday. What I can say to you, we are providing the commission with data based on how much money we have. We can get you better data, we can get you better metrics but we need more money to do so. We get pitched all the time for more services in that area. So sorry to interrupt, what kind of money are you talking about and what kind of timeframe are you talking about and what kind of, how much better will that data be? It would probably be in the tens of thousands and we would get metrics on tone, metrics on regionalization is our message penetrating certain areas we wanted to. Is it resonating with those who are reaching? What I would say to you in terms of the impression numbers that we are putting forward because I know we're now at 11 billion and 14 billion for total impressions and one can say what is the value of that? As I share with Commissioner Berkel, I think the value is that we are reaching people multiple times and there is research showing to go from awareness to action, you need to hear two times, three times from social media, from your TV, from radio and I think that's an area of success for us but I agree with anybody who says it is hard to change behavior through education campaigns. At the dollar figures that we're working at that is a very difficult expectation to have of our office. Well, I appreciate that and I do value the idea of spending money on measuring it and Commissioner Mohorovic to the extent that you're looking at doing a mid-year amendment. I would be more inclined to support something that built in a component and put resources toward measuring effectiveness as opposed to just continuing to run a campaign without doing that but we can have further discussions about that. Thank you, Mr. Wolfson for that. You can get comfortable now. For the time being, Commissioner Adler speaks. Mr. Howell, to go back to the voluntary standards table and the evolution of that and what's not covered on it, just to be crystal clear and I'll point out something like cooktops which I believe is the number one cause of in-home fires is unattended cooktops. Just because it's not being actively worked on or listed that does not mean that we don't have other work going on, technical review, discussions with industry to try to advance something like this. Is that correct? That is correct. For example, in the cooktops, work progresses on that. UL and the industry, AHAAM, are actively working on this but we, the commission, staff are not actively pursuing any changes in this fiscal year beyond what we've already proposed. So we've made our proposal, the voluntary standards development organization in the industry have taken those proposals, they are advancing them and working on them for this fiscal year. We're using our resources in other ways while we monitor that activity and we will re-engage when it's appropriate. Okay, so thank you. Just anticipated my next question which is let's just say for instance on cooktops that there's suddenly a breakthrough in two months and it turns out that staff comes to you and the technical staff comes to you and says we actually now have the basis for a modified proposal and enhanced proposal for the voluntary standards. Is there enough flexibility within the system for that to occur even if it's not listed on a table? Absolutely, you know, much like compliance. You know, the compliance team, you can't predict how many cases you're gonna take every year so we allocate resources and we take them as they come. There's a segment of the hazard identification and reduction work that's the same way and so through years of experience and collecting data, we have resources and funds set aside under a category called emerging hazards. One of the primary factors that consume emerging hazards work is petitions. We can't predict how many petitions the commission may receive in a given year but we need to set aside resources to deal with those. And the voluntary standards efforts tend to consume a modest amount of resources and so when there's a need to re-engage, we are certainly prepared to do so. Great, thank you. And Dr. Borlase, if you could join us please at the table so I can ask you about a couple of specific projects, the first of which follows up on Commissioner Robinson on crib bumpers. As you're aware, the federal government, in particular the CPSC has not spoken on crib bumpers despite the fact that there has been a call for a long time in the public health community for us to do so. Health Canada has spoken, the American Academy of Pediatrics has spoken, various states and local municipalities have spoken. It's a significant concern of mine and I'm not getting into weighing one way or another and how staff comes out on it but it's a significant concern of mine that we haven't spoken and that we continue to have that kind of delay. We did put out a request for information, I believe it will go, print in the federal register within the next week or so which I think goes to some critical questions. What type of expectation should the community that is interested, the public health community that's interested in our work, what do you envision being the end product for this fiscal year for the work that we're doing on bumpers please? For the staff working on crib bumpers this year, they're focused on fully answering all of the charges that were in the record of commission action that the commission put out, I believe it was in 2013 in response to the petition. Obviously the RFI and the questions we were asking were part of getting additional information from the public on all of those pieces but and apologize on the RCA with me specifically but the issues related to the technical aspects of evaluating the voluntary standard for example, doing the technical testing to look at different types of crib bumpers. I will tell you that staff now has test jigs that are used internationally, New Zealand for example and others where they're doing testing of crib bumpers to evaluate is there a way of determining if one is too fluffy, not fluffy enough, et cetera, the other issues in the RCA related to the safety. What are the safety benefits of crib bumpers and a specific question in the RFI? So at the end for the commission, what is coming is kind of a full analysis of everything that was in the record of commission action. Do you anticipate that if the funding continues which I imagine it will that by next year we will be able to have a definitive answer on bumpers? In filling the RCA, that's the next step that we're focused on and then based on bringing that briefing package to the commission which is due this year on the next direction from the commission after that. If the commission direction is to fully answer that for the next year, we'll make sure we've got the additional resources but for this year the resources are fully focused and we have the sufficient resources in the AWP plan to get that briefing package to the commission. And we really are on the clock on that as you know and we owe it to the public to get an answer one way or the other. Looks like I've a little bit of time left for this round. I also want to ask about another subject that commissioner Robinson asked about, residential elevators which unfortunately there continue to be deaths and to commissioner Mohorovic's point when there an incident occurs it's fatal. My understanding is that a number of years ago the voluntary standard went from a four inch gap to a six inch gap in terms of what's permissible for the installation of these elevators and I'm gonna run out of time now so I'm gonna come back to you in my next round. If you can think about, give me some sense as to why we're not addressing this through the voluntary standard. What are the issues associated with that and how you see us getting into a solution that will address this hazard? Commissioner Anderson. Thank you very much Mr. Chairman and I did want to commend commissioner Mohorovic. I've always said he makes a better attorney as an MBA than I make an MBA as an attorney and I think he's demonstrated that time and time again. And I think he's always also taken a very, very thoughtful approach to regulating products. He and I disagree at times whether something is a latent hazard and I also probably disagree with him as to whether even if there's extreme consumer misbehavior if it's foreseeable and it can be fixed at a reasonable price I still think the commission has a role to play but I think he is really one of the most thoughtful colleagues that I've had and I wanna commend him for all of the issues he's raised in particular. I wanted to talk about the Anchorit campaign and the dollars dedicated to that. And it is my understanding Mr. Wilson what you're talking about are contract dollars as opposed to staff resources, am I correct? That's correct, just like the pool safely campaign all dollars are going to a contract. Right and that's one of the big challenges you get so many contract dollars and then sometimes you then say I've gotta spend contract dollars to try to save my kid or my spouse or my significant other and you're trying to choose between irreconcilable values and that's why they pay you the big bucks to help us make those decisions. But if we do get to the point where there is attention paid to greater contract dollars for a campaign I would like to have some notion of what other dollars will not be spent so that we can have a good sense of priorities because simply saying in the abstract let's spend more money as you well know who doesn't get us very far. And in respect to education campaigns generally one of the things I most admire about Scott Wilson is he is such a thoughtful person about the area that he has dedicated his life to and he understands both the potential and the limits to education campaigns and I think that makes for very realistic education campaigns at the CPSC. In particular it means that he's willing to look into education campaigns over the long haul. You don't usually get significant changes in behavior simply by the education campaign of the month so it's not always glamorous work but one of the things that Scott Wilson does is year after year come back to the same hazards and say we've got to continue paying attention to working on those hazards and I really admire that. One of the things that I completely agree with the chairman is that it would be useful to have an evaluation component. If you look at what most agencies do with respect to education campaigns to me two things pop up. They never apply traditional cost benefit measures to education campaigns and two they don't do evaluations and so I'm not necessarily calling for a cost benefit analysis of all the education campaigns we do but I do like the idea of evaluating as we go along and I know you're committed to that and I really want to commend you for that. Commissioner Possible I just want to share with you there is a proposal on the table if there's additional funding for Anchor It the vendor would like to do research on our effectiveness after about a year and a half of the campaign being live so that is a proposal before us. I think it is and by the way that's an extremely difficult thing to do is to measure evaluation I mean as to measure effectiveness we have trouble doing it with mandatory standards let alone education campaigns. One of the other things that I've written about is the topic of recall effectiveness and I want to try to put my thoughts in context. I think it is always important that we continue on an ongoing basis to look at recall effectiveness to think about recall effectiveness to try to improve it but if you put it in context let's not just look at what CPSC's recall effectiveness is let's look at how other agencies that have recall programs operate and I think what you'll find is every single agency that has a recall program is incredibly frustrated because there seem to be upper limits to what you can achieve with the recall program and part of that goes to what the chairman was saying is and also what Commissioner Mohorovic was saying is that it's very difficult to change user behavior and so first you have to get somebody's attention then you have to persuade them that action is important but there are a lot of studies that say just persuading somebody that they need to do something doesn't mean they actually do it so it's a multi-faceted, multi-stage process to get people to respond both to education campaigns and also to recall effectiveness programs. I'm all in favor of the staff on an ongoing basis looking at recall effectiveness and I know that we have lots of folks on the outside who are constantly asking us about our recall effectiveness and Commissioner Birkel I vividly recall the question thrown at you about recall effectiveness and I thought you during the appropriations Harry and I thought you did a very, very good job of responding to that but it's the sort