County Clean Air Goal May Face Setback

Ventura County’s already elusive goal of meeting national clear air standards will likely become even more of a challenge as a result of tough new standards proposed Wednesday by the Environmental Protection Agency, local officials said.

Based on preliminary calculations, Simi Valley--home to the county’s worst air--would have failed the new pollution standard for ozone on 59 days this past summer, according to Dick Baldwin, head of the Ventura County Air Pollution Control District.

Compare that to the present federal standard--which Simi Valley violated 13 times during the summer--and it looks like Ventura County is in trouble.

“That would suggest that we are a long way from meeting the standard,” Baldwin said.

The change will have far-reaching consequences, forcing new restrictions on emissions from automobiles, industries, airplanes, trains and other sources of pollution, although no one knows precisely what those would be.

Stationary sources of pollution, such as factories and power plants, which have already made adjustments, would have to spend a lot more money to make further improvements, Baldwin said.

“We need to focus more on cars,” he said. “We’ve done a lot on stationary sources. Technically, there is more that can be done, but the things that are most cost-effective have already been done.”

Although vehicle emissions have dropped with improved technology and the use of cleaner-burning fuel, more people continue to drive more miles, Baldwin said. Increased car-pooling would help a great deal, he said.

“If everybody carpools, for commute vehicles, that is a 50% reduction in that part of the pie right there,” he said.

Ventura County air typically rates among the worst in the nation. But local officials had hoped to reach federal clean air standards by 2005. Whether that goal is still plausible is unknown.

Baldwin said it would take two to three years--assuming the proposed standard is finalized--for the Ventura County district to put together a new attainment plan.

The proposed rule, which wouldn’t become final until June, is expected to generate intense debate both in the corporate world and the halls of Congress. EPA has been considering several sets of numbers for the new standard, so Wednesday’s announcement did not come as a complete surprise to Baldwin.

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But some elements of the proposed standards were new, he said, making it difficult to figure out just what effect they will have on Ventura County.

And even after next week, when Baldwin expects to receive a 1,000-page document from the EPA explaining the new numbers, the impacts will be unclear until he can put together at least a year’s worth of data based on the new standards.

The only thing that is certain is that the finish line in the marathon that Ventura County has been running for the last decade to reduce its pollution has just been pushed further back.

“They moved the end!” Simi Valley Mayor Greg Stratton said in disgust. “I find it amazing that EPA would be doing this. We just went through a major effort to come up with a rational, logical set of air quality standards that were doable.”

It doesn’t make sense to take a standard that the county and others are already struggling to meet and make it stricter, he said.

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“I think this is just another one of these things where you get some knee-jerk-reaction bureaucratic people back in Washington who don’t have a concept of what goes on in the real world,” Stratton added. “They just sit in their offices and come up with statistics.”

Even local environmentalists expressed concern that the new standards would throw a wet blanket over past efforts. Pointing out that both the nation’s and Ventura County’s air has shown steady improvement in the past decade, Neil Moyer, head of Ventura County’s Environmental Coalition, said the environmental community will probably experience a sense of frustration.

“There haven’t been too many circumstances where people have been able to run up the flag and say we’ve made progress,” Moyer said. “Now the rug is being pulled out from under them. . . . It’s just disturbing when the goal line seems to be in vision and all of a sudden somebody, in this case EPA, throws up a cloud.”

Beside the tougher standard proposed for ozone levels, which will change from 0.12 parts per million cubic feet of air, measured during a one-hour period, to 0.08 ppm, measured over an eight-hour period, EPA is also proposing a new standard for fine particulate material.

Health officials have recently concluded that tiny particles of dust, soot and other compounds pose a much more severe health risk than previously thought. To combat that risk, the EPA has proposed a new standard that would regulate particles of 2.5 microns in diameter. A micron is one-millionth of a meter wide. The current standard regulates only to 10 microns.

Baldwin said very preliminary monitoring--done in anticipation of the revised standards--indicates that Ventura County may meet those new particulate standards.

“It looks real good,” he said. But he stressed the need for much more data before drawing final conclusions.

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A battle is brewing over new EPA air standards. A1