Tentative Clean Air Bill Accord Reached

House and Senate negotiators, apparently breaking a deadlock that had threatened passage of a new Clean Air Act, tentatively agreed Wednesday on far-reaching measures to reduce smog-causing car emissions over the next 10 years.

The agreement extends automobile emission standards adopted by California to the rest of the nation and establishes an innovative pilot program in which “clean fuel” vehicles--cars running on fuels that release only a fraction of the pollution caused by conventional gasoline--will be sold in California starting in 1996. The plan is expected to receive formal approval when House and Senate conferees meet later this week.

“California is going to lead the way for the nation in putting alternatively fueled vehicles on the road,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), a clean air advocate and one of the chief architects of the compromise reached early Wednesday after an all-night negotiating session.

“For the first time, we are going to have a strong federal law, one with real teeth in it, to force a major reduction of smog in this country,” Waxman said.

The issue was resolved through a complex compromise negotiated by House and Senate staff aides, although members of Congress were involved throughout and are expected to adopt the measures.

However, the agreement was quickly criticized by environmentalists and California air quality officials for conceding too much to the automobile and oil industries.

State officials were especially upset with a provision that, if retained in the final bill, would prevent them from regulating smog-causing emissions from several classes of “off-road” vehicles, such as tractors, compressors and other farm or construction equipment powered by engines of less than 175 horsepower.

“Off-road vehicles in this category account for nearly 10% of California’s smog problem. We are in the process of developing regulations for these pollution sources, but if this deal goes through it will stop us in midstream,” said Bill Sessa, a spokesman for the state’s Air Resources Board.

While the air board and other state officials vowed to fight the off-road vehicles provision, the dispute that had threatened the negotiations with collapse concerned the right of other states to adopt and enforce a clean fuels program established under the legislation for California.

Under both the House- and Senate-passed versions of the bill, other states could “opt in” to the program that begins in California in 1996, with the federally mandated production of 150,000 clean fuel vehicles. However, under the terms of a controversial proposal pushed by auto industry supporters, the authority to enforce the program outside of California would have been entrusted to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Environmentalists argued that the states should retain the right to administer the program because of EPA’s long record of failure in enforcing strong clean air regulations.

The issue was finally resolved through a complex compromise negotiated by House and Senate staff aides.

States that adopt the California program will retain the right to enforce it but, in return, deadlines for some other regulations will be relaxed, conference sources said.

“The agreement does a lot of things to make cars cleaner, but the price that is being paid for this is delay,” said Daniel Weiss, a lobbyist with the Sierra Club.

“Most of the reductions (in polluting emissions) are now not going to begin to take effect until the late 1990s, which gives the auto and oil industries more time than they actually need to meet many of these requirements,” he said.

Environmentalists also criticized a compromise that would push back the deadline for oil companies to sell cleaner-burning reformulated gasoline in the nation’s nine smoggiest cities. Instead of 1992, they will have until 1995.

The Administration has threatened to veto any bill that costs substantially more than $20 billion per year but is expected to be generally pleased by the compromises struck Wednesday.