of thing where how can you go and say well it's only a 2% or a 5% rate of recall effectiveness and persuade anybody who's asking you a question that that's a satisfactory answer so I think what we have to do is try as well as educating the public at large is at least raise awareness among our critics about what a proper measure of recall effectiveness is and again that's not in any way to say that we shouldn't be dedicating a lot of time and attention to recall effectiveness. My own view and I've said this before is that one of the saving graces is probably going to be technology as opposed to redesigning consumers which is extraordinarily difficult. It's probably better to get redesigns in technology and redesigns in products and so you've heard my scenario, you walk home and before you put your little child precious into the crib the crib suddenly says don't put precious in me, I've been recalled and I'm not gonna let you recall, put precious in me until you've taken remedial measures. Now there are a million technical challenges to getting things like that done but I do have a sense that 25 years from now if we are going to see any changes in recall effectiveness it's going to be at least in large part as a result of improved technology. I go back, the article I wrote on recall effectiveness is about 30 some years old and I haven't really seen a lot of significant changes in or significant improvements in recall effectiveness rates. I think that tells us something about recall effectiveness. One other observation, the term was used clumping, I like the idea of consolidation. Mr. Hoffman, but you did make a point that I think bears some historical comment and that is back in the day when we were doing budgets and operating plans I can't remember the number of times that commissioners used to horse trade about half a staff month and the staff would sit there with a very, very attentive look on their faces although I'm sure they were quite bemused to see commissioners negotiating over half a staff month, it doesn't work. It really doesn't. That what you want to do is make certain that the staff understands what the priorities of the commission are and also that the commissioners themselves and I think we do a very good job are very quick to ask questions and very quick to probe and follow up when we do have points in a budget or operating plan that we don't necessarily understand and I want to thank you all for being so willing and so attentive in answering our questions because I think that's part of our job as well. I think this has been more of Bob's comments than any questions, but if any of you had any reaction to anything I've said, you're more than welcome to speak up. If not, I think I will end a bit prematurely. Thank you, Commissioner Adler, Commissioner Robinson. I would just like to make a comment on the recall effectiveness. It's from a totally different standpoint. I am hoping that I know in the past when we've had caps where the so-called success rate and I need to interject here that one of them I've been following closely isn't in the two to 3% range but is more like 0.0017% so-called success rate and I'm hoping that as opposed to doing what we've done in the past is simply repeating what we've already done unsuccessfully and we all know the definition of insanity of repeating the same thing and expecting a different result that there will be times when we'll actually look at the recall. I'm reminded of the Takata airbag recall by a sister agency recently where they neglected to put in the recall that Takata had to pay for a loaner car while people came in to have their airbags repaired and the result of that has been that there are very, very dangerous products out there that people are getting killed by because they can't stay away from work and need a loaner car. So to go back and look at the contents of the cap when our success rates, again with quotation marks around it, are so low, I hope that these resources that are being asked for will be part of that recall effectiveness goal that we have that this will be taken into consideration. And I have a quick question for you, Mr. Howell. We've said a lot about tip overs and I know that there are a lot of departments and I of course also thank Mr. Wilson for his efforts but I know compliance, EPI, our field representatives, EXHR are also working on different facets of the tip over danger and Commissioner Mohorovic and I should say our staffs, we shouldn't take credit for this, put together a pretty specific request for an internal report that we would like to see in terms of addressing some specific issues, including reporting and analysis of related compliance data. And we've talked about this in my office but I would just like to hear here in this hearing what kind of resources you think would be needed to comply with the request that the Commissioner Mohorovic and my offices have submitted. For the record, Dr. Borlase has studied this and has determined that three staff months will be sufficient to meet the suggested briefing package. You know, this would be an internal document that would cover not only the voluntary standards activity but certainly the compliance activity that is underway. The resources are available. It would require one staff month from the legal team, one from compliance and one from the technical team in EXHR. It's a modest proposal and Dr. Borlase and I took a look at the resources and felt like it's one that we can support without the need of an offset once again because of the way that we rolled up some resources in the broader categories that we feel like we can make some minor adjustments to other areas and cover this should the Commission direct us to do so. I appreciate that. And now I'd like to move on to some more of my macro concerns with respect to this plan. And let me start by saying that approving the operational plan I view as the most important thing that we commissioners do in any year. It's the roadmap for absolutely everything that we do in any area throughout the year. And I learned that the hard way during my first year when I voted to approve an op plan weeks into my tenure as a commissioner not appreciating that from that point on throughout the year, whenever I had a suggestion of something I would like to have pursued the first question would be, is it in the op plan? So I got the baptism by fire. When I received the op plan this year, it was clear and I had heard no discussion of this. No one had talked to us about it. But it was clear that it had been organized very differently than the previous years. And as I got deeper into it, obviously, your appendix B, Mr. Hoffman is something we examined closely. And I've listened. What we have to keep in mind is we are in this very important, if not most important decision we will make this year. The op plan is supposed to be as specific as possible with regards to all risks to be addressed in order for us to be able to do our jobs. And that's in our regulations. So this year, we commissioners have, my concern, let me see if I can put some background to my concern before I ask specific questions. This year we have appendix B, which has the breakdown of the categories. And I'm gonna come back to that. But my bigger concern is next year we won't have that. Next year we will have the broad categories and without the specificity. So as I looked at the explanations that both you and Mr. Baker have given with respect to why this streamlining is perfect, the materials that were used for the presentation said that the impacted codes or codes either no longer used or with small immaterial resource allocations. And then in your comments, Mr. Hoffman, you said that, I don't know how to even address the error. I don't know how the error is changed by code. So I'm gonna stick with the user fee that that apparently only wanted one code for user fee efforts. And as I look at appendix B, my problem is that as I look through these, there are a whole lot of these that don't fall within those categories that you say was the purpose for this consolidation. For example, if I look at 21726, I have everything from mattresses ignition standards, cigarette and cigarette ignition standards, to the fireworks regulatory options, which we know is not a code no longer used, nor is it one that there's little effort on, quite the opposite. And then you have the cigarette ignition risk, but you have seven categories there. If I look at crib bumpers, this is not something that's no longer used or in the category of either import or in the category of a code with smaller immaterial resources being used. And if I look at the chemical hazards 23259, which is another perfect example, the Poison Prevention Packaging Act, which incorporates a lot of things. And I know we spend more time some years than others. And certainly with the nicotine packaging, I assume we're gonna be spending more effort on that. But then that's lumped together with phthalates, which is a fairly significant effort with respect to the agency. And I perfectly well understand, and Mr. Baker explained some things that were neither in the materials nor in your explanation today in terms of making this easier for accounting. But my problem is, were you looking at my time? Okay, everybody's got their whole office on their wrist right now. The problem that I have is whatever you do for accounting, my job as a commissioner is to approve this OP plan and in order to be able to do that in a knowledgeable way, I need as much specificity as possible. And let me also throw in here that in our meeting on Monday, I raised, for example, a concern that a manager wouldn't know if you had this broad category of seven items in it, some of which are very, very active. Wouldn't know from these consolidated codes what his or her staff is working on, whether it's on mattresses or firework safety. And I was told in no uncertain terms that a manager, of course, if that manager's worth his or her weight, will know what their staff's working on. So I have to assume that even though for accounting purposes, these general categories are used, there will still be tracking of individual sub projects in terms of staffing and deliverables. Let me start with that. Is my understanding correct that the sub projects under these bigger codes will be tracked somehow? So any tracking that happens below the MIS code level would be in the purview of the line manager. So my office won't be doing any of that tracking. But there's nothing that would preclude George from doing it if he wanted to. It's certainly not required to. So again, coming back to, I know that your job, and I'm not saying this the least bit critically, is to make life easier for accounting. And your job is not to make life easy for the commissioners. However, it is to make sure that we're informed with specificity. And let me just as an aside say that I did receive, I asked very, very specific questions with respect to a whole lot of things that were not in the op plan. And I did get information late last night. And I think whoever was working late in terms of getting that to me, I've not had a chance to look at it. But the first question is, why can't we put the specificity that the line managers have into the op plan, given the fact that what's supposed to be presented to the commissioners is supposed to be as specific as possible under our regulations? Okay, so there's really a lot packed into that question. So let me start macro and then I'll address it specifically if I could. First, I don't think there's any daylight between you and I on the what. You've consistently been an advocate for better data for the agency in terms of carrying out our mission. And I would expect nothing less of you wanting better data to do your job. So there's no daylight between us on that. I think maybe where we can have some conversation, maybe where there is some daylight is in the how. I think the first point I would make is you say, well, why can't we have this one level down essentially? My concern with it isn't necessarily about making life easier for accounting. It makes life easier for accounting to be sure. My concern is when we put a project in front of the commission with resources allocated to it, if I were a commissioner, I would think, well, this is probably reasonably accurate. Someone's put some thought into this and the planning levels are accurate. The data doesn't bear that out. The data suggests that these codes, a lot of times the resources are so small. It's not that the work is wrong or being done badly. It's just we don't have that level of precision in our planning process and execution. It doesn't take very much additional execution to run astray in terms of your hours allocated. Perhaps there's a better aggregation. I did, by the way, we didn't say it was perfect, but perhaps there's a better aggregation than what we proposed, but I think