Increase in Population Expected to Erase Clean Air Gains

The South Coast Air Basin, which has made slow but steady gains in the fight against smog over the past decade, will begin to lose ground in the early 1990s unless stringent new controls are imposed to keep pace with higher than anticipated population growth, according to air quality officials.

As recently as four years ago it was thought that air quality gains would not be reversed until sometime in the mid-1990s in the South Coast Basin, which includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Now, however, newly revised population projections call for 16.4 million people by the year 2000 in the region instead of 14.8 million, and some federal and regional officials fear that air quality could begin to deteriorate several years earlier than previously anticipated.

David P. Howekamp, director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s western regional air management division, said the new population projections will move forward the date that the area can expect to begin losing ground again in the smog battle. Indeed, Howekamp questioned whether even tougher controls will hold the line against increasingly unhealthful air.

“No matter what we do in this program, or anything else that will be devised, I wonder if we can keep up. It’s kind of frightening,” Howekamp said.

The EPA is scheduled to begin hearings today in Los Angeles on a developing an air pollution control strategy that would require the state’s four smoggiest areas to impose additional limits on air pollution emissions beyond those already approved by the EPA.

The additional controls are being sought because the four areas--the South Coast Air Basin, the Sacramento Air Quality Maintenance Area, and Ventura and Fresno counties--have acknowledged that they will not meet the federal Clean Air Act’s December, 1987, ambient air standard for ozone. Ozone accounts for 95% of what is commonly known as smog and has been shown to aggravate respiratory diseases, impair lung capacity in even healthy individuals who exercise heavily, and reduce immunity in animals.

The evolving program is known as the reasonable extra efforts program or REEP, and developments here are being closely watched across the nation. It has already come under fire from some quarters in Congress, including Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee who has questioned EPA’s authority for embarking on the program.

However, EPA Administrator Lee F. Thomas has encouraged the California effort. If the REEP program works in California, EPA officials said it could become the forerunner for a new national air quality policy for other cities that also fail to meet the 1987 deadline for complying with the ambient air standard for ozone.

The hearing is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. in Room 1138 of the State Office Building, 107 S. Broadway. A second session is planned at 7 p.m. Testimony is expected from environmental groups as well as representatives of the oil industry and automobile manufacturers, who could have a major economic stake in how the new program is shaped.

Over the past two decades, there have been steady gains in air quality as federal, state and local air pollution authorities have imposed increased controls on air emissions, such as the state’s Smog Check vehicle inspection and maintenance program, controls on stationary sources such as heaters and boilers at oil refineries, and limits on the growth of new sources of pollution.

Despite these efforts, however, air quality authorities have long known that at some point the pollution generated by the growing population would override these technological fixes.

“Ninety new cars don’t put out any more pollution than 10 old cars. But, eventually we’re going to find ourselves with 100 new cars,” said Mildred Yamada, a senior planner with the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

The Southern California Assn. of Governments, which developed the population projections, is in the midst of estimating the impact on air quality of the apparent acceleration in population growth.

‘Educated Guess’

But, Yamada ventured “strictly a qualified, educated guess” that a reversal in air quality gains could occur “one or two years earlier” than the mid-1990 prediction.

The burgeoning population has compounded an already difficult--some would say impossible--task for the South Coast Air Basin to meet federal Clean Air Act requirements. The inability to meet those requirements has also presented the EPA with a regulatory dilemma.

The act requires that all areas of the nation comply with federal ambient air standards for ozone (.12 parts of ozone for every million parts of air over a one-hour average) and carbon monoxide (9.3 parts of carbon monoxide per million parts of air over an eight-hour average) by December, 1987. Unless they do, the act explicitly calls for the imposition of economic sanctions, such as a cutoff of federal highway funds, and federal preemption of state and local air pollution control authority.

Ozone concentrations in the South Coast Basin are the highest in the nation--on the smoggiest days three times greater than the standard allows. In 1984--the last year for which figures are available--carbon monoxide levels averaged 15.7 parts per million. The basin is not expected to meet the carbon monoxide standard until the year 2000.

But, while the Clean Air Act specifically would impose sanctions on those areas that failed to try to meet the standard, the law did not make an exception for those areas that tried but failed.

For the past several years, the EPA has attempted to develop REEP as an alternative that recognizes that fact. Under the REEP approach, the federal deadlines--and the threatened sanctions--would be waived so long as the urban areas made “reasonable extra efforts” to improve air quality beyond emission controls already approved by the EPA.

There are two issues in question, however. The Clean Air Act does not specifically authorize a REEP program, and Howekamp and others have acknowledged that the EPA may be on shaky legal grounds.

The EPA has repeatedly said that while the Clean Air Act does not specifically authorize such a program, Congress did not intend to impose a law that would cause disruptions in the economy in areas that tried hard but still failed to meet Clean Air Act requirements.

Secondly, there is no consensus as to what is “reasonable.” Both issues are the subject of today’s hearing and the development of a REEP program in California.