To Whom it Will Concern:

Thank you for the opportunity to provide comment on the proposed heat illness regulations to be written through the Safety and Health Codes Board. The Virginia Restaurant Lodging and Travel Association is Virginia’s unified trade association for the restaurant, hotel lodging, attraction, campground, and tourism development industries and our suppliers. Our industries support over 36 billion dollars in visitor spending, and over 231,000 jobs across the Commonwealth. Many of these roles bring employees into contact with hot conditions, and our industries have sought to be leaders in protecting our employees from the dangers of heat illness.

Virginia’s hospitality industries are among its most labor intensive, and we urge the Board to protect employers’ ability to respond to their own worksite needs in the most appropriate ways for their particular situations, and avoid creating overly broad standards that may not reflect the spectrum of different working requirements.

Flexibility

VRLTA urges the Department and the eventual RAP to protect the spectrum of approaches that will be required for different industries, which face wildly different environmental conditions. An appropriate rule for a line cook in a working kitchen will not be easy to apply to a hiking guide on a mountain or a ride attendant at an amusement park. All of these employees face differing levels of heat, durations in that heat, and heat that is produced from different sources and distributed in different spaces. Additionally, regulations should account for the fact that a break from these conditions may not require leaving the working premises, as a lower-temperature environment may be close at-hand in a kitchen in the form of the front-of-the-house or the walk-in refrigerator.

The nature and physical demands of the work are particularly important. An employee performing sedentary work, an employee engaged in strenuous manual labor, and an employee working in close proximity to a high-temperature equipment like commercial cooking tools may experience materially different levels of heat stress even under similar general temperature conditions.

The regulation should account for actual workplace conditions rather than rely on broad classifications based on industry, occupation, or whether work is performed indoors or outdoors. Relevant factors include workload, duration and frequency of exposure, available controls, and other workplace conditions.

Exposure duration also warrants particular consideration. The General Assembly recognized its significance by requiring an exemption for heat exposure lasting no longer than 15 consecutive minutes. The regulation should likewise distinguish among short-duration, intermittent, and sustained exposures when determining how particular requirements apply.

Recognizing Heat Produced and Handled Appropriately

Particularly in restaurant kitchens, conditions around the stove, ovens, and other cooking equipment are necessarily at an elevated temperature due to the operation of those devices to properly cook food. While the temperature in one area of a kitchen may be high due to this and other factors, any proposed regulation should be focused on the ambient temperature in the entire working kitchen, rather than the heat that is necessarily produced and then ventilated by those devices.

Coordinate Virginia's Rulemaking with Federal OSHA

The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is already working on a comprehensive Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings standard. OSHA’s proposal addresses many of the same subjects Virginia is required to address, and its informal public hearing and post-hearing comment period concluded in 2025. The General Assembly expressly directed the Board to consider standards developed by OSHA, and the Board has until May 1, 2028, to adopt Virginia’s regulation. The Board should closely monitor the federal rulemaking before adopting substantially overlapping requirements. Virginia’s hospitality industries should not be required to develop compliance programs around one set of requirements only to modify those programs shortly thereafter in response to any final federal standard. Where Virginia considers requirements that exceed, materially differ from, or add to the eventual federal standard, those requirements should be supported by evidence demonstrating the need for a different approach in the Commonwealth.

Establish Workable Temperature Thresholds

Earlier drafts of the legislation that became Chapters 731 and 732 made specific reference to an 80-degree Fahrenheit threshold. This language was appropriately dropped from the enacted legislation, and we respectfully urge the Board and Department to not resurrect the idea through regulation. In the Commonwealth, 80 degrees Fahrenheit is not an unusual nor elevated condition, but rather a typical afternoon temperature across most of the Commonwealth for many months of the year. Establishing a threshold at that temperature would therefore effectively establish a continuous obligation for any employer with outdoor or non-climate-controlled indoor operations for nearly half the year, an outcome which would be at odds with the contemplated two-tier structure. Moreover, while Chapters 731 and 732 require standards for both indoor and outdoor work, the conditions are materially different and we respectfully urge the Board and Department to recognize those differences in the regulations to be developed.

Indoor work is necessarily different in kind from outdoor work, whether the work occurs in a climate-controlled environment or otherwise. We respectfully urge the Department to establish distinct standards for indoor work, focusing particularly on functional climate control (where feasible), break access, and appropriate training, developed by the Department or another independent source and provided at no cost to the employer, to recognize symptoms.