that the aggregation that you were dealing with last year, I think there was a sort of a false sense of security in that, I don't know that it was very good. In the execution data, which I'm happy to share with you at an outside this meeting, it's available on the website. You can look at all the details about how these projects are executed and I think you'd see, boy, there's a lot of variation in this data. And I can look at. I'm sorry, Commissioner Robinson. Sorry. Yeah, we'll definitely go another round. Thank you. Sorry. Commissioner Berkel. Thank you. I only got through one question the last time, so I'm gonna go quickly and I'll ask y'all to do the same. There is, on page two, there's reflected an increase in the RAM. It's about $150,000 from the FY15 ops plan to the budget, the 16 enacted budget. What was the increase for and where did it come from? Yes. Increase in the RAM. $150,000. That was because we had resources that we were able to dedicate. Oh, sorry, able to dedicate this year that we needed to increase in support costs. And so where did the $150,000 come from? I believe that was what was in the budget. For the RAM? And in 2016, yes. That's what we requested. Okay. And the RAM to me is these three phases. There's RAM, what we have now, the current RAM. There's RAM 2.0, and then there's the whole requirements analysis that's being done right now. And I'm trying to get my arms around that along with the registry because while these subcodes may not mean a lot, for us, I'll speak about myself, when I just see one number for IT, I immediately begin to think, okay, how does that break down? And how can, for instance, I mentioned the registry in the last round of questions, how can we have this major project go forward without us knowing about it? And so then I want to get into the granularity of the budget and the ops plan. So with regards to the registry, is there anything in this year's ops plan of that magnitude that isn't clear to me, to us as commissioners? And how would I even know what questions to ask because the registry just came out of nowhere? I don't know how to address the out of nowhere, so I can't help you there. In terms of are there projects in the operating plan that aren't transparent, I think it really comes down to asking the question, how are the contract dollars that have been allocated to each organization? And I believe the additional backup information has been provided on the projects in terms of funding levels. I would just note for all the commissioners that one of the reasons that's not published in the operating plan is because those amounts are so small by project, they're essentially contract estimates. And I'm a little bit nervous about publishing those externally before we actually let it procure them. So that's point one that I would make. Okay, and when I say out of nowhere, I know that's not an accounting term. And let me give you, for instance, in what Todd just posted this past week, some of the contracts, there was a contract for our media for $729,000 for technical support and governance support of the PGA message set. The contractor's proposal date is January 26th. So where is that in this year's ops plan? And you can understand our frustration when, again, I only can speak for myself, when these contracts, when we get this far along in the process, as Commissioner Morozovic mentioned, five months into the fiscal year, a lot of these contracts have already been obligated to funds. So this is a perfect example, or I'm guessing that's what happened to the registry. So it's in project 34340, and it is annotated in the operating plan in the import surveillance section. There's a dollar amount for that contract. There's not a dollar amount for the contract, but that's consistent with everything else for the reason I just stated. You just made my point. So what number is that included in? It's in the 3.6 million as James articulated in table two for the RAM. All RAM related, and the registry is part of the RAM, all RAM related spending is fenced within that $3.6 million allocation. And I guess I would echo Commissioner Robinson's request. Why can't we be given that you have that information? And I think when it comes to decision making for us to have that information, it helps us to understand priorities, how money is being spent, and it just seems like it should be part of this process. Sometimes I feel I'm on a scavenger hunt when I'm reviewing a document like this. It's difficult. It's difficult to get the information and that's what I, it's not that it's not there, but I don't know where to look for it and it certainly isn't broken down into the granularity that I'd like to see and know and understand. Plus the timing issue is completely separate, but I'll move on. So RAM 2.0, we gave $3 million to bring that software in-house at the mid-year, I believe. Dwayne can probably speak to this. So did the software for RAM, did we buy that software or are we rebuilding that software for the RAM 2.0? Mr. Ray, do you wanna step up for that one, please? Thank you. So the current contract that goes through the end of this fiscal year is to build out our own version of the current pilot system. Okay, I'm just trying to understand was it available for us to buy the software or we just decided it would be better to build it? We have looked at purchase options and that was not a viable option. And then while I have you here, the requirements analysis, our favorite topic of conversation, when will we get the results for that? And with regards to process forward, this concept of fully expanded RAM, how will those projects be prioritized and will the commissioners have any input with regards to that? Well, with regards to the requirements analysis, that contract's been let. We expect at least the first draft by the end of March where the team will have a chance to look at that, make sure it makes sense. That'll go through this internal process where we will take a look at the full ask and put that forward as far as commission involvement, any impact as far as future budgets and requests and dollar values and things like that, that's where those will be served up as a result of this process to gather the requirements. Okay. I wanna turn now to a completely different topic, which is not, I don't think it's your bailiwick. I think it's Dr. Borlase or Jay. So right now we're dealing, there's been a lot of support, bipartisan support with regards to TB 117-13 and the California smoldering standard and this concern that the agency's been working on rulemaking for a long time and at least we could get resolution with regards to the smolder's standard. So I'm wondering has any, with regards to the ops plan and consideration about a way forward, is anyone considered separating out the two, I mean it seems to me, and part of my question is the kind of resources that we've utilized so far in what we've learned, but have we looked at pulling out the standards, pulling them apart, looking at a smolder standard that appears something like TB 117 would address the smolder issue and then go forward with a separate standard for open flame. Let me begin by sharing with you staff's assessment of TB 117. Staff has previously determined that the test method similar to TB 117-203 have issues, issues that make it an unsuitable candidate for adoption under the FFA. The test method itself has technical feasibility issues including reproducibility and repeatability. Staff has, as you were calling the past, found that similar small scale tests do not adequately indicate the address of the hazard. The revised TB 117-2013 is technically equivalent to the UFAC ASTM standard with a few changes. And as staff stated in the 2008 NPR, our research on smolder and ignition indicates that several elements of the ASTM-UFAC volunteer approach would not be very effective at reducing the risk. Mr. Howell, I hate to interrupt you, but Todd is waving his card at me and- I'm certainly available either next round or after this to have a more detailed discussion. Yes, my concern, here's what I'm thinking and interested in doing is getting a briefing package to the commissioners on this issue. Apparently, if we've been doing rulemaking for 21 years and I'd be interested to find out the kinds of resources that have been invested in that rulemaking and what we have found out, but apparently we've reached an impasse or there's something going on that we can't get to a rule in 21 years. And so I think it would make a tremendous amount of sense to ask staff, direct staff, to give them some direction from the commission that we want a briefing package that will explain to us where we are at and as you're saying, YTB 117 isn't acceptable and is there a path forward? And have we looked at separating out the two standards so that we can finally get some resolution to this issue? Thank you, Commissioner Buerkle, Commissioner Mohorovic. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Howell, I know you're in the middle of a very thoughtful response to Commissioner Buerkle and Commissioner Buerkle, I'm willing to yield if you'd like to finish that line of discussion on upholstery furniture or if Mr. Howell, did you want to finish your thoughts or your response maybe without such a time constraint? Well, certainly, as I was saying, we believe there's some very basic technical issues with TB 117 2013 and is anyone familiar with that standard? I think would agree was more, the revision of that standard was more of an attempt to address an issue of chemical hazards versus it was an enhancing fire protection. Having said that, certainly the thought of separating the smoldering from the open ignition is something that staff can take a step back and look. If there is a belief that we are closer on one than the other, I can understand where the commission might believe that that might be a way to move forward with a mandatory standard that at least addresses part of the risk than the other. But staff fully believes that it is necessary to address both smoldering and open flame to provide adequate protection of the consumer. That the number of consumers injured or that die due to furniture fires is significant for the open flame, almost as significant as the smoldering. So certainly we are open to continued discussion and other approaches that may move us ahead faster. Thank you, Commissioner. Thank you. And I thank Commissioner for yielding just, and I just want to make it clear. We're not saying you wouldn't go forward with an open flaming. Just if we can address one part of this problem, then do that and then move on to the next. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Alas, I have to weigh in on that point too. In bringing up risk-based decision-making, I'd please like to ask and remind staff Mr. Howard to consider prongs two and three of that consideration, the susceptibility of that hazard to remedial action. The degree of the hazard I think is one that's recognized by all, but the susceptibility, it has escaped this agency for 21 years, 21 years. We've been in active role-making on that subject. I think that is a testament to the potential susceptibility there. I think Commissioner Buerkle brings up a great alternative with California TB 117. 