Reaction to Advisors’ Resignations Ranges From Dismay to Relief
The head of pulmonary medicine at UC Irvine Medical Center said it was scary.
A Riverside County supervisor said it was bold.
The chief economist to a Los Angeles business development group said it was just one more grenade attack in the political battlefield.
Reaction ran across a wide spectrum Friday to the resignations of nine of 11 technical advisors to the South Coast Air Quality Management District--the Southland’s smog supervisors.
Some observers said the protest was an effective way to draw public attention to what they consider Southern California’s waffling clean air battle. Others said, in so many words, good riddance!
The advisors resigned Thursday, complaining that the smog agency’s newest clean air plan would not ensure healthful air because it was based on unreliable predictions about the severity of smog over the next 15 years.
Moreover, the advisors complained that the AQMD has gone soft in its smog war, bowing to political and business pressures to relax air pollution emission standards, and that their input was being dismissed.
“To me, it’s pretty scary,” said Dr. Archie Wilson, chief of the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine at UC Irvine Medical Center. For the scientists and economists to quit, he said, “is a pretty powerful statement. It must be serious for all of them to resign.”
State Sen. Ray Haynes (R-Riverside), on the other hand, said he was skeptical about the value of the scientific advisory panel and the “misuse of so-called science in environmental management.”
“What is supposed to be . . . objective science is actually highly politicized interpretations of a political agenda,” he said of the panel’s contributions to the AQMD.
Ron Lamb, the head of government relations for the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, said he was sorry the scientists quit.
“But . . . quite frankly,” he said, “I think the L.A. Chamber has worked very hard to achieve balance in the regulatory community and the environmental community. And I can’t imagine the scientists have resigned because they oppose balance. There must be another reason.”
Another observer applauded the panel’s work and said their advisors’ resignations should send up giant warning flags. Kay Ceniceros, head of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, said the advisors bring “an extraordinarily valid point of view” to the AQMD’s board.
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“We need those scientists to be our conscience,” Ceniceros said.
Others suggested that the advisors would not necessarily be missed.
“A lot of these people were very dedicated to really cleaning up the air, at all costs,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist at the Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles County.
“Yes, you want to clean up the air as quickly and effectively as possible, but you have to be concerned about the impact on the economy and what it means to jobs.”
Kyser said: “No matter what the AQMD board does, they’ll have grenades launched at them, either by environmentalists or the business community.”
The office of Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan said Riordan was unavailable to comment on the resignations. But he has championed delaying some stringent air quality measures because of the economic repercussions of tougher rules.
Gov. Pete Wilson said his administration will look into the scientists’ criticisms of the AQMD’s policies.
“I don’t have a very clear picture of what the substantive objections are, but we will be looking at it because obviously we intend to make sure that the [Clean Air] Act is fully implemented,” Wilson said.
As a senator, Wilson was one of the main supporters of the act, which requires the states to meet limits and deadlines for air pollution. He has been criticized, though, by environmentalists for weakening state policies.
Art Pick, president of the Greater Riverside Chambers of Commerce, said the resignations “weren’t a good idea. It’s better to work inside the organization than from the outside. . . . They’ve abandoned their intellectual ground, and that’s a mistake, always.”
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Former state Sen. Robert Presley of Riverside--who championed tougher smog standards in the 1980s--also was upset over the resignations. “Their timing is sort of bad,” he said. “We’re coming out of the recession, to where the board would probably feel more comfortable making a more hard-line stance against air pollution.”
Times staff writers Deborah Schoch and David Lesher contributed to this story.
