Activists See New Chance to Clear Air

Behind Mark Abramowitz’s modest Santa Monica apartment, a battered orange Volkswagen sits idle, its bumper and grille interwoven with tendrils of dandelions.

Abramowitz, widely regarded as one of the most effective jousters in the battle against air pollution in Los Angeles, has been too broke to buy car insurance for several months.

The angry young environmentalist has splurged on just one extravagance: his personalized license plate, FGT SMOG.

David-and-Goliath Struggle

In a city where smog seems to have taken up permanent residence and the oil, power, auto and development lobbies have waged a long campaign to protect their interests, the 28-year-old UCLA graduate says he and his allies are waging an upward battle in a David-and-Goliath struggle.

But, for the first time since the 1970s, these increasingly vocal activists, concentrated on the city’s Westside and clustered in smaller groups in the inland smog bowls, believe they have a chance to turn the tide on air pollution.

On the environmentally active Westside, homeowners groups, influential residents and elected leaders like Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) have formed groups to fight air pollution.

At the core of the fight are Abramowitz and his most vociferous ally, Sabrina Schiller of Pacific Palisades, an outspoken maverick on the South Coast Air Quality Management District board.

“The Westside has been the birthplace of a lot of this city’s environmental movements, from cleaning the bay to saving the wetlands,” Hayden said. “And now Mark and Sabrina have inspired something really big out here--just how big I don’t think they realize.”

Missing Deadline

The two activists, both longtime members of the Santa Monica-based Coalition for Clean Air, say that a federally imposed December deadline for clean air--a deadline that Los Angeles is expected to miss by dozens of years--is adding steam to the movement.

Abramowitz said the realization by many residents that smog can be licked with the help of car-pooling programs and staggered work-hour measures like those used for the Olympics has “all of a sudden caused this great public awakening.”

“People thought the job was getting done, and now they understand it’s been a big lie, especially on smog,” Abramowitz said. “They’re really incensed, and that means change is in the wind.”

Despite 10 years of effort, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, average ozone levels during the smog season have been reduced by just 5% in heavily polluted areas. The days that Los Angeles exceeded federal ozone standards dropped 16% in that period, from 194 to 162 days, according to the AQMD, but the bulk of the smog remains.

If the sluggish progress continues, experts say the 1987 deadline for clean air will not be attained until far beyond the year 2000, if ever.

Schiller said the key to the revitalized fight is that people are “finally just sick and tired of smog.”

“I’ve been struck by the overwhelming feeling out there that life isn’t worth living without the quality of life,” she said.

Consider:

Buoyed by the dramatic victory in November of Proposition 65, the state clean-water initiative, Hayden is holding strategy meetings in Santa Monica with several influential Westside residents to design a state ballot initiative or legislative package to crack down on smog.

A lawsuit by Abramowitz seeks to require the EPA to order an overhaul of the AQMD’s ozone cleanup effort or even to force the federal agency to take over the job. It is pending in the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

A bill by state Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside) would abolish city and county appointees who now dominate the embattled AQMD board and replace them with appointees chosen by legislators and the governor. In addition, the bill would spell out the board’s power to order companies to create ride-sharing programs and adopt other innovative reforms--issues that critics say the board has “hemmed and hawed” over.

Officials of the EPA and the AQMD agree that Southern California’s clean-air fight is enjoying newly found grass-roots support and political clout.

A survey recently released by the AQMD and USC shows that 73% of Californians are willing to pay dramatically increased consumer costs as long as industry is forced to switch to cleaner fuels like methanol and cars are redesigned to use similar fuels.

Larry Berg, an AQMD board member and USC political science professor who directed the survey, said industry groups are so worried about the implications of his survey that a Ford Motor Co. official met with him in January and challenged the accuracy of his findings.

“The last election--with (U. S. Sen. Alan) Cranston winning and Proposition 65 getting an incredible vote--was a message that politicians had better get on the environment bandwagon, and smog is next,” Berg said. “The public is really riled up.”

Hoping to ride this crest, Hayden’s group of influential Westsiders plans to draw on the experiences of Schiller, Abramowitz and many others as it designs a major anti-smog measure to be introduced in 1988 or 1990.

Hayden says the climate “is absolutely ripe for a smog initiative.”