13, I look forward to understanding to a greater degree staff's concerns with the technical aspects and I appreciate and thanks staff for providing that opportunity. I think we're doing it next week in a closed session at the laboratory and also the cost of achieving that action in risk-based decision-making. I would hate to know the figure of the total cost in public expenditures on the role-making over 21 years that has not amounted to a mandatory standard that this commission would be able to finalize, but to a happier subject and one that's near and dear to my heart with regards to a recognition of shared priorities at the agency last year and mid-year of the commission unanimously made a commitment behind creating a culture of regulatory look-back, retrospective review, one in which we will be constantly looking at our rules and regulations, hopefully through considerable public input in terms of those that are outmoded, outdated, inefficient, and as the president points out, most importantly, excessively burdensome. And I was very pleased to see a robust lineup of rules under the category of rule review. And if you could just provide us, I apologize for not letting you know in advance Mr. Hall, I was going to get to this point in particular, but with what's identified in the mandatory standard summary, the rule review plan, do you happen to know what, where the timing is in terms of getting the feedback and comment and when we might be able to see the briefing package on the rule review plan, which will establish the foundation for that culture in an ongoing effort. Could you provide us just a status update of where we are on that? You know, certainly I can provide some greater detail after this meeting. You know, staff is advancing the briefing package and certainly expect to have it by the end of the fiscal year. Understood, thank you. And the look at fireworks has been identified here and I'm very familiar with it as to why the 1110 rule would be considered rule review, since in fact we do have an existing 1110 rule. But the other two subjects of lead and mattresses, could you perhaps explain why those two projects are identified under rule review and how that encompasses the same themes? They are both required. The mattress standard was a significant rule. It's been in place for about a decade and it is time for us to take a look and assess that particular rule. Lead was a congressional mandate under CPSIA that on a regular basis we would take a look at the lead level and make adjustments as appropriate. So, you know, that tends to be the emphasis behind both of those. Excellent, thank you Mr. Chairman. I have nothing further. Thank you, Commissioner Mohorovic and Dr. Boyles. If you can join us again, we can continue our residential elevator discussion. And while Dr. Boyles is coming up, I do want to note how pleased I was to hear the commissioners to my right pledge to support a mandatory standard for upholstered furniture. And I'm hoping that they are open to whatever staff presents as opposed to being particularly wedded to one solution. And if it turns out that the commissioners have information that would show that staff is incorrect about the challenges about going from bench scale testing to pole scale testing and other concerns that have been raised about technical bulletin 117.-2013. I'm sure the staff would like to see that as well. But I've yet to hear in the time that I've been here such universal enthusiasm from my two colleagues at the same time for doing a mandatory standard. And I'm pleased to hear that. I'm residential elevator. So Dr. Boyles, where we left it was, I believe and tell me if I'm wrong that there had been a time when there was a four inch gap that was permitted and now it's a six inch gap and it has been identified at least by some folks in the concerned community that that two inch difference is the critical distinction between a safe installation and one that provides for a child to become entrapped. One, is that accurate and two, if that is either way, what is going on the voluntary standards work and is that a path forward on this? I don't have in front of me the details of the history on the voluntary standard and what was in the petition. I will say that from staff's perspective, sorry. From staff's perspective this year, our charge is to bring to the commission the briefing package where we're evaluating the petition plus the comments that were received during the public comment period as we do with the petitions and bring to the commission a package that with the evaluation, including things like the voluntary standard and a staff recommendation of either approving the petition, denying the petition or some other action, oftentimes which has include for other petitions based on the characteristics of the voluntary standard status et cetera, a recommendation to defer and do voluntary standards work. So while I don't have the details on the voluntary standard and part of the evaluation of the petition, staff is looking at the current voluntary standard. Great, and in the interim of when that work is done, the next time I see you, if you can please provide me with whether or not I'm accurate in terms of the four versus six and the timeline on that and if that is really the answer, if there is a path forward in the voluntary standards. Absolutely. And thank you, and while you're here, I do wanna reiterate something that Commissioner Adler said about the importance of table saws. It's another persistent hazard that is leading to life-altering injuries, unnecessarily so in my view, especially when there is a technology that it seems that can solve this problem. We wanna urge staff to make sure that that package just meets the deadline that's set in the operating plan if the commission approves it. Can you give me your assurance as best as you can that we're gonna be seeing an NPR notice of proposal we're making in fiscal year 16 on table saws? Absent the voluntary standard miraculously solving the problem. Yes, in terms of the resources, and we just had a project review recently evaluating the status as of February to make sure that that's on track by the end of this fiscal year. Great, and of course, please let us know if that slips for whatever reason. That's certainly a concern for many of us. And then I do wanna echo something that Commissioner Mororovic said about the rule review plan and express my gratitude to Mr. Helm, Dr. Borlase and your staffs for putting in the time for, and Ms. Sider, for putting in the time for putting this back out and getting this right. I do think it's an important component and I'm looking forward to seeing the final plan as it comes up. And then of course, as Commissioner Mororovic mentioned, the work that will flow from that. That's it for right now on EXHR stuff. I do wanna turn to Mr. Hoffman to an incredibly exciting topic called the Green Book. So our Inspector General came out with a recommendation in the last few months that I thought was extremely helpful. What underlies a lot of the work that we do and the operating plan is having controls in place to make sure that there is fidelity in how we measure and how we achieve what we're trying to do. We talked about having effectiveness or having some type of value of component on our education campaigns which are externally facing. It certainly seems to me, and I think you agree, that we should have proper internal controls about how we go about doing our work. Can you speak a little bit about what GAO's Green Book is and what it will mean as we go to try to fulfill the recommendation of our Inspector General? I'll certainly try. So it's a brave new world. The Green Book in a nutshell tries to do for non-financial management what has already been done for the last 20 plus years for financial management. That's probably the easiest, that's probably an oversimplification, but that's the easiest way to understand it. And for us specifically, I think the big challenge, but also opportunity in front of us is to look at what programmatic outcomes the agency is chasing, whether they be in an awareness campaign or a particular safety standard or implementing the strategic plan and thinking through what our risk factors are and how we are mitigating them. We're just at the very early stages of this so I can't say exactly what it's gonna look like, but as we've looked at all of the new, there's called the COSO framework when we look at all the principles and requirements in that and we map them back to the agency we have today, we're actually pleasantly surprised. There's a lot of things that we're already doing really, really well and they might not be packaged exactly as the new framework would suggest, but I think that it's something that we can implement that said, I don't think it's something you implement overnight. I think this is an iterative process that will take us several years. It took us nearly 10 years to get to the financial management implementation, but we're actually gonna be discussing this with the staff next week at our strategic data review about how to identify these risk factors, programmatic risk factors and what the mitigates might be. So I think it's an exciting challenge as challenges go. Thank you for that. And what kind of work product might the commission see to get a sense as to how this is coming along? Yeah, that's a fair question. I'll have to get back to you on that. I hadn't contemplated that question. Okay, and it doesn't need to be written. It could be oral as part of briefings, but I do think it's important and I'm sure my fellow commissioners agree that we get a sense as to how this is coming along because it does go again to the underlying effectiveness of everything that we actually are approving here. So thank you for that. Mr. Howell on recall effectiveness. I think you touched on this, but I wanna pull it out a little bit more to make sure I heard it correctly. We are, am I correct that there are higher priority recalls that the Office of Compliance and the Office of the Executive Director have identified where you're taking a closer, deeper look at to what might be done to enhance the effectiveness of those recalls and without getting into internal compliance and internal compliance discussion. If that's accurate, can you give it some sense as to what that entails? Certainly, as you might imagine that depending on the hazard classification and the history collected on the actual impact, if you will, of the product on consumer death and injury, products then rise up in the level of our attention. There is actually a field within our case management database that identifies it as a high priority case. And those are ones that we pay particular attention to. You know, we open over 600 cases a year and they can't all be high priority. It is the responsibility of each and every compliance officer to monitor those cases that they work through the system. But this additional effort is really to key on that handful of truly high priority cases either due to public attention, commission attention, or just through the facts and evidence that we determine that they're ones that we need to track and that we are particularly interested in. And we do so. And with the new management team, we have been placed down in compliance now. We are continuing and actually building upon an effort that was begun by Mark Schoem before he left the agency and we continue to take it further. And picking up on something that Commissioner Robinson was talking about, is it accurate to have the impression that everything's on the table as you do that, meaning re-notification, re-opening the cap that as you look to try to, especially for those particular recalls, that you're not limiting yourself to what might be necessary to be more effective? Absolutely. I think, you know, part of any analysis, you know, once you determine that you don't believe that a recall is effective, is as effective as it should, it requires a little bit of thought and assessment as to what may have gone wrong, what might be at the root cause of this so that you can take a very pragmatic approach to, you know, kind of putting new actions in place to try to enhance that. And certainly any and everything is on the table. It's, you know, as we typically do, you know, speed is of the essence in a lot of what we do in compliance. And so if there are actions that we can get the firm to agree to voluntarily immediately and put those in place, those are preferred over what could be a lengthy, you know, restart of the negotiation process. But we're also not limited to just one bite at the apple. So certainly as we continue to monitor, we will take the actions as appropriate. Great. Thank you, Commissioner Radler. