California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) has extended the public comment period for the proposed amendments to their “short-form” Proposition 65 “safe harbor” warning regulations in response to a request from the California Chamber of Commerce. OEHHA’s proposed amendments change existing provisions addressing label size, catalog and internet warnings, and other issues (see here for our earlier summary report). Due in part to the intervening holidays, OEHHA now must receive comments on the proposed modifications by January 21, 2022.
Once finalized, the new regulations would become operative one year after the effective date of the amendments. OEHHA believes that is sufficient time to allow stakeholders to continue using the current short-form warning until such effective date. OEHHA also proposed last year to allow an “unlimited sell through period for products that had compliant warnings when they were manufactured, thus allowing businesses to avoid recalling items in the stream of commerce to apply the modified short-form warning.”
Stakeholders will have a small window of time to react if and (more likely) when the amendments are adopted. However, the best opportunity is now for providing input to OEHHA – particularly on issues such as a more reasonable transition time to implement new warnings. There is no guarantee that OEHHA will seek any further comments, so we recommend providing input before the January deadline.