Enlisting Allies

He has enlisted the help of Deputy Mayor Tom Houston, former state Air Resources Board Chairwoman Mary Nichols and former county and city environmental prosecutor Barry Groveman.

Now a private attorney, the tough-talking Groveman said he has “tremendous respect for the work Mark and Sabrina have done to save this city from its biggest embarrassment--smog.”

Groveman, who gained a national reputation as leader of the highly publicized Los Angeles toxic strike force, said the Hayden group “is going to play hardball. One thing I’ll be looking for is a way to send the first air polluter to jail.”

All the talk about changing the way smog is fought has pollution-control officials on edge.

Jim Birakos, deputy executive officer of the AQMD, said people who point the finger at big industry, big business, or inaction by the district are missing the point.

Change in Life Style

“People think that, No. 1, industry is to blame and, No. 2, vehicles are to blame,” Birakos said. “But nobody assigns it to themselves. What we need is major changes in life style, like people using personal computers at home instead of driving to work every day.”

(According to the AQMD, vehicles cause 55% of the smog in Los Angeles, and stationary sources, such as industrial stacks, create 45% of it.)

Birakos said leading activists like Schiller and Abramowitz, “claim to have a strong interest in cleaning the air, but at board meetings they get on us about the smallest issues of the day. And then they won’t budge. . . . Sometimes these activists are against everything.”

Schiller and Abramowitz say it is, in part, the length of the battle that has made them so uncompromising.

Schiller, a sometime actress who has appeared in dozens of television shows, still remembers the day in the late 1960s that she turned down a role on the police drama “Mod Squad” to devote her time to fighting smog. She joined Stamp Out Smog, a now-defunct citizens’ group that was one of the first in the nation to demand a crackdown on air pollution.

From her hillside Pacific Palisades home, Schiller has a bird’s-eye view of smog hovering over the South Bay.

Respected by many of her fellow board members for her technical knowledge, she once reported a refinery on the Palos Verdes Peninsula to the authorities after she spotted a plume of pollution from her yard, 20 miles away.

“I feel incredibly lucky that my husband (comedy writer and television producer Bob Schiller of “Maude” and “All in the Family” fame) is supporting me while I do this thing I have to do,” she said.

One of her biggest concerns is what she referred to as “this prevailing wind”--her term for an unspoken attitude she says exists in Los Angeles that grants greater importance to industry and business than to people.

At AQMD meetings, she said, “when environmentalists or the public testify, there’s a lot of busy work by the board members.

‘Extremely Rude’

“They are extremely rude, talk to their secretaries, do paper work and ignore the testimony. This attitude is exactly why they were audited by the EPA and why people like Sen. Presley are stepping in, thank God.”

Schiller has a reputation as a self-confident sophisticate with a passion for speaking her mind. That handle has earned her almost as many detractors as admirers.

She nearly lost her appointed seat on the AQMD board last fall after state Sen. Ruben S. Ayala (D-Chino) demanded her removal, accusing her of “agitating the troops” by publicly criticizing fellow board members.

Berg, the AQMD board member, said Schiller hates to compromise, even if it would mean getting the board’s approval on an issue.

Defeat From Victory

“She is one of the most difficult people I’ve worked with in the last 47 years,” Berg said. “She really has that ability . . . to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”

He said that although he values Schiller for her scientific understanding of pollution, he believes that “nothing is so important to Sabrina as being right.”

Schiller brushes aside criticisms of her style. She said Berg’s problems stem from a personal fight she has had with him over his smoking during informal meetings.

“I’d be happy to hear any specific issue where he felt a compromise on my part would have saved an issue that died,” she said. “It simply isn’t the case.”

Among the many battles Schiller and other activists lost was a proposal to require oil refineries to install costly control devices on their giant boilers. On three occasions since 1984, the AQMD has turned aside attempts to pass the rule after heavy lobbying by industry representatives.

Doug Henderson, executive director of the Western Oil and Gas Assn., which represents refineries, said the oil industry opposed the devices because they were “a tremendous economic hardship that is unnecessary.”

Schiller characteristically bristles when she hears that kind of industry response.

