Revised Plan Details Goals for County Air Cleanup : Pollution: District proposes regulations on pesticides and other products. Computer models project success of the blueprint for meeting federal smog standards.

For the first time, a Ventura County plan shows how air pollution can be cut throughout the area to meet federal health standards by 2005.

The revised blueprint to clean up the air includes new regulations to control emissions and new computer methods for projecting the success of those rules.

The county’s 1995 Air Quality Management Plan Revision, which comes three months after a tough federal plan was scrapped by Congress, is the first to reach the elusive federal clean-air goals on a countywide basis.

The 1994 plan, amended for the plan released last week, predicted that the county would reach the standards except in parts of the Ojai Valley.

“It’s a real breakthrough,” said Bill Mount, deputy director of the Ventura County Air Pollution Control District. But Mount cautioned that predictions the county will reach the health goals are based on computer models, which are fed information on weather, terrain, emissions and chemical reactions.

“It’s a big black box computer program that simulates air,”’ Mount said. “It’s the best tool we have, but it’s still just a tool.”

The district has been cautious in its calculations and careful not to manipulate the figures to the county’s benefit, Mount said.

Nevertheless, some community activists were skeptical.

“There is concern over whether the predictions for attainment are realistic,” said Stan Greene, president of the Citizens to Preserve the Ojai.

But Greene, whose group successfully sued the district and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to force more stringent regulations in 1988, also praised the district for working with interested parties to devise the plan.

“There has been a maturing in the attitudes of the regulatory agency, the business community and the environmental community,” Greene said.

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The new plan is the result of more than 10 years of effort to meet federal health standards for smog.

The more stringent California standards will require even tougher rules and will probably not be met until after 2010, Mount said.

The plan will now be submitted for approval to the EPA.

As a result of the citizens’ lawsuit, the EPA wrote a Federal Implementation Plan to impose rules on the county to clean up the sources of pollution that the district could not or would not address.

But last April, Congress rescinded that plan. With that plan went the authority to regulate emissions from sources over which the local district has no jurisdiction, such as heavy trucks and ship traffic in the Santa Barbara Channel.

But the federal government has now set new controls on diesel trucks.

And the state Air Resources Board has committed to new pollution-reducing measures, allowing the local plan for Ventura County to include provisions to regulate pesticides and consumer products such as hair spray.

Both contain nitrogen oxide. Oxides of nitrogen mix with hydrocarbons in sunlight to produce ozone, a colorless but lung-damaging component of smog.

The largest source of both pollutants is the motor vehicle, which accounts for about half the emissions in the county. The county produces about 87 tons per day of hydrocarbons and another 81 tons of nitrogen oxides, based on 1990 figures.

To meet health standards, hydrocarbon emissions will have to be reduced to 43 tons per day and nitrogen oxides to 51 tons per day, according to the plan.

Scott Johnson, manager of the planning section of the air district and principal author of the plan, said it is difficult figuring predictions for air pollution 10 years into the future.

The emissions data is now five years old, he said. In addition, the chemistry that the computer uses to figure reactions is about 10 years old, and things have changed since then.

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For instance, gasoline is being reformulated to reduce hydrocarbons and is very different from two years ago.

“By the time we finish reformulating gasoline, the atmosphere in 1997 will have a very different [chemical] reaction than it did in 1984,” Johnson said. “We are forecasting the future while we are turned around looking at the past.”

But some improvements were made in the computer modeling, he said. In the Ojai Valley, for instance, the model assumed an incorrect wind direction. And geographical borders were off by 20 miles in another area.

The district plans to work with the state and other air quality districts in Southern California to update the process, Johnson said.

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FYI

People interested in commenting on the revised 1995 Ventura County Air Quality Management Plan can write to Scott Johnson, Air Pollution Control District, 669 County Square Drive, Ventura 93003.