Toward Cleaner Air

Measured against the severity of California’s air pollution, the state’s automobile smog check law is a soft touch. It keeps engines and smog controls working smoothly enough to trap slightly more than 10% of auto pollution before it can leak out of exhaust pipes. But smog controls need to trap more than twice that much to keep California on a steady path toward cleaner air.

Without dissent, the California Senate has approved a bill sponsored by Sen. Robert B. Presley (D-Riverside) that would tighten up both pollution controls and smog checks. It starts through the Assembly this week, and should be enacted and signed into law as soon as possible.

Among other things, the new measure calls for lifting a ceiling on repair costs that the Legislature felt was necessary to avoid a revolt among California motorists when smog checks were initiated in 1982.

The present repair-cost ceiling is $50, and the average annual cost per vehicle of smog checks is $19. Because car prices and repair costs have shot up since the law was passed, about one-third of all late-model cars that fail the smog check go right back onto the road with a waiver because it would cost more than $50 to put them into shape. Presley’s bill, SB 1997, would replace the fixed ceiling with a sliding scale, starting at $60 for the model years 1966 to 1971 and ending with $300 for new cars starting in 1990.

The bill calls for longer warranties on smog-control devices, random roadside inspections of diesel trucks to make sure that their emissions are within state standards and more rigorous training and licensing for mechanics who perform smog checks. Automobiles still would have to stand inspection only every other year.

One of the bill’s most important features has to do not with smog controls but with bureaucracy. The bill would have the Bureau of Automotive Repairs report to the governor’s secretary for environmental affairs rather than to the consumer affairs department, as it now does.

That is a wise proposal, one that Gov. George Deukmejian should welcome. The consumer affairs department is concerned primarily with licensing cosmetologists, making certain that contractors deliver on promises and seeing to other consumer housekeeping chores that have nothing to do with clean air. With its expanded responsibilities for a major share of environmental protection, the bureau belongs with its own kind.