20-Year Air Quality Plan

A disservice will be done to the public if the 2O-year air quality improvement plan proposed by the South Coast Air Quality Management District is approved by the California Air Resources Board at its hearing on Aug. 15.

No one disagrees with the goal to clean our air, including our members in business, labor and government who live and work in Southern California along with their families and friends. But the AQMD plan will prove too controversial to work over the long haul. It is an unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky scheme which is technologically, economically, socially and politically impossible to achieve, despite its best theoretical intentions.

The public should not be misled into believing that we are on the road to pollution-free air once the plan is adopted. We fear that the plan eventually will create a public backlash so severe that it will set back clean air attainment once everyone understands the business closures, job losses, increased taxes, added consumer costs and massive usurpation of local government control mandated by the plan.

We favor a brief delay in the ARB adopting the plan in order to achieve a realistic workable proposal. The plan needs two major amendments. Independent, accurate, in-depth cost benefit analyses of the social and economic impact of each new pollution control rule should be completed and debated before adoption. The district’s governing board must balance such legitimate issues as potential job loss through business closures or added taxes through mandated government services against the gains in clean air. And, some resolution must be sought for the coming clashes over home rule issues between local elected city officials and the non-elected AQMD when the district usurps local land use and transportation decisions. The AQMD is posed as an unelected sub-government with frightening power over business and industry, local government officials and even individuals.

Let’s resolve these serious problems at the outset of our 20-year effort to clean our air. Let’s not set out on a course we must alter dramatically as the plan falls apart from its sweeping technological and political impracticalities.

By tabling the plan now and working toward such amendment, the ARB can guarantee eventual broad public acceptance so vital for the plan to work.

WILLIAM T. HUSTON

Chairman

Community Air Quality Task Force

Los Angeles