County Plan for Clean Air Will Not Pass EPA’s Tests

Planners in charge of cleaning up the county’s air are working furiously to finish a pollution reduction plan, but even as they write they know that federal authorities will reject the plan and impose sanctions to boot.

Like other areas of the state with air pollution problems, Ventura County must write a plan and develop regulations that prove the county can reduce air pollution enough to meet health standards by 2005, or face sanctions by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency.

By Nov. 15, the EPA must have the document, known as the air quality management plan, which must already have been approved by Ventura County and state authorities.

But the document county planners hope to complete by the end of the month will not contain enough tough new regulations to meet the clean air mandate, said Scott Johnson, planning manager for the Ventura County Air Pollution Control District.

Johnson said the exercise of writing a plan that essentially fails to meet its goals has been frustrating for the staff.

“It’s tough to be pushing papers instead of reducing emissions,” he said. “But the plan will succeed in the sense that it will improve air quality in Ventura County to some extent, so there is benefit from that.”

To further complicate the equation, the EPA has circulated a draft of a tough pollution reduction plan that has drawn criticism from business and industry locally and throughout the state.

That plan contains enough measures for the district to meet its clean air goals, Johnson said. But those measures cannot be used by local districts until the federal plan is adopted in February, three months after the district’s plan is due before the EPA.

The federal plan contains regulations on such pollution-causing activities as interstate trucking, locomotives and shipping at sea. The local district has no jurisdiction over those areas.

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“We’re really in a box,” Johnson said. “EPA will slap sanctions on us if we don’t submit a plan to them by Nov. 14. But we’re not going to be able to make up the gap (in pollution reduction) without the things identified in the federal implementation plan.”

Sanctions could include stiff new requirements for further emission reductions as well as the withholding of federal transportation dollars, which amount to millions for the county each year.

But because there is an 18-month grace period between the time the sanctions are imposed and the day they are implemented, Johnson said the county should be able to revise its plan to include the federal measures in time to avoid losing money.

Neil Levine, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Center in Santa Barbara, said the district is understandably avoiding responsibility and opting instead to let the federal government take the heat for the kinds of controls needed to clean up the county’s air.

“In some ways, it would be political suicide,” he said. “The Air Pollution Control District does not have the strength to regulate some of the industries that are the economic base for the county.”

For instance, the district plan and the federal plan both have run into opposition from the agriculture industry, which could face new controls on emissions from heavy farm equipment, as well as controls on pesticide emissions and interstate truckers that pick up produce in the county.

“With the agriculture industry, it’s easier for the district to point its finger at the EPA and say, ‘It’s the federal government that’s coming down on you, not us,’ ” Levine said.

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Another very unpopular measure, which the district could adopt but does not intend to include in its plan, is the so-called emissions cap.

That provision, which was proposed by the EPA, would require large pollution producers to reduce emissions by more than 4% per year for five years beginning in 2001. The reductions are based on emission levels in 1990, but if the businesses were required to reduce emissions for other reasons since then, they still must reduce another 25%.

The provision amounts to a double hit, said Marc Charney, president of the Ventura County Economic Development Assn.

“The cap essentially says you take a snapshot of a business in 1990 and reduce emissions from there by 25% by 2005,” he said. “But there is no credit given for emission reductions after 1990.”

Charney’s group strongly opposes the emissions cap and is developing control measures that he says will be offered as substitutes.

“We want to come up with something that is both technically feasible and socially acceptable,” he said. The economic development association’s alternative proposals to the EPA’s plan should be complete by the end of the week, he said.

Charney, a local attorney, acknowledged that the EPA draft plan was not intended to be punitive on local businesses. But that would be the effect if many of its provisions are adopted, he said.

“I think everyone realizes that what the federal implementation plan proposes is unrealistic in a lot of places and unworkable--it’s an administrative nightmare.”

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The EPA was ordered to prepare the federal implementation plan after the U.S. Supreme Court ended a five-year struggle between the federal government and local environmentalists.

After the EPA approved Ventura County’s 1982 air quality management plan that also failed to show that the county would reach clean air goals, the Citizens to Preserve the Ojai sued the EPA.

A 1988 settlement produced a court order for the EPA to write a plan to clean up the air. But after the federal Clean Air Act was revised in 1990, the EPA claimed that the lawsuit was moot and that it no longer was responsible for writing a plan.

A lower court agreed with the EPA, but the decision was overturned on appeal. In 1993, the EPA appealed that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case and let stand the ruling that the EPA had to write a plan to clean up air in Ventura County, and the Los Angeles and Sacramento areas as well.

Stan Green, president of the Citizens to Preserve the Ojai, said diminished lung capacity and other health problems associated with smog are compelling reasons to embrace the measures in the federal plan.

“There always is a cry that (controlling air pollution) is a big expense,” he said. “But there is a bigger expense for our children and grandchildren attached if we wait. We need to bite the bullet now and work together.”