Irvine’s Balancing Act With CFCs : Environment: City chose partnership and not conflict with business when it went to war against chlorofluorocarbons.

Every once in a while, government does something right. Despite years of rhetoric about the bad business climate fostered by government regulation, sometimes regulation, properly created and administered, works to the advantage of both the public and business.

One example is Irvine’s ordinance restricting the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs.) Lauded by environmentalists as a landmark initiative when it was adopted in 1989, it was decried by some businesses as an unworkable experiment in local regulation of a global issue that would lead to a mass exodus of industrial companies from the city.

Irvine chose to administer the ordinance by allowing companies that couldn’t find an easy alternative to continue using CFCs. At the same time, the city set up an aggressive technical assistance program that was designed to achieve substantially greater reductions. This approach rested on the belief that most firms had little access to information about alternatives to CFCs and, if use of the chemicals was denied in Irvine, there were few barriers to moving out of the city and continuing to use ozone-depleting substances.

Workshops, visits to factories, phone calls, and a newsletter were the means for providing help to companies. And rather than waiting for companies to call, city staff called them to ask if they had tried available alternatives and if the city could help do some research for them.

Was this approach the right one? By several measures, yes. Use of ozone-depleting chemicals, measured by both reports to the city and to the federal government, declined radically. From 1988 to 1992, federal data shows an 80% reduction in the release of CFCs and methyl chloroform. Although about a dozen companies that had used CFCs left the city--some went out of business, some consolidated with other locations, and some moved to cheaper locales--about an equal number moved in with the knowledge and a commitment that they had to eliminate their use of these chemicals. Irvine companies that acted quickly were not caught in the scramble when other government entities (the Air Quality Management District and the Congress in amending the Clean Air Act) sought to eliminate ozone-depleting chemicals. In business, you rarely want to be the last one to change.

The city didn’t limit its efforts to just CFCs. The technical assistance program was broadened to include reducing the use of all hazardous chemicals in the city and was integrated with an economic development program that targeted companies interested in moving to Irvine. Inquiries to the city would generate help not only with the city’s permitting processes, but technical assistance on pollution prevention. Working with businesses to solve environmental problems became the watchword. city staff genuinely wanted to help, and businesses became convinced that pollution prevention benefited the public and their own interest.

This isn’t idle talk. Those same statistics that showed a reduction in CFCs also showed that businesses in Irvine reduced their emissions of hazardous air pollutants by 77% from 1988 to 1992. This compares with a 40% reduction by all California businesses and just a 33% reduction in all of Orange County. And surprisingly, business licenses for manufacturers actually increased between 1990 and 1992 by about 13% in Irvine.

The old adversarial models, usually predicated on government mandating environmental compliance by businesses in mind-numbing detail, appear less effective than setting performance goals combined with high-quality technical assistance. Perhaps another difference is that Irvine’s “bureaucrats” cared. They cared not only about protecting the environment, but they were committed to maintaining a viable industrial community within the city.

We’ll always need tough enforcement for those rogue companies that want to get away with environmental crimes.

But the lesson taught by Irvine is that we actually speed up getting to our common goal of protecting public health and the environment through partnership rather than conflict.