Wilson Veto Kills Clean-Air Transit Funds

Angering local air-quality officials and environmentalists, Gov. Pete Wilson on Monday vetoed a clean-air bill that would have provided nearly $10 million a year for creating advanced low-polluting vehicles and fuels to combat smog in the Los Angeles Basin.

The veto abolishes a 10-year-old program in which motorists in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties are charged a $1 fee when they renew their car registration. The money is used by the South Coast Air Quality Management District to subsidize businesses developing cutting-edge transportation technologies, from fuel cell shuttles and electric cars to school buses and trucks powered by natural gas.

AQMD board Chairman William Burke called Wilson’s veto a political act of retaliation because the AQMD refused to help win support for an appointee backed by the governor’s chief air-quality aide, John Dunlap.

“It’s revenge,” Burke said. “What the governor has done is hold the whole [Los Angeles Basin’s] population hostage to the whims of one of his employees. I feel sorry that the governor would take the advice of political operatives and put the citizens of Southern California at risk.”

Last week, Dunlap warned the AQMD that he would advise the governor to veto the bill unless the AQMD board helped win Senate confirmation of Wilson’s sole appointee to the AQMD board. The appointee, Orange County consultant Wayne Nastri, was not confirmed because of a controversy over his ties to industry; his term ran out Saturday.

Dunlap, who chairs the California Air Resources Board, was unavailable for comment Monday. Last week he said he was not holding AQMD officials hostage when he said Wilson would veto the bill unless they helped with Nastri. Instead, he said Wilson would only be comfortable with authorizing the money if Nastri could help choose valid projects to fund.

In June, Burke reported to the Senate that Nastri’s Newport Beach environmental consulting firm is a subsidiary of a large pesticide company regulated by the AQMD. Nastri was the third AQMD appointee of Wilson’s that the Senate refused to confirm.

Wilson spokesman Ron Low said Monday that Nastri’s ouster had nothing to do with the veto of the clean-air program. Instead, Low said the $1 fee “goes against the whole idea of reducing taxes.”

In his written explanation to the Assembly, Wilson said the bill approved by the Senate and Assembly is “inconsistent with recent efforts to reduce vehicle registration taxes.”

Environmentalists criticized Wilson for vetoing a program they called vital to cleaning up smog.

“It is really ridiculous that the governor chose to veto this bill for no good reason,” said Tim Carpenter, program manager of the Coalition for Clean Air. “It’s a pity that personal politics are interfering with a program that does wonders for encouraging investment in the technologies we need to ensure clean air in the future.”

Air-quality experts say Southern California cannot breathe air that complies with national health standards unless ultra-clean transportation technologies are developed and brought onto the market over the next decade. The new technologies are considered too costly for companies to develop without some government help.

The AQMD’s program, begun in 1988, “has worked to improve the state of clean-fuel technology, keep the automotive industry interested in developing it, and brought it closer to being commercialized than ever before,” said AQMD spokesman Bill Kelly.

Without the subsidy, some vehicle technologies might not be developed or might appear more slowly, Kelly said.

If Wilson had signed the bill, the AQMD would have issued grants to companies totaling about $10 million a year from 1999 through 2004. The AQMD will still collect a $4 surcharge on vehicle registrations to fund other projects.