On June 20, APGA held a webinar for its members to provide an overview of APGA’s legislative and regulatory activities in 2019. The webinar was presented by Dave Schryver, APGA’s Executive Vice President, Doug MacGillivray and Stuart Saulters, Directors of Government Affairs. During the webinar, there was an overview of the activities of the 116th Congress and a discussion of some of the activities, such as providing funding for the federal government and raising the debt limit, that Congress will be forced to act on when it returns from its August recess, which ends on September 9.
Dave, Stuart and Doug discussed a number of legislative items that APGA has been engaged including pipeline safety legislation, energy efficiency legislation, natural gas vehicle tax credits and infrastructure legislation. On the regulatory side, Dave discussed, among other things, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) proposed revisions to the Process Rule. The Process Rule addresses the procedures and policies that guide DOE in establishing new or amended energy-efficiency standards. Dave also discussed the comments that APGA filed earlier in the year with the Prudential Regulators (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System) in response to a proposed rulemaking that would implement a new approach for calculating the exposure amount of derivative contracts under the agencies' regulatory capital rule. The technical changes being proposed would require banking institutions to hold much more capital for natural gas swaps, which would result in higher costs that would be imposed on a swap or energy swap transactions.
A recording of the webinar will be available on the APGA website at
www.apga.org/webinars. APGA holds these webinars twice a year, an end of the year webinar will be held in December. For questions on this article, please contact Dave Schryver of APGA staff by phone at 202-464-2742 or by email at
dschryver@apga.org.