“We know it’s expensive,” she said. “My question is, ‘So what?’ ”

“Has anyone talked to the tourist industry?” Schiller said. “To the health providers who keep track of costs paid by and for smog-afflicted people? Have you ever looked at the price of a home in Pasadena compared to the price of the same home in Santa Monica? Just how much quality of life have those inland communities given up to smog?”

(No definitive studies of smog’s cost to society exist, but the most conservative estimate by the AQMD places the figure at $10,000 per ton of emissions. About 3.5 million tons of pollutants are released into the Los Angeles basin annually, the AQMD said.)

Those who back Schiller say her passion is justified.

“I’m quite a bit more moderate, but I understand why she’s so angry,” attorney Groveman said. As an example, he cited his eight years as a public prosecutor, during which he was unable to persuade the AQMD to help him criminally prosecute air polluters.

“If police officers sat down and had coffee with the drug dealers, that would not be tolerated, but that is what is going on in air pollution enforcement. . . . The whole attitude is: Please comply with the laws, when and if you can,” he said.

State Sen. Presley, who intervened to save Schiller’s position on the board, says that her work should be recognized.

“I’ve always felt we were very fortunate to have Sabrina,” Presley said. “She lives where there isn’t a tremendous amount of smog, yet she works as hard as she does, and I think people ought to be grateful to have someone who’s willing to do that. She’s intelligent, energetic and well-motivated, so I fought hard to keep her on there.”

For his part, Abramowitz says he has wanted to fight pollution ever since he was a teen-ager.

“I just decided that this was the issue, and I said, ‘I’m going to do it,’ and I did,” he said. “When I got to college, I took every UCLA course I could find that had to do with smog.” He received his degree from UCLA in analysis and conservation of ecosystems, specializing in air quality.

In fact, almost everything Abramowitz does is for the fight against pollution.

He bought his only suit, a black pin-stripe, especially for face-offs with well-heeled industry lobbyists and government officials. And last month he finally saved up enough money to buy a lap-sized computer that gives him instant access to regulations and statistics during public hearings or AQMD meetings.

He earns his living as a paid consultant for Citizens for a Better Environment, and he is a member of the Coalition for Clean Air’s board of directors.

Affable and Irascible

Lobbyists know him as the sometimes affable, sometimes irascible young man who carries a thick brown briefcase containing the federal and state pollution laws that are his bible.

EPA officials know him as the persistent pollution whiz whose lawsuit won’t go away.

“I intend to show the EPA and AQMD for what they are,” Abramowitz said, “a bunch of spineless invertebrates who really do not intend to uphold the clean-air laws.”

At EPA regional headquarters in San Francisco, staff members well acquainted with Abramowitz’s criticisms of them presented a skit at Christmas, sung to the tune of “We Are the World,” that took a light-hearted jab at his efforts:

Non-attainment out there is mak -

ing us despair.

Now how to get Abramowitz out of

our hair?

We are the staff, we are the workers.

We are the ones who push the papers

for this nothing-burger.

What we once thought was great,

been wrecked by invertebrates.

When will we have cleaner air for

you and me?

Abramowitz sued the EPA in 1984 after it approved Los Angeles’s ozone cleanup plan. He contends--and the EPA concedes--that the plan fails to meet federal clean-air standards.

Lucille Van Ommering, an EPA environmental protection specialist, said the agency is putting tremendous effort into responding to Abramowitz’s suit.

Van Ommering, who attempted to work out a settlement with Abramowitz, said the EPA approved the basin’s substandard cleanup plan because the agency did not want to penalize the region after it had made a sincere effort to cut down smog.

She said she believes the EPA would have tackled the basin’s problems without impetus from Abramowitz. However, she conceded, “under law, we were required to act against (the AQMD) and we didn’t. Obviously Mark has got a case.”

Gladys Meade, one of Southern California’s leading smog activists and an official of the American Lung Assn. of California, says Abramowitz’s lawsuit may prevail where many other efforts have failed.

Battle Scars

“I can show you the scars for all the battles we’ve lost,” Meade said. “Mark’s lawsuit was a last resort after the agencies insisted on going forward with an (ozone cleanup plan) that won’t really clean the air.”

