GM Workers Pleading for Their Jobs : Air Panel Recesses With No Decision on Paint Odor

General Motors workers continued pleading for their jobs during the second day of a public hearing Thursday, but an air-quality panel recessed without deciding what to do about continuing complaints of offensive odors from the GM plant in Van Nuys.

After the hearing, which is scheduled to resume Dec. 2, the South Coast Air Quality Management District hearing board will decide whether to modify an abatement order it issued to GM in October. The order raised penalties for odor violations and imposed deadlines on GM for curbing odor problems caused by its recent shift to a new auto-painting process.

Air-district staff members and GM lawyers, agreeing that the company has reduced but not eliminated odors in a neighborhood downwind of the plant, asked Wednesday that the board approve a modified order requiring further remedial steps. However, the hearing board put off deliberation on the proposed agreement in order to hear testimony from people who trooped to the microphone Wednesday and Thursday.

Most were GM suppliers, small businessmen near the sprawling auto assembly plant at 8000 Van Nuys Blvd. or GM workers.

Bill DeWitt, mayor of South Gate, testified about the economic distress in his city when GM closed its assembly plant there in 1982.

More than 20 people living near the plant, including GM workers and some who said they had no affiliation with the company, told the hearing board that the odor has been slight or non-existent since GM began taking corrective steps.

Some GM workers were excused from their shifts to testify, and GM wrote to suppliers and area chambers of commerce to warn that unfavorable action by the hearing board could lead to a plant shutdown.

Outside the El Monte hearing room Thursday, Robert Brown, one of the badly outnumbered GM critics, accused the company of throwing “thousands of people into a panic” by wrongly insinuating that the air district and people troubled by odors want to see the plant closed.

Linda Culver, who lives just north of the plant, told the hearing board that petitions submitted to the panel showed that those disturbed by the odors “are not just a mere handful.” She said more than 100 people signed the petitions, which state that, despite recent efforts by GM, the “odors are at times so strong that they . . . seriously disrupt my normal daily activities.”

GM officials and technical experts for the company and air district will testify when the hearing resumes.

GM says it has spent about $17.5 million to reduce odors caused by the switch in August to a process called base coat/clear coat painting. The process gives cars a more lustrous shine but smells worse than other painting methods.

To cope with the odor problem, GM has raised vent stacks on its roof and installed incinerators on drying ovens to burn fumes from freshly painted cars. The company also has begun altering the chemical makeup of paints and primers--a process that would be accelerated under the proposed new order the company negotiated with air-district staff.

Although cast as a heavy in the case by many GM supporters, the air district actually paved the way for the switch to the new painting method last year by amending a key regulation at GM’s request. The regulation dealt not with odors but with solvent emissions from paint, which help cause ozone pollution.

The base coat/clear coat process, which GM officials said they adopted to stay competitive, creates more solvent vapors than the plant’s previous painting method.

The hearing does not affect resolution of 21 odor-violation notices and seven other citations air-district inspectors have issued GM since August. Some of the alleged violations carry maximum penalties of $1,000; others are punishable by fines of up to $6,000.

GM also faces possible legal action on two other fronts. A prosecutor in the Los Angeles city attorney’s office said the city probably will bring criminal charges against GM because of the odor.

And, in a matter not related to the odor, the Environmental Protection Agency is considering court action over GM’s alleged failure to meet solvent-emission limits in its painting operation. The federal agency issued GM a notice of violation in July.

The Van Nuys plant employs about 5,000. It is one of two GM plants that produce Firebirds and Camaros.