Ventura County Industry Assails EPA Smog Plan

The broad-based smog remedies recommended Tuesday by federal environmental officials were met with alarm and skepticism by Ventura County industry leaders, who said the weighty regulations could drive them out of business.

Several Ventura County business executives promised to challenge portions of the proposal at every step of the public process before the federal Environmental Protection Agency recommendations become final next year.

Others complained that such stringent air quality efforts would have severe impacts on production and jobs.

One of the federal recommendations prompting special concern in Ventura County affects companies that emit more than four tons of hydrocarbons or four tons of oxides of nitrogen annually. Under the proposal, those firms would have to lower emissions by 6% a year for four years, beginning in 2001.

“If they’re talking a 24% reduction over four years, that’s an extraordinary reduction,” said Robert Paulger, an engineer for Procter & Gamble, which produces paper products at its Oxnard facility.

“I think it would have substantial negative implications,” he said. “I don’t know that we could do it.”

The draft EPA plan covers virtually every source of air pollution in Ventura County and two other jurisdictions--greater Los Angeles and Sacramento--that have perennially failed to meet federal air quality standards.

The recommendations were ordered by a federal court after Citizens to Preserve the Ojai and other Southern California environmental groups sued the EPA for failing to require local governments to observe federal laws requiring compliance with clean-air standards by 2005.

“It has to be comprehensive to achieve the deadlines,” said Neil Levine, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Center of Santa Barbara, which represented the Ojai group in its lawsuit.

“It’s going to affect everybody’s lives because they can’t afford to leave anybody out,” Levine said of the EPA plan. “Hopefully, with the public comment period, we can get something effective in reducing the ozone in the air without causing too much grief to people.”

Ventura County air quality officials said Tuesday that the federal plan would give teeth to local regulators.

“It’s going to provide substantial emission reductions that we need and can’t attain on our own because we don’t have the authority,” said Richard H. Baldwin, director of the county Air Pollution Control District.

“All of these things are things that were out of our grasp before that will be beneficial to our attainment strategies,” he said. “The district has no authority on mobile sources (of air pollution), and a lot of the reductions will come from mobile sources.”

In addition to the reductions called for in local industry, motor vehicles would be required to pass a smog-check system three times tougher than the existing program.

Roughly half of the ozone produced in Ventura County is the result of vehicle traffic, the air pollution district said.

Several of the county’s major employers, including Southern California Gas Co., Southern California Edison and the Point Mugu Naval Air Weapons Station, said they could not yet tell what impact the proposal would have on their operations.

Edison has already been targeted by Rule 59--a county ordinance approved in June, 1991, that requires power plants to reduce smog-causing emissions by 88% before 1997.

Agricultural leaders said the EPA proposals would have broad impact on the county’s billion-dollar farming industry. For example, they said, proposals to more closely regulate use of pesticides could threaten citrus and avocado growers.

“If they were to restrict the amount we use or the days we could use them, it might force us to use non-selective materials,” said Dave Machlitt, a Ventura County Farm Bureau board member. Using less effective pesticides “can cause other pests to become problems.”

“That would raise costs and lead to insect resistance,” Machlitt said. “It gets you on a treadmill where you use more and more pesticides.”

Under the proposal, delivery trucks from outside the area that do not comply with local rules would be allowed only one stop in the county per visit--which could have a severe impact on agriculture by raising transportation costs.

“Ninety-nine percent of the trucks in this county don’t meet certain emission standards,” county Agricultural Commissioner W. Earl McPhail said. “If they go into non-attainment, they can only make one stop in the county, and that has us very concerned.”

McPhail said county officials have overestimated the contribution that pesticides make to air pollution. But he expressed hope that the proposal can be amended to suit farming interests.

Other industries complained Tuesday that they too would be hard-pressed to comply.

“That’s going to chase us out of here sooner or later,” said Jon Cronk, director of health and safety for Union Oil, which has several operations targeted by the plan.

Kevin Rubey, plant manager for 3M’s computer tape production facility in Camarillo, said the plan seems to penalize companies that have already cleaned up emissions.

“What we have put in place today is the most technologically advanced system that’s available in the world,” Rubey said. “For us to reduce from this point can’t be done.”

One of the plaintiffs in the Ojai group’s lawsuit said tough new laws are long overdue.

“There may be other methods (to reduce air pollution) that are less difficult to deal with economically,” said Stan Greene, president of Citizens to Preserve the Ojai. “That’s why there is a lengthy public comment process.”

Greene said the benefits of cleaner air far outweigh its costs to industry and jobs.

“The real cost in air pollution is what it costs in lower farm production, poor crops, health-care costs and lost working days,” he said. “That’s what we have to weigh it against, and people don’t always look at that.”

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