Why We Have Smog

Now I understand why we have smog.

The article on Ventura’s chief environmental problems (April 22) quotes local officials as saying:

1. Air pollution has improved in the past 20 years.

2. Air quality will continue to improve until 1995.

God spare us such progress! Anyone who thinks the air in their community is getting better all the time hasn’t been outside for a long time. When the very men who are responsible for cleaning up our air make such blatantly absurd statements, we can only conclude that either they cannot see the smog for the smog, or that they find comforting and politically opportune lies to be preferable to the truth.

Such a denial of responsibility in our clean air officials ought to be grounds for their resignations. This is exactly the kind of bull that has caused so many communist regimes to lose respect.

What do you say, Ventura County residents? Is the air better? Did your eyes burn a decade ago in Ventura the way they do on some days now? Was that pale brown haze there 20 years ago? And as for the ozone reductions, while the smog invasion has arrived, that is hardly cause for celebration, as the Ojai Valley, where I have lived for 13 years, still has the fourth-worst ozone concentration in the nation!

If the people do not tell the truth to their leaders, what hope is there that our air can really be cleaned up?

DALE RUFF

Oakview