Nowhere is the rift between the activists and the agencies more dramatic than in the strained relations between Schiller and Abramowitz and influential AQMD board member Tom Heinsheimer, Schiller’s arch rival on the board.

Schiller said Heinsheimer has successfully fought them on several measures that could have removed hundreds of tons of pollutants from the air each day.

“Tom has been a serious impediment to clean air in this city,” Schiller said, “and I’m willing to stand behind that right to his face.”

But Heinsheimer says Abramowitz and Schiller are “zealots, true zealots who don’t care about jobs, don’t care about the economy, don’t care about industry--only about their particular issue.”

Formerly acting chairman of the AQMD board, Heinsheimer reluctantly pulled out of a race for the chairmanship in January after he was challenged by Norton Younglove, the new chairman.

The end of Heinsheimer’s reign was welcomed by Schiller and by Abramowitz, who called it “a major victory for everybody’s lungs and eyes.”

Heinsheimer, who has dominated the board’s philosophy for most of the past 10 years, says he has tried to compromise with the environmentalists and industry.

He opposed a rule backed by Schiller that would have ordered big companies to encourage car-pooling by making in-house ride-sharing programs available to workers. The rule ultimately could have prevented 151 tons of carbon monoxide from entering the air each day, according to the AQMD staff.

“It disgusts me when I think how Tom fought it,” Abramowitz said.

Heinsheimer pushed an alternative rule that would have asked, not required, companies to draw up ride-sharing plans.

He contends that his compromise would have achieved similar goals, but Schiller opposed it.

He said the two activists “prefer to have a puff piece in the L. A. Times, a nice picture describing all the battles they have lost, rather than trying to make accommodations.”

However, both activists have found supporters at the EPA and AQMD, particularly from staff members who agree with their philosophies. At the EPA, some employees grudgingly welcomed Abramowitz’s lawsuit, saying it gave them a needed impetus to re-evaluate the basin’s ozone problem.

Even some industry lobbyists say the activists serve a welcome function.

‘Valuable Part of Process’

Carolyn Green, environmental affairs manager for Southern California Gas Co., said that although she thinks some confrontations have been detrimental, “the Mark Abramowitzes and Sabrina Schillers and Gladys Meades of the world are a valuable part of the process.”

“They are always there, making sure that the ‘conservative’ environmental perspective is considered,” Green said. “And industry is always there, making sure that the ‘conservative’ economic factors are considered.”

Recently, industry and business began gathering their forces against Abramowitz’s suit.

In February, attorney Bob Wyman, representing the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, filed a motion to intervene in the suit on behalf of the EPA, as did the Western Oil and Gas Assn. The motion was denied and the groups have appealed the denial.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups have asked to intervene on Abramowitz’s behalf.

The EPA’s Van Ommering laughed, saying it is, “pretty funny, industry siding with the EPA, but we understand why.”

Industry groups fear that if Abramowitz wins his suit, punitive measures would take effect that could, theoretically, impose a construction ban on big pollution sources such as trash-to-energy plants and withhold some federal highway funds.

Henderson, of Western Oil and Gas, said sanctions “would be extremely harmful.”

But Abramowitz said what he really wants is what he sought during settlement talks: a worldwide search for, and identification of, state-of-the-art technological controls for Los Angeles industries and a program offering economic incentives--like breaks on parking-lot fees--to individuals and companies who use ride-sharing.

Ray Remy, president of the chamber, said the organization is fighting Abramowitz because it is opposed to “heavy reliance” on costly industrial controls.

Preferred Alternatives

He said the chamber’s members would rather spend more money on car-pooling and vehicles that use cleaner fuel.

“Though I have a lot of respect for (Abramowitz) and see some value to what he’s doing, it doesn’t get the biggest bang for the buck,” said Wyman, the chamber’s attorney.

But, with Los Angeles fast approaching a clean-air deadline that it cannot possibly meet and the AQMD under mounting scrutiny, Schiller said the views of those who think industry should be trusted to do its share are losing ground to public opinion.

“Fortunately, there are more people, just everyday people, on our side, and to me that’s all that matters,” Schiller said.

“In spite of all of industry’s money and power, they are gradually losing,” she said. “We’re wearing them down like water on a stone and we are the water. Drop by drop, but the water is flowing faster now than ever before.”