Clean Air Plan Causes a Dust-Up

For the last six months, ever since he put pen to paper on a historic package of air pollution bills, state Sen. Dean Florez has been itching for a fight in his backyard.

He had the cheek, after all, to demand that agriculture, the most powerful industry here, give up its 60-year-old exemption from clean air rules. The fight, at last, has begun -- with a punch that Florez says he never saw coming.

The maverick Democrat from Kern County is not only facing opposition from local lawmakers who find it hard to defy agriculture, the region’s biggest employer. He is also battling urban legislators -- Assembly members from Southern California and the Bay Area -- who admittedly have no interest in farm issues and consider themselves advocates for the environment.

Big city colleagues whom Florez counted on to force agriculture to do more to clean the air -- Assembly Democrats such as Lou Correa of Anaheim and Leland Yee of San Francisco -- have suddenly turned into foes after hearing the complaints of farm groups.

In a committee vote last week, the two lawmakers opposed a Florez bill that would end agriculture’s exemption and demand that farms and dairies use less-polluting equipment and methods. Seven other committee members from urban areas, including Assemblyman Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) abstained in the vote, ensuring the bill’s defeat in committee.

Now Florez is engaged in a last-ditch fight to resurrect the legislation. It is a battle that finds him accusing his colleagues from Los Angeles and San Francisco of caring about the health of their own children while ignoring the health of kids in this fast-growing farm belt, which has emerged as the nation’s smoggiest basin.

More than 16% of the children in Fresno County, the highest rate in the state, suffer from asthma.

What makes this Capitol quarrel -- a feud complete with dueling committee hearings -- so disconcerting to folks back here is that it has little to do with clean air and everything to do with petty politics, they say.

Florez may be over-brimming with the righteousness of his cause and unwilling to smooth the way with his colleagues, they say. But some of the urban lawmakers have made it clear to colleagues that their goal in opposing the clean air legislation is a partisan matter. They are seeking to protect the Assembly’s most vulnerable Democrat, Nicole Parra (D-Hanford), from defeat next election.

Parra’s district happens to include some of the biggest dairy farms in the country -- ammonia-spewing factories with 3,000 Holsteins and more. In November, Parra won the seat by a bare margin, 277 votes. If she loses the support of the farm lobby, it is reasoned, her seat will surely go to a Republican.

Florez says nothing would make farm groups more pleased with Parra than for her to lead the way in killing or watering down his bills. It doesn’t help matters that the two Latino politicians, both young and highly ambitious, have been engaged in a sort of Hatfield and McCoy feud that dates back several years to when Parra was a congressional aide.

On past contentious issues, Florez has accused Parra of betraying her roots and siding not with farm workers or the poor but with powerful growers.

“You are standing on the side of those who would like to be allowed to pollute just a little more,” Florez wrote to Parra last week. “I am standing on the side of children with asthma, and for them there is no compromise. Personal relationships should not matter when it comes to doing the right thing.”

Parra says she supports a clean air bill that would put the valley in compliance with federal standards. But she believes the legislation in its current form would hurt the valley’s economy. She and her staff have declined to be more specific. “Mr. Florez wants to make this a personal dispute when the focus should be on policy,” said Nicole Winger, Parra’s spokeswoman.

Even as the San Joaquin Valley has overtaken the Los Angeles basin as the smoggiest region in the country over the last few years, farmers here continue to enjoy a special status, burning their uprooted trees and vines in bonfires and plowing their cotton fields into clouds of dust.

In March, Florez introduced SB 700 to end agriculture’s historic exemption, along with other bills to ban open-field burning and control dairy emissions by Jan 1, 2005. One bill seeks to expand the 11-member regional air district board to include four new members with no farming or oil industry ties, including a respiratory specialist and an environmentalist. Other bills in the Florez package call for tax-exempt bonds and other funds to help farmers underwrite the costs of converting to cleaner equipment.

Florez has held 10 hearings up and down the valley to meet with farmers and residents, tweaking but not fundamentally altering the bills. Farm groups have repeatedly questioned why the legislation was targeting their industry when on-road vehicles and sprawling suburbs account for the lion’s share of pollution here.

Florez’s reply was simple: Agriculture is the only industry exempt from federal and state clean air rules. In addition, he argued, environmentalists have sued the local air district and the EPA to end the farm exemption and force a cleanup. The lawsuits have put billions of dollars in federal highway funds for California in jeopardy, highlighting the need for decisive action, he said.

Eight of the bills have passed in the Senate. Then last week, on the eve of Assembly consideration of SB 700, Florez says he was sucker-punched. Farm bureau lobbyists had gone to Yee and other urban lawmakers to complain that Florez had shut them out of the process. Parra wrote to her colleagues saying she was opposing SB 700 and the bill to add a medical and an environmental voice to the local board.

The opposition was enough to defeat SB 700 in committee. Several of the urban lawmakers who abstained or voted against the bill deny they tried to protect Parra or caved in to pressure from farm groups. Yee, for one, says he refused to support the measure because agricultural interests had not been given a full seat at the negotiating table.

“My opposition wasn’t about politics or Parra. It’s about process,” he said. “The two sides have never sat across the table from each other and talked about this historic bill. That just boggles my mind.”

Yee said at least one of his colleagues mentioned protecting Parra as his reason for opposing the bill. But several legislators contacted by The Times denied that politics had played a role in their decisions.

Yee decided to hold his own hearing Tuesday night -- opposite a hearing held by Florez -- to urge agriculture and Florez back to the table. A second vote by the appropriations committee should come Friday, he said, and he has not ruled out supporting the measure.

“The way Dean has been going about this is all wrong,” said Yee, a child psychologist and first-term assemblyman. “The guy needs therapy.”

Florez says it is ridiculous to think that the farm lobby never got a chance to fully address SB 700 and the other bills. “What were all those months of hearings about?” he asked. “For all this opposition to come at the last minute is a pure power play.”

Farm groups say they now support ending agriculture’s exemption. What they continue to dispute is the wide net cast by SB 700. It would not only require permits and regulations of big industrial farms but of small and medium-sized vineyards and fruit orchards, as well.

“The problem with the Florez bill is that it assumes that if you’re a farmer, you’re a gross polluter,” said Karla Kay Fullerton of the Fresno County Farm Bureau. “If you have one tractor, you are treated the same as the farmer with 100 tractors. It’s just too broad.”