As a courtesy to our audience, Maritime Commons will provide a daily compilation of nationally-relevant Federal Register Notices. To provide comments for the public record, follow the Federal Register link for each individual notice. Please note, the Coast Guard cannot respond to comments on these notices outside of the Federal Register.

Note: The below post has been updated to reflect the updated Federal Register notice regarding the updated comment period end date.

The Coast Guard published a notice reopening the public comment period for the notice of proposed rulemaking entitled “Seafarers’ Access to Maritime Facilities,” which published in the Federal Register on Dec. 29, 2014.

The notice proposed to require each owner or operator of a facility regulated by the Coast Guard to implement a system that provides seafarers and other individuals with access between vessels moored at the facility and the facility gate, in a timely manner and at no cost to the seafarer or other individual.

The original comment period closed on Feb. 27, 2015. Several members of the public have requested additional time to comment on the proposed rule, citing various timing constraints.

In order to provide interested members of the public an additional opportunity to submit comments, the Coast Guard is reopening the public comment period for 60 days. The Coast Guard is particularly interested in comments on our estimate that there is a 10.3 percent non-compliance rate of facilities with respect to providing seafarers’ access.

In addition to comments on this topic, we will consider all public comments received during the reopened comment period.

To be considered, comments and any related material must be submitted prior to July 27, 2015.

For further details, please view the entire Federal Register notice.

This blog is not a replacement or substitute for the formal posting of regulations and updates or existing processes for receiving formal feedback of the same. Links provided on this blog will direct the reader to official source documents, such as the Federal Register, Homeport and the Code of Federal Regulations. These documents remain the official source for regulatory information published by the Coast Guard.