EPA Smog Plan Is Just the...

When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency jolted California with its tough plan for clean air last week, the agency’s regional administrator called it “the end of the line” in the state’s decades-old struggle to control its notorious smog.

But for Southern California’s business leaders, the federal government’s foot-thick binder of proposed regulations is only the beginning of six painful and turbulent months of negotiating, lobbying and compromising.

Since the 1970s, the politics of smog in the Southland has taken on a life of its own, with endless maneuvering among regulators, business leaders and environmentalists, each pushing their own agenda. But this time, most observers predict, the players will have to change their ways and find some common ground.

They will have no choice.

The EPA is under court order to clean up California’s smoggiest cities. By next February, final smog-control regulations must be in place to ensure that the Los Angeles Basin--home of the nation’s worst air--achieves health standards by 2010. Under the same court order, the Sacramento metropolitan area and Ventura County have until 2005.

“The last 20 years (of smog control) have been quite adversarial,” said Felicia Marcus, who heads the EPA’s western regional office in San Francisco. “Now there is a potential for a critical mass where people are tired of complaining. . . . If folks want us not to regulate them, they (had) better come up with better measures.”

New alliances of businesses are expected to emerge--not to just complain or lobby, but to attempt some consensus building among themselves and develop alternatives that might soften the economic blow across the region and still meet clean-air mandates.

“We have to recognize that ‘X’ amount of tons of pollution have to come out of the atmosphere,” said Ray Remy, president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. “We can’t fall backward in the progress we’ve made in air quality. Nobody finds that acceptable. But we don’t want to adopt something that will stimulate a huge massive outward migration of job opportunities either.”

Under the federal plan, nearly every source of smog will be regulated to cut pollution--motor vehicles, the trucking industry, trains, airlines, factories, fuels, small businesses, construction equipment, recreational boats, off-road vehicles, paint companies, pesticide manufacturers and many others.

The Clinton Administration was forced into developing its far-reaching plan after environmentalists sued the EPA to clean up smog in the Los Angeles Basin, arguing that local and state officials had failed in their efforts to meet health standards. After years of legal wrangling, the EPA lost an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992.

Although details of the nearly 100 proposed rules in the EPA plan are likely to change, the court will not allow the agency to waver from its goal--full attainment of health standards for ozone and carbon monoxide in the state’s smoggiest regions.

In the case of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, meeting the court order is especially daunting: 90% of hydrocarbons and 70% of nitrogen oxides, the two ingredients of ozone, the area’s worst pollutant, must be eliminated by 2010.

“EPA’s one condition is that this plan has to achieve the required emission reductions. Everything else is negotiable,” said Los Angeles attorney Robert Wyman, who represents aerospace firms, the oil industry and other major manufacturers in air-quality issues.

Julia Barrow, the EPA’s director of the agency’s air quality planning office in San Francisco, said the goal is to make clean air “a shared responsibility” among all businesses and governments.

“The idea is to have different industry sectors talking among each other about how to balance it, and decide what they can live with,” she said.

The EPA expects a dizzying volume of input from hundreds of trade groups and individual companies. About 1,000 information packages summarizing the rules were mailed out when the plan was unveiled Tuesday, and another 150 people called the EPA last week requesting copies.

Many business leaders fear that accepting the EPA’s plan will have major statewide--even national--ramifications for the economy.

If the anti-smog measures on airlines increase the cost of flying into Los Angeles, it could have an impact on the state’s tourism industry. If shippers find smog rules at the Port of Los Angeles too costly or restrictive, they might haul their cargo or passengers elsewhere along the West Coast. Consequently, it may benefit every industry to find alternatives for those measures.

“I think the document as it now stands would create huge economic dislocations in Southern California,” Remy said. “We’re going to have to spend a fair amount of time pointing out areas of difficulty.”

The Wilson Administration also has expressed serious concern, with state Secretary for Environmental Protection James M. Strock saying many parts of the federal plan “have little chance of success.”

“The proposed federal plan adversely impacts all phases of the California economy without regard to building the kind of public support necessary to achieve cleaner air,” Strock said. “Absent fundamental change, this plan would find few champions among Californians.”

Some environmental activists say they welcome the inevitable give-and-take among businesses and promise to be flexible in their views on how the final plan shapes up.

“We really do see this as an opportunity for a collaboration, to try to find the best strategies that clean the air in the most fair way and give us new economic opportunities,” said Denny Zane of the Coalition for Clean Air, the lead environmental group that sued the EPA. “There is certainly an opportunity for reasonable changes that give us similar results.”

Californians will have to work fast.

EPA officials will accept public input on the proposals only until August, and then they will sequester themselves until next February, when they must finalize the rules. By April 1, the EPA plans to hold the first of a series of public workshops, mostly for the various industries. Public hearings will be held in July.

“We intend to have some pretty earnest discussions,” Marcus said. “We’re already engaging folks in real discussions about the best way to get (clean air).”

Most business representatives will take several weeks just to decipher the plan’s details, much less develop a plan of action. The various proposals fill about 1,600 pages--so unwieldy that the agency has displayed them on an electronic bulletin board for quick access.

“(The debate) will be heated, but it will be slow heat. It’s going to take time for people to realize the impact. They first have to sit down and read it,” said Tom Eichhorn, communications director for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the agency responsible for cleaning the air in the Southland.

Businesses and environmentalists won’t be the only ones trying to come up with substitutes for the EPA regulations. State and local politicians and air-quality officials also will play a major role. Under the federal Clean Air Act, the state is required to propose a clean-air strategy by Nov. 15, and the EPA hopes the state plan will be rigorous enough to supplant the federal proposal eventually.

Many of these key players have been through tough negotiations before, especially in the late 1980s, when state and local smog regulators came up with their clean air plans.

But in the federal plan, an array of influential interstate industries based outside California--airlines, trucking, the shipping industry and recreational boat manufacturers--are targeted for the first time.

The greatest outcry probably will come from them, with the likely argument being they are a small part of the pollution problem. But Remy, Wyman and others representing Southland industries counter that everyone now is a small part, since oil refineries and other major polluters already have been forced to spend millions to slash emissions.

“The natural reaction is ‘Why me?”’ Wyman said. “There tends to be a learning curve for regulated industries. Those regulated the most and for the longest, such as the refineries and utilities, tend to be the most sophisticated in the public comments. They bring up alternatives, and they tend to question less the goals of it.”

The California motorist, responsible for more than half the state’s smog-causing emissions, is one target all these industries may all end up agreeing on.

State air-quality officials have long debated such politically unpopular proposals as charging commuters a fee for miles driven or designating no-drive days.

No such measures are incorporated in the EPA plan, partly because the agency has no clear authority to enforce them and partly because the Clinton Administration believes such social changes should be left to local control. But some industries are expected to lobby the AQMD and state and local government to take on California’s drivers and take some of the burden off themselves.

Still, some say California clean-air issues are so entangled that it may take an act of Congress to come up with a solution. They say that, even as they quickly point out that Congress took more than a decade to agree on new Clean Air Act amendments before finally passing them in 1990.

“It very well may come down to . . . the business community will be flat out opposed to what is in this plan,” Remy said. “There is recourse to Congress, but that is a difficult road to travel.”