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I did want to return to the topic of TB 117 and upholstered furniture because I would, I wouldn't use the 21-year figure, to be honest, either Commissioner Birkel or Commissioner Mohorovic. I would say 48 years because this goes back to before the commission was set up and the national then known as the National Bureau of Standards was addressing this and they did a lot of incredibly helpful work in supporting the agency's activities on upholstered furniture. And Commissioner Mohorovic, I think you put your finger on it. It is an incredibly challenging technical issue that's made even more challenging because of our concern about chemical hazards and FR chemicals showing up in upholstered furniture. I do take what Mr. Howell says as an indication of the challenge of even picking something like TB 117. And I am open to the notion of trying to address the smoldering hazard first and then an open flame hazard. One of the big challenges for me has always been the quality of the data. When you have a fire, it's very hard at times to figure out what caused it. It's very hard at times to figure out whether this one was really ignited by a smoldering source or by an open flame source. So that makes the data very challenging. I've heard staff's assessment of the number of fatalities and injuries associated with open flames. And I've heard those figures very strongly contested by other people. So it really at times goes back to how good is the quality of the data that we're using. I will say on a more optimistic note, when NBS first started looking at this, we had somewhere between 1300, maybe 1400 fatalities a year from upholstered furniture. That number is now down in the 300s. That is clearly not just due to upholstered furniture safety, it's due to a variety of factors and inputs which makes it a more challenging matter but it still remains true that upholstered furniture is the largest source of injuries from fires in the home. And we've got to continue working on that. But I'm open to somebody coming in with data and demonstrating that we could take a big bite out of the problem by focusing on the smoldering issue. A word about rule review. And again, I do thank my colleagues on the right here for raising the issue about rule review and about the need to look for outdated stale obsolete rules. And I think it's a good thing. I think we ought to be addressing and revising standards that maybe don't do the job we've set out to do. But I always want to remind my friends and my colleagues that part of the mandate for rule review is if you find a rule that's on the books that's an inadequate rule, that's an overly weak rule that it is part of our job to upgrade and strengthen the rule. And I hope we never lose sight of that fact as well. Now I'm going to switch gears very quickly. We all want to know what is going on in the agency that pertains to the issues that we care about. And I think we all care about almost all the issues at the commission. But here's a plea that I would have and a question that I've raised with respect to expenditures on certain activities. And this is one where I would like to have a continuing discussion with staff about because what I'd like to see, if possible, is a breakdown of the FTEs and the dollars dedicated to these functions, to the ombudsman, to our voluntary standards coordinator. And within compliance to the FTEs and the dollars dedicated to import activities, to activities related to defects, and activities related to fast track. Now I have mentioned this to Mr. Howell and he has very accurately said sometimes these dollars are so dispersed through the categories it's very difficult to get a clear read about what we're actually spending. But to the extent that we can get this feedback, that I can get this feedback, I would greatly appreciate it. And I will just repeat, ombudsman, voluntary standards coordinator, within compliance, import, within compliance, defects, and within compliance, fast track. And Commissioner Hamlin, just to point of clarification, when you say ombudsman, you mean small business ombudsman? Yes, thank you. Thank you. I don't think we have a large business ombudsman, but the fact is, no, that's a great point. Our ombudsman, the small business ombudsman, has done Yeoman effort in helping large corporations as well. And I think the regulatory robot that he crafted is gonna be accessed as much by many big businesses as they are by small businesses. And I do have one specific question, if I might, if you turn to page 13. And this is just a question that, again, I apologize for not asking when you were sitting in my office. But as I look at the chart on page 13, under resource summary, I see a breakdown in terms of budget dollars, but I don't see a breakdown in terms of the FTEs. It's like 167 lumped. Is it possible to get a breakdown of FTEs dedicated to these activities as well? Or am I missing something very obvious, which I may well be? I can get back to you on the specific question about the breakdown that I can tell you why it's not broken down though. The control totals for the agency, both from a financial and from an HR perspective, are all contained in table two. So table two is what we manage to at a resource control point level. In terms of the breakdown of these, I think it's safe to say yes, we can figure out how many people are working in the lab and we can figure out how many people are working in EPI and give you some sense of the FTEs allocated to these activities, but I need to get back to you on that. I appreciate that. Thank you very much. I don't have any further questions at this point. Thank you, Commissioner Adler. Commissioner Robinson. Thank you. I have several more questions with respect to the organization of the app plan this year and obviously with the concerns being aimed at what's going to happen going forward. But I want to start someplace else because I have not addressed another of my macro concerns. I think it's well for all of us to be reminded of the regulation under which we are operating with respect to the operational plan and I think it's essential that this regulation be followed both in letter and spirit. And I refer and this will not come as a surprise to anyone sitting here because we gave you a heads up that I would be talking about this today. Section 1009.8 is the policy on establishing priorities for commission action. And the pertinent sections are B states, it's a general policy of the commission. The priorities for commission action will be established by a majority vote of its members. The policy will be reflected by both votes on all requests for appropriations and annual operating plan and any revisions thereof. Recognizing that these documents are the result of a lengthy planning process during which many decisions are made that substantially determine the content of the final documents, the chairman shall continually keep the commission apprised of and seek its guidance concerning significant problems, policy questions and alternative solutions throughout the planning cycle leading to the development of budget requests and operating plans. And subpart two of that regulation states, the operating plan shall be as specific as possible with regards to products, groups of products or generic hazards to be addressed. It shall be submitted to the commission for approval at least 30 days prior to the beginning of the fiscal year. First, I would note that the process that we have just been through does not in any way reflect what was clearly anticipated by the statute. And second, I am extremely concerned about the fact that this is being presented to us five months into the fiscal year. To ask questions when you're looking at the up plan that you're seeing for the first time, five months into a fiscal year, about one project taking resources from one project to give to another and be told accurately so that almost half of the money or staff months have already been spent as determined by staff, not the majority of the commission. And what this means is the commissioners authority to set priorities of the agency as directed in our regulations have de facto been delegated to staff. And staff has determined the projects and priorities that will be advanced without a majority of the commissioners having approved. I do not share my fellow commissioners enthusiasm for how well staff may have guessed at our priorities. The point is we had absolutely no input and I heard nothing about the up plan other than when it was supposed to be expected which kept getting put off. And I do not believe that this de facto delegation is appropriate. I've been trying to communicate as I understand other commissioners have for months that it's not necessary for staff to have the exact dollars and cents in our budget to provide us with a proposed operating plan. Indeed, in 2012 we did exactly what I would anticipate should be done. An interim operating plan was approved by the commission that set the priorities understanding that when Congress approved the final number, those numbers might have to be adjusted, but at least the priorities were set through an interim operating plan. I can anticipate several approaches. Certainly the 2012 approach would seem to be most appropriate, but the staff could present the commission with an operating plan conditional upon final funding. I mean, this year the difference between what we asked of 129 million and what we got of 125 million and what actually that four million represented clearly signified that there was absolutely no reason to hold up an interim or proposed operating plan so that we could do our jobs. So I guess my question is, and I guess this is aimed at you, Mr. Hoffman, since you coordinate this, isn't it possible going forward in the next fiscal year for us to receive a timely physical plan, even if it's not within I would prefer it to be according to the regulation within 30 days of, without exact dollar amounts, obviously. But certainly within the first few weeks of the fiscal year, so we don't end up in a situation where we have de facto delegated the authority to allocate resources for almost half the fiscal year. Well, let me say this, so I share your frustration about the plan coming up at this time. So I'll stipulate to the lateness of it. I won't argue that point. The approach that you've laid out in terms of how it was done in 2012 is actually the process that our office has. So I have no objection to us following our own process. In fact, I would note that for the last three years, in fact, we've done it exactly that way. We've been fortunate to have a final appropriation on one of those occasions, but that's the process we tried to follow. This year we worked with the chairman. He had articulated other policy priorities that were outside of EXFM that delayed the presentation of the plan. I was okay with that given some of the budget uncertainty, but I have no objection to trying to bring these forward, assuming that we have the resources and the capacity to do it. Excellent, and I would just say, and obviously I'm not the chair, but I would just say that speaking for myself, I'm repeating what I said, I think this is the most important thing that we do in the course of the year, and sets the roadmap for everything that's being done. So whatever other projects might be going on in my office, we consider this to be the top priority in terms of getting it out in a timely fashion, and I appreciate your willingness to do that. Let me go back, since I have a few minutes remaining, to go back to the organization of this, and I understand what you were saying, Mr. Hoffman, with respect to the resources that were actually expended being so small, but let me just, as I look at Appendix B, there are some classifications that clearly aren't going to be small expenditures, or in the five months when we haven't had an operating plan approved, haven't been small expenditures. I mean, the fireworks regulatory options is one, crib bumpers is one, thalates is one, voluntary standards program coordination is one, and I mean, I'm missing, I mean, for us to be able to look at, and let's go to a specific, crib bumpers, if we want to look at the kind of effort we want to spend at crib bumpers, and the resources we want to allocate, those amounts of resources won't be so small as to be negligible. So I would go back to what I said earlier. For those things that have commission attention, irrespective of whether the resources are small or large, we try to retain them. MIS codes, project codes change every year, so codes get added and deleted, just from an accounting perspective. So if there's a code that we analyzed incorrectly, there would be nothing to preclude us from adding it back to say, well, wait a minute, there's more resources against this than we thought, or this is a higher visibility project than staff appreciated, and in either retaining the code or putting it back. So I don't want to give the impression that this is set in stone, or that these are under my pillow at night, and I'm very, very wedded to it. I think the bigger issue, which I don't think I'm hearing any objection to, is let's just have good data. And whatever number of codes, whether it's hundreds and thousands, or whether it's two or three, so long as we can have good data that we're confident in, that we're confident that our plans align to, I'm for that. So is there any reason for the next OP plan that regardless of codes, because the codes mean something to you that they only mean to me when they're associated with data, obviously. But is there any reason why if you're going to use a larger classification, we can't get specific descriptions of what works being done under that category in the OP plan? And I think that's the intent. For the projects that we consolidated this year, and I'm happy to accept a letter grade of A through F, we tried to describe in that text, we, the collective, we of the agency, what the activities were in those projects that you were losing, that was our intent. If we didn't do a good enough job in that, or there's ones where you thought we could have done better, obviously there's nothing I can do about it now, but give us that feedback. Commissioner Adler always gives me feedback every year on things he wants to see improved, and we try to incorporate that into the next round. It really is an evolving document. Because some of these codes I perfectly well understand, they're not needed anymore, and that makes sense. But when you get into the bigger ones, and I'll tell you another one that caused me concern, I looked at the fact that adult bedrails, for example, the petition, is