State OKs New Plan for Clean Air

Trying to stem a rising tide of smog, state regulators approved a new clean-air plan Thursday to accelerate emissions reductions across Southern California, though the strategy is unlikely to achieve healthful air by the end of the decade as required by law.

More than 400 schoolchildren, elected officials and concerned citizens lobbied the state Air Resources Board during a daylong public hearing in Diamond Bar to move with urgency against air pollution. Though smog has been in precipitous decline in the Los Angeles region, the long-term trend toward improved air quality has been threatened by resurgent ozone in recent years.

“If there’s one environmental issue Californians are united behind, it’s action on air pollution. It’s past time for caution. It’s time for action,” said Tim Carmichael, executive director of the Coalition for Clean Air.

In an eleventh-hour attempt to bolster the plan, air quality officials committed to cutting smog-forming emissions by 120 tons per day by 2008, much sooner than originally planned, and pledged to seek authority and funds from the Legislature to knock out another 66 tons a day. Those reductions are critical because they would fall upon pollution sources that have historically been difficult to regulate. The plan calls for expanding existing controls and developing new ones for consumer products; heavy-duty diesel trucks; dirty, old cars; and off-road engines such as forklifts, backhoes and lawn and garden equipment.

Environmentalists said they would study the plan more carefully, though they did not rule out a threat made earlier in the week to file a lawsuit if air quality agencies did not approve a stringent plan. Similar lawsuits filed in 1994 and 1987 led to stronger anti-smog measures in previous plans.

For Southern Californians, the changes would come in the form of electric lawn and garden tools, solvent-free cleansers and room fresheners and trading older, higher-polluting cars for cash rebates. More frequent smog checks would occur, and tailpipe emissions could be monitored using infrared beams that scan tailpipes in parking lots. Smoky trucks and buses would be retrofitted with soot traps and smog-busting catalysts.

“The Air Resources Board rose to the occasion and is helping Southern California achieve clean air,” said Barry Wallerstein, chief of the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

But environmentalists and major business leaders said the new plan still gets too few reductions too slowly; they said the state air board should have gone further to slash emissions. The new plan fails to specify methods to cut about 260 tons of daily emissions -- 40% of the amount required to achieve clean air by the deadline.

“They missed an opportunity to deal with the true long-term challenge. That’s unfortunate,” said attorney Bob Wyman, who represents Northrop Grumman, Chevron, Texaco, Reliant Energy, the Irvine Co. and Toyota, among other major companies

“It’s a step in the right direction, but there’s still a great big hole that needs to be filled seven years out and the clock is ticking,” Carmichael said.

The war on smog has taken on a growing sense of urgency. This revision to the smog plan is critical because it is the last time air quality officials can adjust the clean-air strategy in time to meet a 2010 federal deadline by which ozone must be reduced to safe levels. Failure to meet the ozone standard by the end of the decade could lead to economic sanctions, including restrictions on business expansion and loss of billions of dollars in federal highway funds, in the region that includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

The air pollution master plan is a document the size of a telephone book that contains dozens of control measures to reduce ozone and haze-forming particles.

The plan targets smoke from fireplaces and charbroiler restaurants, exhaust from cars and boats and emissions from livestock and irrigation pumps at farms. New controls are proposed for boats, rock-crushing plants and paints. Diesel-powered engines, including those for big trucks, trains and big ships, are targeted.

Costs for the pollution controls are estimated at $3.2 billion and the benefits are expected to be $6.6 billion, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

The plan contains more than 50 control measures, including specific strategies for reducing emissions, ranging from new smog-check requirements to controls for pleasure boats to solvent-free paints and coatings. It calls for energy conservation measures, tax breaks for people who buy clean cars and emissions controls for dairy farms.

“There’s a major [cleanup] effort ahead. This gets us on a more aggressive path, but we still have far more to do. Time is short,” said Alan Lloyd, chairman of the Air Resources Board.

Now that state and local officials have approved the plan, it goes to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for final approval, which is expected by next spring.