COLUMN LEFT/ ERIC MANN : Feet of Clay May Trip the Feared AQMD : Business’ big guns are out to make it surrender vital powers.
On Aug. 7, the South Coast Air Quality Management District will vote on the recommendations of the Special Commission on Air Quality and the Economy, a group composed primarily of business people and free-market ideologues with the explicit objective of gutting the agency’s ability to regulate corporate polluters.
The AQMD agreed to the formation of the commission because of enormous pressure from regulated businesses. They had been rallied by a self-interested report from Southern California Edison that claimed environmental regulation was a significant factor in businesses leaving the Los Angeles Basin. In fact, the Center for the Study of the California Economy demonstrated that the major areas of employment decline--aerospace, because of long overdue reductions in defense spending, and retailing and construction, because of the national recession--had no causal relationship to environmental regulation.
The commission’s report simply asks the AQMD to commit suicide. It demands abrogation of the AQMD regulation requiring employers to implement employee trip reduction plans to reduce single passenger auto use. It recommends installing an in-house business lobbyist on AQMD premises under the euphemism of “ombudsman.” It proposes a bizarre “contrarian analysis” by which every agency rule would require a formal dissent from a pro-business consultant. And, of course, it would reduce fines for corporate pollution while increasing taxes on motorists.
If the agency will hold its ground on tough air-pollution rules, it can force viable business investment in new technologies; innovative research and development can be assured of a guaranteed market. As a member of the commission, I helped write a dissent from the report that proposes government loans and investment in new technologies to help entire industries, such as furniture, metal plating, and dry cleaning, to comply with health-based rules. The commission’s plan to relax the rules will only undermine the business incentive for either new technology or compliance.
Ironically, while business portrays the AQMD as Draconian, the agency is already in danger of developing feet of clay.
While the commission demands an “ombudsman” to plead business’ case, the AQMD is already overrun by lobbyists from Southern California Edison, Arco, Chevron, Unocal, Monsanto and the Western States Petroleum Assn. Workers, low-income people and people of color, who live in the neighborhoods that are most polluted by auto and industrial emissions, are rarely represented.
In the existing rule-making and permitting process, the agency already gives far too many exceptions, delays, offsets, and variances to polluters.
Under pressure from industry, the agency is advocating a marketable permit plan that, through the buying and selling of pollution credits, will allow some companies to purchase their way out of reducing toxic chemical emissions.
The recent reported reductions in L.A. Basin smog demonstrate the AQMD’s success when it stands up to business and implements rules to reduce emissions. But 22 years after the original federal Clean Air Act, Los Angeles is still out of compliance with federal air quality standards because every rule and every implementation plan emerges weakened and often undermined by powerful business forces.
While it is not surprising that business would try to organize a “special commission,” why would the AQMD appear to take its report seriously? Because it is withering under the powerful force of a nationwide campaign to sabotage the fight for clean air, from the efforts of the Quayle Commission on Competitiveness to gut the federal Environmental Protection Agency to the Ueberroth Commission on California’s Competitiveness, which advocated dramatic weakening of environmental regulations, to the AQMD board’s own free-marketeers led by Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich and Orange County Supervisor Harriet Wieder.
It has been an uphill battle to simply state the obvious: It is the AQMD’s job to protect community health and to enforce the regulations designed to maintain the highest environmental standards. And it is the job of profit-hungry corporate executives who attempt to justify their obscene salaries and perks with the fiction of “innovation and risk” to start innovating and risking something besides our health.
