Easing of Ride-Share Regulation Proposed : Air quality: Two supervisors want their colleagues to let small businesses take part in a less expensive program.

In an effort to help small businesses, two Ventura County supervisors are proposing that the county ease a rule that requires employers to promote ride-sharing and other anti-pollution measures.

Supervisors Susan K. Lacey and Vicky Howard will ask the board Tuesday to consider allowing businesses with between 50 and 99 employees to participate in a less restrictive and less expensive program for reducing smog.

Under their plan, the small businesses would be given the option of contributing to a program to get pollution-spewing cars off the road.

The amount of money the employers would contribute to the fund is expected to be less than half what it would cost them to comply with the tough ride-sharing code, called Rule 210, officials said.

The proposed change would affect 163 businesses, officials said.

“We are hearing from a lot of them that the requirements are too onerous,” Howard said. “We think it should be less expensive to the smaller employers.”

The supervisors’ proposal was immediately praised by the business community, but criticized by an environmentalist, who said the county should leave the ride-sharing code alone.

A third supervisor, John K. Flynn, agreed that the county needs to consider serious changes in Rule 210, a state-mandated 1991 ordinance that he said is ineffective in reducing pollution. He said he is considering proposing different revisions Tuesday, but he declined to disclose the particulars of his plan.

“If changes are not made, businesses will leave,” Flynn said. “The air is a serious problem; there is no question about that. But we must commit ourselves to cleaning up the air and keeping jobs in Ventura County. We can do both.”

If the board approves the proposal by Howard and Lacey, the county’s Air Pollution Control District will be asked to prepare a report detailing the proposed change to the state and federal environmental regulators, who have imposed stiff air quality guidelines on the county.

Before the plan can be implemented, Howard said, local administrators must show state and federal officials that scrapping or upgrading old cars will clean up the air as much as the ride-share program, which is scheduled for implementation in stages over the next six years.

“By actually buying off some of the old cars, we can accomplish the same goal,” Howard said, although details of how the program would work have yet to be worked out. “We want a little more flexibility.”

Lacey could not be reached for comment. But Ed Webster, one of her assistants who worked on the proposal, said the county wants “to ease the cost burden for anybody that we can.”

“The business people have been very frustrated by these laws and we are frustrated by them too,” Webster said. “I think it is critical that in this economic climate we try to make the rules as cost-efficient as we possibly can.”

But Cynthia Leake, vice president of the Environmental Coalition of Ventura County, blasted the supervisors’ idea.

“It’s so dumb,” Leake said. “They are never going to be able to get enough of the old cars off the road. They would have to have an awful lot of money for it to work.

“I think it is a better idea just to leave the thing alone.”

Under present rules, companies with 50 or more employees must devise plans to reach a car-pooling goal of 1.5 employees per automobile, or nine people for every six cars driven to work.

To comply, business leaders say, companies will have to offer cash incentives to employees. The mandate is estimated to cost businesses an average of $310 annually per employee to implement, they say.

Stacy Roscoe, president of the Ventura County Economic Development Assn., and H. Jere Robings, president of the Ventura County Alliance of Taxpayers, said the supervisors’ proposal would give small employers a much-needed financial break.

“The costs have been very high,” Roscoe said. “I applaud this effort. It shows creativity and it makes a lot of sense.”

Robings added: “We have argued for a long time that Rule 210 is one of the factors in driving the businesses out of the state. It’s very, very expensive.

“It means in some cases that it’s easier to cut back on production and lay off people to come under the 50-employee limitation than it is to try to comply with this rule.”