Checking Checkers

A little guerrilla war between state inspectors who check California’s smog-check stations and some of the stations that fail the tests is stacked against the stations. And rightly so.

Station owners who skip any part of the smog check required every two years for all cars registered in California can be fined up to $1,500 the third time they are caught writing out passing certificates for cars that run dirtier than the law allows. The state can yank a station’s license the fourth time. So some owners who have been caught skipping some items on the checklist have hired a lobbyist to get Sacramento to stop taking inspections so seriously. A trade association that represents about one-third of the state’s 8,300 licensed smog-checkers says that it will have no part of the revolt.

That is a wise policy. There still are people, some of them in the Legislature, who think that state-owned smog stations might keep more pollution out of the air than the network of state-licensed stations can. They may also just be waiting for the network of licensed stations to press its luck.