County Air Panel Seeks Public Input on Rules to Ease Area Pollution

Directed to come up with a clean-air strategy by the end of June, the county’s Air Pollution Control Board on Tuesday approved for public comment 52 separate tactics aimed at cutting pollution on everything from back yard barbecues to industrial boilers.

If all 52 were implemented, which officials said was unlikely, it would cut pollution by 5% to 7% during the next decade, according to a report filed Tuesday with the board.

However, even if all 52 were implemented, it would not meet the requirements of a stringent 1988 state law that requires a 65% cut by the year 2000 in hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen, the main ingredients in smog, the report said. Most smog--about 60%--comes from car and truck emissions, and that’s an issue that state agencies are tackling, the report said.

Still, a spokesman said Tuesday, the board is pushing ahead with public comment on local standards.

“We’re not looking to say, ‘We can’t do it,’ ” spokesman Bob Goggin said. “We’re looking for help. Because we have to do it.”

Under the 1988 California Clean Air Act, the board must deliver to the California Air Resources Board by June 30, 1991, its smog-fighting plan.

Times and dates for public comment on the 52 suggestions have not yet been set, Goggin said Tuesday.

Industrial controls among the 52 tactics are aimed at reducing gasses from production at bakeries, kelp processing plants, fiberglass makers and a variety of plants that make coatings or solvents. The report calls for a variety of more efficient manufacturing techniques, different additives in solvents and closed systems to cut the release of gasses.

Controls on manufacturing plants over recent years have already created “substantial cuts” in industrial gasses, and those plants account for about 20% of smog, Goggin said. “This is like the last squeeze,” he said.

A seemingly endless array of activities account for the remainder of smog, about 20% of it, and the report suggests stricter controls on what it calls “areawide sources,” meaning those widely dispersed activities that cumulatively produce smog-making gas.

Those include ways of heating a hot tub, cooling or heating a house, back yard cooking and applying house paints.

The report suggests the use of less lighter fluid and the reformulation of paints. It says that water heaters that produce lower emissions of nitrogen oxides should be standard. It also suggests that solar energy can “provide all the energy needed for swimming pool heating.”