Poor People Again Take the Toxic Brunt : Proposed air-pollution rules for the L.A. Basin reward environmental racism.

For many people who know of the South Coast Air Quality Management District from its own press releases, the agency’s image as a hard-hitting, even Draconian, enforcer of anti-pollution laws is still in the air. But our members have attended more than 30 board meetings over the past four years and our direct experience has been chilling. We have seen AQMD board members calling a public hearing and then walking off to have lunch while people testified to a dais of empty chairs. We have organized people from Wilmington, South-Central and East L.A. to take a day off from work only to have the AQMD insult community representatives and refuse to provide the promised translation for Spanish speakers. We have walked into meetings with an impressive multiracial grass-roots delegation of more than 100 people only to be confronted by an army of more than 250 paid lobbyists, all of them able to call each board member by first name.

This leads us to have little hope of affecting the AQMD’s crucial vote Friday on air quality near industrial plants. But we have to try, because the AQMD board is on the verge of legalizing dangerous quantities of toxic emissions from industrial sources in the Los Angeles basin.

The primary AQMD mandate under the federal Clean Air Act is to reduce smog-producing chemicals--oxides of nitrogen, ozone, particulate matter and carbon monoxide. But smog is not the only problem, and the AQMD has identified 89 chemicals as air toxics, meaning they have been determined to cause cancer, leukemia, severe damage to the central nervous, respiratory, reproductive and immune systems, and more. Poor communities and people of color are disproportionately affected by such poisons, and their civil rights are being violated by the AQMD.

Some history: In 1987, the Legislature passed the Air Toxics Information Act, giving “hot spot” communities the formal right to know the chemicals to which they are exposed and their known health dangers. The AQMD was told to write letters to residents in plain language, disclosing emissions and their risks. It was never enforced. In 1992, after five years of AQMD inaction, the Labor/Community Strategy Center, Mothers of East Los Angeles (Santa Isabel) and Concerned Citizens of South-Central L.A. pushed the agency to rule that any facility posing a significant risk level of 10 additional cancers per million people exposed would trigger AQMD warning letters to affected residents and mandate meetings between the community and the company.

Two years later, not one major polluter has complied with that law, and the AQMD has not enforced it. As Wilmington environmental activist Carlos Molina told the board recently, “Low-income communities of color suffer from severe health problems because of air pollution. You acted sympathetic but then turned around and . . . stabbed us in the back.”

The AQMD caved in to industry with its “pollution-trading” credits. Now it is pushing ahead with a plan to set incredibly lax standards for toxic chemicals from industry--including the right for each company to emit poisons that would cause up to 100 extra lifetime cancers in a population of 1 million. The desirable standard is 1 per million. We would settle for 10. Not 99.9.

Hoping against hope that the AQMD might listen, we propose that the rule-making be postponed for a year, during which time the “right to know” rule would be enforced, in order to give affected communities the knowledge they need to participate in the process.

After that year, the AQMD should mandate emission reductions in three categories:

* Firms that pose the greatest risk to the “maximum exposed individual”--a hypothetical person receiving the highest possible dose.

* Firms that expose the largest number of people to risk, such as the Arco refinery in Carson that exposes more than 13,000 people to toxic emissions.

* Firms that emit the largest quantities of toxics per year, such as Arco, with 485,000 pounds per year, or Texaco’s Wilmington oil refinery, with more than 240,000 pounds.

The communities must have a voice in this rule-making. Currently, AQMD rules are heavily influenced by representatives of the oil, chemical, metal-plating, dry cleaning and aerospace industries. If the new emission rules are approved, the battle will continue, whether in the media, in the courts, in the streets or all three. The AQMD should not think it will be able to breathe easily.