under older consumer safety hazards, and I know that's referring to the citizens who use adult bedrails, and not to the safety hazards. No comment. But I could see, for example, going forward as our population ages, and as Commissioner Adler's pointed out so frequently, us having many projects that are under that, but what you're saying is that when you present us with the OP plan, you present the specific description of what's being proposed under that general category. Yes, and I personally think that makes more sense, and don't get me wrong, we can have an offline conversation, or we can do it here. I think I have a sense of what would satisfy you in this regard, and I don't think that there's anything that would preclude us to having supplemental information that gets you what you need. I don't wanna be overly esoteric, but I mean, there's nothing that you're saying that I can't envision providing you 80% or more of what you want, either now or in a future iteration of the types of analysis our office does. How about 100%? Want to make sure I know what I'm agreeing to. No, but because I, and it sounds as though you're appreciating my concern. My concern is not micromanaging the accounting department. My concern is making sure that we as commissioners have specificity, not only a general description, but what's being done, and for example, in these subcategories, can we get a percent of the resources under that? For example, if you looked at the fire hazards that I pointed out, fire hazards rulemaking activities, I would guess that a large percent of those seven categories right now is under fireworks regulation, but I would need to know that as a commissioner as to what percentage, not just a description of what's being done, but with some sort of percentage of the resources being allocated there would be, is that making sense? It is, I think I'm saved by the bell, however. Thanks. Thank you, Commissioner Robinson. We'll go another round if you need more time. Can we just get an answer? Oh, I didn't realize. Was there actually a question? There was a question. The question was, can you get that information? Yeah. I think the answer is the way it is designed right now, you would need to work directly with the program manager, in this case, Dr. Borlase. We wouldn't be collecting that information in my office outside of what's been provided in the project description. That's my follow-up. And if I may respond. Yes, please go ahead. You know, we have various ways of developing operating plans, and I hesitate to promise that I'm going to outside of the MIS code to start to plan and maintain documents down to sub-MIS code levels. So I think we can certainly continue to discuss this, but there's an additional effort that may be required there that I think as we have this discussion, we need to all recognize the resources required and the value of expending the resources in that manner. So I'm certainly. Thank you, Mr. Howell. Thank you, Commissioner Robinson. Commissioner Berkel. Thank you. I just want to clarify one point, and that is I can't speak for Commissioner Marahovic, but I'll speak for myself. I'm not advocating for a mandatory standard. I'm advocating for Marty, excuse me, Commissioner Robinson to find insanity, and I think it's time. And it sounds like staff has done a lot of the work and the analysis on TB 117, and on the Smolder and the Open Flame standard. But if they've done some of this analysis and they've thought about TB 117, I would just want to ask you about a briefing package. Would it take a lot of additional resources? I would need to get with Dr. Borlase and his team and have them put together. It would be helpful if you have a particular scope in mind to share that with us so we can ensure that we answer whatever questions it is that you want answered. That will be a significant driver in the amount of resources. We will do that. Thank you. We are considering currently a proposal requiring commission approval for additional caps. And I'm wondering how in the performance goals for compliance as well as communications, how will that affect those metrics? At this point, given if you accept the current estimate of how often one might expect to deal with this situation as it's been proposed, I don't believe at this point in time that the impact on any of our metrics will be significant either on our side. I certainly won't speak for Mr. Wolfson, but within the Office of Compliance, I don't think it's gonna have a big impact. Mr. Wolfson, are you interested in commenting on that? How you think it would affect the metrics for the timing of a press release? I think I like clarification from GC as to whether this is a discussion we can have right now regarding the issue. About a proposal among the commission. So the question for the general counsel, as I understand it, if I may, is that Commissioner Berkel's question went to the hazard classification proposal that's currently before the commission on an internal basis. And is Mr. Wolfson free to get into the potential public aspects of that in terms of budget metrics that appear in the operating plan? Is that correct? I think you can speak generically. Generally speaking, this is the timeframe for press release negotiations. So speaking generally, we've made great progress in the past couple of years in this area. We had a goal last year of 20 days from start to finish of releases. We met that goal, moved it to 19 days for this fiscal year. We are under that goal already. So I see great progress being made among the staffs in my office as well as compliance. And I think that's a good sign of where the regulated community as well like to be able to keep that momentum going. Thank you. Thank you very much. I want to now go, thank you very much. With regards to retailer reporting, where are the resources associated with retailer reporting reflected in the ops plan? At this point in time, those resources are in the OEX management resources. In addition to that, depending upon any future direction that staff may propose and take, we are already process a number of records associated with the current retailer reporting program. So if the way that that program may or may not evolve has no significant impact on the number of records as a way that they're processed, the resources are already present in the operating plan, primarily on both the compliance and the epidemiology side. And can you speak to the amount that's in this ops plan? In a broad way, it has to get you greater detail. I believe that it's probably somewhere in the neighborhood in total of about $350,000. That's a broad number and I need to verify that for you please. Thank you. I'd just have a series of requests that I'll make here and then we could get them going forward. I'd be interested in knowing what the resources have been dedicated to window coverings, both on the compliance side as well as the rulemaking side. And then with regards to test burden reduction, if we could, I'd like to get a status of 2015, how those monies were spent, what the proposal is for the additional million dollars in this ops plan, what is the plan for that million dollars and what have we accomplished in terms of real burden relief for the regulated community? I have a question and I think perhaps Commissioner Adler touched on this a little bit and this is back to the budget issue. So on page two, you'll see the directorate and you see it in terms of budget and you see it in terms of FTEs. For example, compliance receives 363,000 and has 56 FTEs, which amounts to $6,482 per FTE, whereas human resources gets 528,000 and they have 11 FTEs or to make it more personal, finance gets 1.115 and they have 27 FTEs. So it seems that the amount of the budget isn't at all commensurate with or can be, how do you determine that dollar amount in terms of the staff? It's kind of apples and oranges. It's based on the requirements. So let me give you some very specifics and I think it'll be clear. So in compliance, that 360-some-odd thousand dollars is mostly for training. We allocate a set amount per FTE for training. It's actually the same for your staff as it is the same for compliance staff. I don't remember the exact figure off the top of my head but it's in the thousand dollar range and then there's some money for travel. In an office like mine, there's certainly that element of it that there's also the financial system which is about a million dollars. We have outsourcing of our procurements which we do with HHS. There's about $200,000 a year. So it's based on the requirements of the office and what gets funded there and human resources has some outside contracts in terms of all these emails you receive on training today to do whatever that's housed there. So the contract dollars are really based upon what the requirements of the office is. It has really very little relationship to the number of FTE in the office. Okay, so that's not salaries. That's completely separate. You're suggesting it's for training purposes? Well, I'm just, as a for instance, that is one thing that each office has allocated. The salary dollars, if you look on your table too, are on there. It's the 79.7 million and you may say, well, I'd really like to know what the salary is by office. A rough order is about $140,000 to $150,000 per FTE gives you a pretty good sense of what the salary dollars are allocated for each office. Todd, do I have time left? Thank you. So the federal employees are gonna receive a raise at the start of the calendar year 2016. Where is that reflected in the ops plan? It's reflected in that 79.8 million that Jay just referred to. So that reflects the bump up. Okay. And that went into effect the first full pay period in January, so I think the one that ended January 23rd. We haven't yet received what that impact is, the data for that yet. Okay. With regards to mid-year kind of an anticipation of that, we've not been up to full staff. And one of my requests that we can add to the other list is given the number of vacancies, do we have an approximate number in anticipation of the mid-year discussion for an ops plan? What do we think that that number will be? Well, we have been operating below level, so there's likely to be a salary surplus, but given what you just asked about the pay raise and all that, we're uncertain exactly how that's going to impact. So we're gonna start that calculation usually in the end of February, March timeframe and start working on that as we get more refined in our numbers knowing what that actual payroll is. So with the pay increases, do we get additional monies? No, we do not. Okay, so we have not. We have to factor that in, okay. All right. I'm interested to know what the renovation of the hearing room is gonna cost. And my understanding is that's on time. Do you wanna turn right if you wanna turn over? We can get back to you on that. Okay, I would appreciate that. Thank you. And then George, excuse me, Dr. Borlase, with regards to test burn reduction, I'm just reading over. So again, what we have spent the million dollars on how we're gonna spend this other million dollars and what kind of relief we have given and what kind of relief we anticipate giving. Thank you. With regards to security, so we received a million dollars last year for security enhancements. I understand that went to cameras. It went to increased security at the lab. There were a host of things that, so should we be anticipating a million dollars every year to enhance security? Well, I think it's not the gift that keeps on giving. The million dollars, the 700,000 for the IT related cyber items, we'll have to, I'll need to sort out with the CIO at some point what his ongoing need is. But for those things for the building, unfortunately those are largely O&M and those are gonna be repeating costs because it's paying for the actual guard itself is what the increase pays for. My time has expired. Thank you, Commissioner Buerkle. Commissioner Mohorovic? No, I have no further questions, Chairman. Thank you, Commissioner Mohorovic. So I'm pretty sure there are more questions. I certainly have more questions, so we'll go another round. And Dr. Borlase, if you could please rejoin us at the table, I'm sure you're very happy. I wanna go through a series of Office of Hazard Identification and Reduction projects and if you could just give us a sense to the extent that you have it, if not we'll follow up. Fireworks has been raised a number of times and certainly there's, we have the briefing package and then there is a notice of proposed rulemaking that's contemplated by the staff should the commission approve the operating plan. Can you just give me your sense? Do you feel from your perspective that what the staff is proposing if we were to adopt it or at least propose it in an NPR, does that materially affect the safety of fireworks or do you feel it goes more toward and I'm not putting a