AQMD Breathes Easy Over Pollution Profits

Re “AQMD Budget in Fine Shape, but Critics Fume at Spending,” May 27: It is infuriating to read that the South Coast Air Quality Management District has been using the substantial fines it collected as a pork barrel. Board Chairman William Burke defended it as a “consensus judgment,” but it has been a consensus of hypocrites. These are elected officials who have been appointed to restore and protect the air quality of all of us, but after mouthing pious phrases, they fall in line with the Regulatory Flexibility Group, the organization representing the major industrial polluters.

Evidently, the members of the board felt that they were not being watched and could get away with wasting the people’s money on projects having a tenuous connection, at best, with cleaning up the air in the L.A. Basin. Thanks to your article, which named names, it is out in the open. It may be too much to ask of the well-entrenched county supervisors to be more responsible, but let us hope that the new mayor of Los Angeles and other more environmentally aware municipalities will do better in their choices for the AQMD.

Emil Lawton

Sherman Oaks

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Just show me the money! That’s what our state and federal representatives are showing us more and more each and every day. Yes, it proves that everything has a price tag, even when it could end up killing us all. The AQMD allowed these large power plants to dispense more nitrogen oxide into the air, just as long as they pay the required penalty of $7.50 per pound over the required limit.

The AQMD wants us to applaud this brilliant decision. However, we have already been operating at record levels since last summer. The AQMD has collected more than $17 million in penalty money--which it has quickly spent--and is now waiting for the rest of the money, which could be as much as $182 million more.

Remember a few years back when most of the AQMD board members got up and walked away from their jobs because they wouldn’t do what our state politicians wanted them to do? Well, nowadays you only have to show them the money!

Edwina L. Hughes

La Crescenta