Concerns Cross County Borders : Ventura: Pollution is lowest in two decades, but quality fails standards many days.

The county’s Air Pollution Control District leads the coastal county into the 1990s with unprecedented controls on polluters and the cleanest air in 20 years, district officials say.

Moreover, air quality in the county of 669,000 will continue to improve by tiny increments through 1995, despite what is expected to be a continued exchange of farmland for homes and businesses, regulators say.

Critics point out that the county’s air still fails federal health standards an average of 44 days a year and fails the more stringent state standards 125 days a year. The district’s new air quality management plan, issued in draft form earlier this month, does not contain enough measures to bring the county into compliance with either set of standards.

Critics say that the controls on polluters are too lax and come too late in the battle to overcome the county’s ozone pollution problem, the ninth worst in the nation and one of the five worst in California. The district, they say, has been particularly soft on Southern California Edison Co.--the county’s single largest source of ozone-causing emissions. A proposed regulation to reduce Edison’s emissions by 90% should have been passed several years ago, district detractors say.

“They should not bargain industry against our health,” said Patricia Baggerly, a board member of Environmental Coalition, an umbrella organization for local environmental groups.

Although some detractors charge that the district wrongly traded resources and efficiency for autonomy in 1976 when it chose not to join the larger, better-staffed and more innovative South Coast Air Quality Management District, that view is not widely shared. Most of the district’s critics agree that differences in geography, meteorology and emission sources preclude Ventura’s joining AQMD.

Instead, the 65-person district should consolidate resources with its neighbors to the north in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, said Neil Moyer, a Ventura County environmentalist and former employee of AQMD and Ventura air quality district.

“You cannot separate what happens with air quality in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties,” Moyer said. “All the science shows us that, and yet we continue on our merry way.”

Richard H. Baldwin, county air pollution control officer, passionately defends the agency he heads. He bristles at the suggestion that he and his staff are ignoring air quality problems, polluters or possible solutions.

The district is working with a countywide task force to study whether the three central coast districts should combine into a single authority, he said, while the soft-on-industry comment is “simply not true.”

Baldwin said Ventura County’s strategy to reduce ozone pollution is working, although not as quickly as he would like. The district’s restrictions on companies with stationary internal combustion engines are among the most stringent in the nation, he said.

The district requires companies with gas engines to reduce emissions as much as 90%, depending on their size and the type of fuel they burn. The district also requires oil-well drilling rigs to use electric motors in most cases, replacing the highly polluting diesel engines once widely used in the industry.

During the last decade, those controls have helped the district decrease by half the number of days that the air fails to meet health standards. Environmentalist Baggerly said Ventura County could be doing better if the district had adopted a regulation limiting emissions at Edison in 1988 as the environmental community had urged.

The district’s current proposal that Edison reduce ozone-causing emissions by 90% is being fought by the utility, although Baldwin wants the regulation adopted this year. “I have no intention of backing down,” he said.

The district has also taken heat from environmentalists for a compromise it engineered on Edison’s proposed merger with San Diego Gas and Electric Co. that could result in more pollution for Ventura County. The district signed off on the merger when Edison promised to offset the pollution by paying for other businesses to convert to cleaner energy sources.

“The mitigation is good, but those are things that should have been implemented anyway without the merger,” said Phil White, a Ventura environmental consultant and onetime employee of the district.

The district has been praised for its work in other areas, including the development of a rule requiring large employers to provide incentives for workers to ride-share. The district also played a pivotal role in negotiating an amendment to the new federal Clean Air Act that for the first time allows air quality districts to control emissions from offshore oil platforms.