Soot on White Gloves

Four outside groups are about to give Southern California’s chief air-pollution-control agency an old-fashioned white-gloves inspection. A lot of soot is bound to rub off on those white gloves.

If today’s control techniques are not changed, it will take just four years for average levels of smog that have been falling recently to start rising again under the relentless pressure of growth in population, and hence growth in automobiles and other producers of air pollution. Southern California needs to know as soon as possible what can be done about it.

One study of the South Coast Air Quality Management District will be conducted by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. As Times writer Larry B. Stammer reported this week, the agency wants to know, among other things, why 17 pollution-control strategies that the district promised in 1982 still are not in effect. One thing that makes Washington wonder about the district is the way the federal agency had to override the local pollution controllers to get tighter controls over vapors from paint that help create smog.

The General Accounting Office, which is the investigative branch of Congress, will examine smog-control agencies in Houston, Los Angeles and Charlotte, N.C., to determine what, if anything, can be done to get the air in those areas clean enough to meet federal standards. The South Coast district has said all along that even if it complies in full with its own long-range plan, and so far it does not, it could not meet federal standards until after the turn of the century--if then.

The other two studies will be done by the Air Resources Board, the lead state agency in pollution control, and Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside), who will have what may be the most interesting questions of all.

Like the others, Presley and his budget subcommittee will be asking what the district is doing to fight smog and how well it does it, but he also wants to look at the structure of the district board of directors.

That will get Presley into the crucial question of accountability in an effort that by its very nature drags on with little tangible evidence that work is being done well or at all at the end of any one year. At the district, adopting rules and enforcing them is done outside the mainstream of day-by-day public concern. And it is done mostly by gaining legal ground inch by inch against polluters who oppose tougher controls. Jobs like that breed the worst traits of bureaucracy unless someone is in charge to stir things up. Elected officials have periodic elections to prod them into making things run smoothly enough to keep voters happy. But the elected officials who are accountable for the air quality district appoint representatives who keep them at arm’s length from bad news about, and accountability for, smog.

Perhaps the agency is structured as well as it can be. But it has been a long time since anyone even asked whether that is the case. And it may well be that Presley will be rubbing his white gloves over the area that has really accumulated soot.