value judgment on this, but more toward quote unquote cleaning up the rule but not really affecting the underlying product. Do you have a sense of that? From staff's perspective, we don't view that there are definitive impacts on safety. I think definitive perhaps still being somewhat relative. It is in the rule review category from staff's approach on it which is there are a number of existing regulations. Let's review them. Okay, so does that mean that the staff is still determining whether there are safety impacts or you feel like that determination has been already been made and communicated to us? From staff's perspective, I think the determination at least that with respect to the safety that this current level of safety is being maintained, I think both in the briefing package, staff was able to lay that out in that. So we're not looking at it as a decrease in safety but as we also don't see it as a definitive increase in safety. Okay, that helps. And Mr. Hall. If I may, Chairman. And I think we're kind of getting hung up on this definitive work. Certainly staff believes that there was no reduction in safety from their proposal. Bless you. For example, while the clarification on the audible effect that ties to the metal powders, arguably that creates a greater focus on manufacturing quality. But it certainly is not gonna have an adverse effect on safety if indeed we move forward and put performance standards in place that tend to improve the quality. Where if one views that a lack of that quality control can contribute to potentially hazardous products that get out in the marketplace. So we're not able to clearly define it but certainly we believe that we have at least maintained the level of quality and perhaps improved it. Okay, and then following up on that, Mr. Hall, does that, or what does that mean in terms of whether staff is comfortable if the commission were to pick and choose aspects of that package or is staff believed to achieve what you're talking about, that it's preferable from staff's perspective to adopt the entire proposal? Certainly as staff made their proposal, they were anticipating that the commission would direct them to address all the factors that were identified. If there is some rationale behind picking and choosing and it's one that perhaps there's a belief that if we reduce the scope by half, we can reduce the time in half. I'm not sure that you can, there's direct correlation there and certainly I believe if the commission has something in mind at addressing a portion of staff's proposal than the full, we can certainly take a step back and do a resource assessment and present that data to the commission for their consideration. Well, I don't wanna speak for the other commissioners but my sense of it is that everyone has an interest in the audible effect portion being enhanced and beyond that though, there's a question as to cost benefit of doing the rest of the work and I think we'll have different views on that but that'll be a discussion to continue. And certainly if one of the intent of rule review is in addition to maintaining or improving safety is one of reducing burden and aligning, if you will. So, I would certainly encourage the commission to look at the briefing package in that broader context as they make their direction. Thank you for that. And Dr. Borlase, section 104, as you're very familiar with of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act requires the commission to promulgate on a regular basis durable infant products, related regulations or at least to take the voluntary standard and either enhance it or adopt it. We have been at this for a number of years now where are we in terms of finishing the list and will we see at least from the mechanical engineering perspective in particular, will there be a freeing up of resources at some point where we feel like the 104s evolved as we call them, the 104s have been addressed. We continue to take in as ASTM updates them and process those updates but we'll at least on the base list and will that yield some type of savings in terms of staff resources at some point? Yes, so based on the plan that's in FY16, the operating plan plus the FY17 performance budget request, we do project completing with final rules all of the section 104 rule makings then in fiscal year 2018 is the current plan. So clearly we've got a robust list of 104s in 2016. We had a robust list of 104s in the 2017 performance budget request. Those NPRs that are in 2017 were envisioning are basically the last set of NPRs which would be final rule in 2018. God, and nothing from what I'm saying should staff take that these are our priorities. They should be their congressional mandate and we should continue to make them a top priority but I am looking forward to as I'm sure you are having the available mechanical engineering staff in particular for other projects. Two petitions that I wanna mention quickly and it looks like I still have time. The supplemental mattress petition, clearly an ongoing hazard. It presents a difficult issue as far as I've been made aware of it of trying to find the right thickness and it probably has some relationship to bumpers and I'm wondering is there some crossover in the work that we'll do on bumpers and the information that we'll receive that will help inform the staff on supplemental mattresses. I know when the staff's going through the petition for the supplemental mattresses, they're up there at NPTAC and they're working with all of the same people. We don't have much of a bench on many of these products to have other people working on other projects so it's a lot of crossover between the teams even in the same division so that if there's a common theme between the two, we're also making sure that the project reviews for example that those themes are getting picked up and applying between them. Great and will I understand it or do I understand it that if there is something that's identified that the voluntary standards remain an option for taking that to try to improve it through that vehicle? Oh absolutely, on the petition side, crib bumper side as a specific question. Either of them, yes. And then we had an incredibly informative hearing a few months ago on organohalogens, flame retardants and a petition that's in front of us. Can you give me a sense please as to what kind of work product will we see? Clearly it's a briefing package but what can we expect to see from the staff in terms of work going forward on organohalogens during this fiscal year? What do you envision? In the petition package I think a lot of the staff focus is related to the same themes in terms of informing the commission on the petition and our recommendations the same themes that came up in the hearing with respect to the class for example as one of the things. One of the things that they do have to look at as part of the petition and the recommendations is implications of path forward to CHAP for example if that was the path forward on the commission just making sure what we as staff are laying out are here's the bill in the future depending on which way the commission is. You give us a robust sense of what the options are and the costs and other aspects associated with that. Correct. Okay and then the other topic which relates to chemical exposure that I wanna raise from Mr. Howell or Dr. Borla she can jump into if in theory there were to be an interagency task force on crumb rubber and the potential risks associated with children exposure for artificial turf and playgrounds. Do you, is it contemplated within the proposed operating plan that we would be able to provide some support to that effort? Certainly if the opportunity presented itself to participate at some level with other federal partners on an area of interest to the commission. Once again under the emerging hazards category I would think something like crumb rubber is easily identified as an emerging hazard and would provided resources were available would be allocated from that pot. So you're at least aware of that potential contingency and planning for it as I understand it? As I mentioned earlier knowing that you need to plan for the unexpected we have set some resources aside for those type of things. Okay, great. Thank you. Commissioner Adler. Thank you very much. We're talking about an operating plan. I'm always reminded of what that great philosopher Mike Tyson said about plans which is everybody has a plan until I hit him in the face and the implication of that is and what drives it home for me is that we're doing a snapshot five months into the year but a lot of these projects are going to evolve and morph and mutate over time. And so one of the things I think I like about the more streamlined approach is that it may build an additional flexibility for us as events unfold to be able to reallocate dollars within these categories. And Mr. Howe, I just wanted to ask you, do you feel that the streamlined approaches will give you that degree of flexibility that you might feel otherwise constrained about? Yeah, let me share my professional opinion. That's what we like. The greater the level of detail, the more finely that we attempt to define staff work, the less flexibility we have without coming back before the commission for a vote on a change. It is helpful for the commission in a broad way to identify their objectives either as detailed or as broad, for example, we would like to see the risk associated with fire hazards reduced. Staff, we don't care how you do it. We have a couple of thoughts, but in general, we want more resources allocated here. We think they can come from this category here. If you think, we have six paths that are based on hazard groups. Certainly the commission has expressed a desire to provide direction at a much more granular level, but it does create some challenges for staff. So I think if we can find some approach in the middle that allows the commission enough information that they can see what's going on, but enough flexibility on staff's part to react as new things happen, it would be helpful. Yeah, and just an observation about that, as I was looking through these topics that are going to be consolidated, I'm sure that I and I'm sure my colleagues are not going to say, well, tell me about MIS code fire hazards. I'm going to walk in and say, what the hell is happening on upholstered furniture? What's happening on bedrails? What's happening on these various things? So the questions to you and to staff are not going to cease simply because we're revising our MIS codes. If I may suggest that, you know, the commission is primarily interested in the deliverable, the outcome. You are dependent and should be on staff understanding what kind of resources it takes to get there and not over-promising. So for example, the mandatory standards table should tell you, what is it the staff is proposing to deliver to the commission in this year? And if I don't see something I want, then that's brought up. Once I make that commitment that I'm going to deliver it, how I'm going to deliver in the resources required, I need the flexibility to be able to pull those around within that year to make sure that I fulfill my obligations to the commission. I want to change subjects for just one second because I wanted to associate myself with the question that the chairman asked about the fireworks rule. And I thought you phrased it exactly the way I would phrase it. The big issue, as I see it, is the audible effects test. And to the extent that staff can come back and tell us that it may not be the cleanest and best approach to doing it, but it will really solve what is the safety and hazard issue, then I think I would be more inclined to say let's do it in a way that we can do it in a more efficient manner so that we can dedicate those precious resources to other sorts of hazards. So I look forward to any feedback you can give to the commission. And I did want to give Commissioner Mohorovic a nod because this was an issue that he had raised that I thought was a very thoughtful approach and in his typical thoughtful fashion. So I at least would want to hear that kind of feedback. Certainly if I can caution the commission, we've gone down this path before where we did rule reviews and never took it to the point of actually putting a change before the commission to vote on. And so what we had for many, many years was staff resources being spent on a comprehensive rule review and a report and no change to the rule taking place afterwards. The longer I wait after I do that rule, the more dated the material becomes and the less useful it becomes. So my suggestion would be that if we're going to do a rule review, we move it quickly from rule review to any proposed rule that the commission wishes to consider. Certainly if the commission wishes to pull off part of this, that's certainly within your right to do so. But I