EPA Draws Fire Over Proposal to Limit Smog : Pollution: State and local authorities say the plan does not do enough to meet federal clean air standards.

A federal government proposal to impose additional smog controls on the Los Angeles region was criticized Monday by state and local authorities for not doing enough to meet federal clean air standards.

The criticism was leveled as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency opened a daylong hearing in Los Angeles on the proposal before it becomes final next February.

The EPA was ordered by a federal judge to impose the additional controls because a 20-year clean air plan by the South Coast Air Quality Management District and state Air Resources Board fails to guarantee that the region will be able to meet federal standards by the year 2007. The region already has missed deadlines set in the federal Clean Air Act.

But state and regional officials charged Monday that the federal plan, announced in July, fails to limit pollution sources only the federal government can control--military bases, offshore oil rigs in federal waters, ships, trains and aircraft. An estimated 100,000 federal employes in the basin also are exempt from local ride-sharing requirements.

“It’s not fair. It’s not right,” Pat Nemeth, deputy executive officer of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, told the EPA hearing panel.

The federal plan is largely limited to new controls on evaporative emissions of hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide from gasoline and controls on oil tankers when in port.

“This federal plan does little to advance clean air efforts in California. But it does a lot to jeopardize our actions,” said Mike Scheible, deputy executive officer of the state Air Resources Board.

If the gasoline controls and other EPA measures do not bring the basin into compliance with clean air standards, the EPA proposes to impose additional “backstop” measures.

Scheible complained that one backstop measure would jeopardize proven state air pollution efforts by imposing an arbitrary, potentially unworkable across-the-board 90% emission reduction requirement on all major polluters.

Another backstop measure is a once-a-week “no-ride” day to reduce pollution from commuting.

The Venice-based Coalition for Clean Air, which joined the Sierra Club in a 1988 lawsuit that resulted in the court-ordered federal controls, warned, however, that it would sue again unless the EPA immediately wrote specific backstop measures.

The EPA is considering delaying writing the backstop rules until they are necessary. By waiting, the EPA could include the latest clean air technology, an approach favored by the Western States Petroleum Assn.

But environmentalists said they are unimpressed by the EPA’s past enforcement record and called the wait-and-see approach illegal.

“This is a blatant disregard of the court order,” said Jan Chatten-Brown, president of the Coalition for Clean Air. She was joined by representatives of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Citizens for a Better Environment, the Orange County Coalition for Clean Air, and the American Lung Assn. of California.

Members of the public have until Nov. 30 to send written comments on the proposal to the Air and Toxics Division’s state liaison section at EPA regional headquarters in San Francisco.