think we need to be clear that if we walk away from the rest of it, that the longer we wait, the less useful that work becomes. That's a point well taken. And I think you have just made Commissioner Mohorovic very happy with that response. Let him speak for himself. Thank you all. Thank you, Commissioner Adler. Commissioner Robinson. Thank you. Let me first say that I brag on the staff of this agency all the time. I mean, you guys make me proud all the time to be a part of this. And I know that we're sitting here with some of the hardest workers of the agency and nothing that I'm raising by way of concern as my role as a commissioner has anything to do with anyone sitting in front of me. I think it's very important and I say this often that we all remember our roles. I mean, one of my favorite quotes that I have used so often came from a federal judge who said to me that the only reason the system of justice works is if everyone in the courtroom remembers their role. The judge can't be the plaintiff's lawyer. The plaintiff's lawyer can't be the defense lawyer. But he has to play their role. So my concerns that I at least I think are being misunderstood by Commissioner Adler are not with respect to anything other than me doing what I should do as a commissioner. And I only speak for myself. The ultimate flexibility obviously to staff would be to just give you the assignment to protect the public from unreasonably dangerous products. Obviously we have a role in setting priorities and my concern about timing and the descriptions being specific enough not to invite questions later on. We'll all do that. But in terms of setting our priority for this very, very important operational plan is something that's where my concerns are. But I would just like to close by saying that I am very pleased at the exchange that we've had today with Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Baker, Mr. Howell. I think that you guys very much get my concerns with respect to both the timing and the fact that we're almost halfway into the fiscal year without us having had any input. And the fact that a majority of the commissioners are supposed to be the one to approve this. And I think you get my concerns about the specificity in the plan. And I'm not aware of any plan under the old codes. I mean, problems, rather, under the old codes. I've only been here two and a half years getting close to three. But nobody's ever come to me as a commissioner and asked for approval for a change because the projects in the op plan were too specific. So they needed to change resources. I think we have, under the old codes, been general enough that those flexibilities have been there. That having been said, I fully appreciate the concerns that both Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Howell have expressed with respect to efficiencies. And I very much look forward to further discussions in brainstorming with your offices and hopefully with the other commissioners and the chair to make sure that we're getting the best descriptions, both for efficiencies for your offices and for this agency and for us as commissioners to be able to do our job in terms of setting priorities. And I just want you to know that I'm committed very much to getting this right. And I look forward to working with you. And thank you again for all of the effort that went into this. I know it was huge amount of work. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Robins and Commissioner Berkel. Thank you very much. Mr. Hoffman, if you could do me a favor. You mentioned training being a part of what factors into that number, and not now, but at a future date. Could you provide me with the other factors that affect that FTE, that number we talked about? I might make myself clear. So I asked you, why is there a discrepancy? You said apples and oranges. You said one of the reasons is the training. And then you said they're among other factors. If you could just educate me on that another time. Fair enough. Why don't I come and see you and we can talk through. And then the other question I kind of have is because you mentioned in your budget, your IT, your technology is included in your budget. But sometimes it's included under IT's budget. Not yours, but some other pieces of IT. And I'm trying to understand why. Is it all in one place? Is it divided up? Some are in their own budget, in a department's own budget, versus just in the general IT budget? And how we distinguish that, I would appreciate that as well. Yes, yeah. Dr. Borlase, with regards to what was mentioned early in the briefing on ROVs and the discontinuance of any mandatory standards. Do we anticipate how many staff months, hours will be saved because we are not working on the mandatory standard for ROVs? Oh, from the planning perspective, I'd have to go back and look and see if we've got from the planning. I mean, what we made sure of is that by January 15, when this came up to the commission, we've got on that day the resources from all the different directorates to support what we're proposing, which is a briefing package to the commission as one of the milestones, evaluating the effectiveness of the voluntary standard. OK, so you'll get me that information. I want to go back to my topic of burden reduction, test burden reduction. And I want to mention it just in light of what you said. And I mean, my personal feeling is that the agency has moved at a snail's pace on test burden reduction and actually providing relief. You just mentioned a robust 104 rulemaking that we anticipate through 2018. And I wanted everyone, and I know you are aware of this, but every time those, and it isn't something we do, it's something Congress requires us to do. But every time a 104 becomes a mandatory rule, we then add another layer of test burden requirements and test burden to these regulated companies. And so I just want to call it, let's be aware of that. I mean, and maybe be a little more aggressive. We're getting money to do test burden reduction. And I think it's so important that we commit to it and we see some results. And so I look forward to getting your analysis at the end of this. And I have one other question under test burden reduction. You mentioned that staff will continue to work on advancing the state of technology for the FTIR for Thal 8 testing. Can you, and again with some of the other information I've asked for, can you provide me with how much we've spent to date? And then an explanation as to why do we consider that development of that technology burden reduction? Sure. We'll get you the exact numbers. I can say at a high level, our approach to it is that we know from industry feedback or on research that the cost of Thal 8 testing is really the one of the big issues that feed into the cost of the third party testing. I'm sorry, but getting our lab, we're going to have Commissioner Mohorovic answer the question for me. So the FTIR effort at a higher level is looking at alternate technologies that would reduce or potentially reduce the cost of the testing perhaps by a screening method such that we could determine with better accuracy plastics that have one of whichever band thallate it is, such that we could screen out immediately, perhaps ones that don't have the band thallate, so they don't have to do the testing at all. That's at a higher level the approach with the FTIR. That's the rationale. And I think that's all for you, Dr. Burlase. I'm now to IT, and I guess that's Duane is back. On page 42 of the breakdown of IT and specifically under the RAM, it discusses providing a system to identify hazard trends quickly, or an early warning system, so to speak. And it will enable more rapid and increased dissemination of information. Is that something new? Is that something we're adding? Is it something that currently exists, but it's referred to as an early warning system? No, we have been working on various stages of an early warning system actually dating back before the CPSIA. It really started with a lot of the CRIB accidents that we were seeing and really started with, and a consolidated spreadsheet trying to get our hands around where were all these injuries and deaths occurring, what was a common theme. And then from there, it moved to can we put this into a system as opposed to this spreadsheet and what I'll say is a more manual process. That ultimately evolved into what we now call CPSRMS, the bigger system that we got the money through the CPSIA and that allowed us to invest into those systems that ultimately led to that. But we still use a lot of those terms dating back the early warning system. What I will say, it's been an evolving process. We're not, RMS isn't done. I don't want to give the impression that we've solved it all. We still are looking at better ways to try to predict or get an early indication when we're seeing those trends where it's one or two as opposed to a whole bunch piling up. And so we've got activities trying to improve that as far as that technology goes. But it's still an ongoing process. OK, and we can chat about that offline here. But so you're saying it's a technology that allows you to look across CPMRS, and I think I use those, and assess information coming into the, or is it just with regards to saverproducts.gov? It's just incident data. And it's regardless of the source of the incident data, whether it was eligible for publication in the database or not, it's looking at incoming incident data from whatever source we get it and then trying to pick up any trends or factors that would cause us to investigate further. So I guess I'm thinking, and I haven't thought this through, and I haven't asked the question, but why can't that technology be applied to retailer reporting? That's incident data coming into the agency to look at trends. It actually is now those reports, what I'll call the status quo retailer reporting, to the extent that we still get those reports and they're fed into RMS, that is part of that system. So I view retailer reporting as a data source, an additional data source that we currently use within RMS, but it exists now. Thank you. Back to human, thank you very much. With regards to human resources, because I didn't see, where's Jonathan Throne's budget? It's in the same line item. In HR? Yes, ma'am. I apologize, I do have one more question. With regards to the three exit milestones on page 43, can you, not now, but break down the cost of those three projects for us? Sure, this is VDI, FISMA, and the privileged user. Yes, absolutely. That would be helpful. Thank you. And I think I'm almost out of time, so I'll squeeze in one more question for Mr. Howell. You, early in this briefing, you mentioned about a change in activities, you changed the definition of active participation. Did that have anything to do with the recent 1031, or was that prior to 1031? And do you think that 1031 will affect that number and that participation, that definition? This actually happened prior to. It really is just deciding how we're going to count the numbers and what becomes relevant. I don't see the Commission direction on 1031 having any impact on how we define active participation. OK, thank you. And I will just end on a note that Commissioner Robinson brought up, and that is the statute and the regulations, which make it clear to all of us when this information should get to the commissioners. And I think as an agency, we hold the regulated community, and we hold stakeholders very accountable, both to the statute and the regulations. And I think we should hold ourselves to that same standard. So I look forward to more timely, and I know the limitations we have because of the Hill, but more timely discussions and operating plans. And I think the key in all of this, and it talks about ongoing dialogue, that information ongoing rather than just in one bolus. So I think having that and all of us being aware of that will enhance, certainly enhance, our knowledge and our role as commissioners. I thank you all very much for your time today. Thank you, Commissioner Buerkle, Commissioner Marovic. Anything else, no? Commissioner, is anything else? We're good, OK. Thank you very much to the staff, to Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Baker, Mr. Howell, Mr. Ray, to Mr. Wolfson, if he's still in the room, doesn't look like he is. He wisely ran out, Dr. Borlase, and to our general counsel for her cameo. Very much appreciate it. A lot of work goes into it. We will spend the next two weeks deliberating and resume here in two weeks for those who are watching. This is not our normal hearing room. We hope to not be here much longer, but we're grateful for the staff that has worked to make sure that we can be in this room. So thank you again for those who have attended, for those who are watching online. This concludes this public meeting of the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission.