Tough New Smog Rules Get Long Deadlines

The Bush administration’s new air quality standard will impose tougher requirements on the nation’s smoggiest regions -- Southern and Central California -- but postpone the compliance deadline for so many years that local air officials worry that the regulations could be rendered ineffective.

Local regulators also complain that while the administration is imposing stricter standards, it is undermining the ability of localities to meet the deadlines by advocating policies favored by certain industries.

In Southern California, the new rules extend by 11 years, to 2021, the date when the number of unhealthy air days must be reduced to near zero. The San Joaquin Valley, which has missed several previous deadlines, has three additional years, until 2013, to eliminate its smog.

The deadline for the San Joaquin Valley is sooner because although the problem there is severe, federal officials feel it is less intractable than the pollution in Southern California. The previous deadline was 2010, a date that many valley air officials concede would have been difficult to meet.

Under the EPA’s new way to measure smog -- a standard that measures air quality over an eight-hour period -- the Los Angeles region, which includes Los Angeles and Orange and much of San Bernardino and Riverside counties, was out of compliance 120 days last year. The San Joaquin Valley was out of compliance 134 days, making it the nation’s new smog capital. But while the valley has more bad air days, the peak levels of smog there are much lower than the peaks in Southern California.

Under the new rules announced Thursday by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the average amount of ozone -- a key ingredient of smog -- must be less than 85 parts per billion throughout an eight-hour span. The old rules allowed an average of 120 parts per billion for one hour.

From 70% to 80% of pollution in the two regions comes from what regulators term “mobile sources” -- a category that includes cars as well as trucks, trains, airplanes and ships. But gardening equipment and even household cleaning agents also contribute to the problem. The mandatory ozone reductions will have to be made during a span of time in which the state is expected to add millions of people.

“The reality is that we don’t have the luxury of time and we certainly don’t have the luxury of procrastination,” said Sam Atwood, a spokesman for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which regulates smog in the Los Angeles region. “There are a lot of serious health effects happening right now from smog in Southern California.”

Smog is blamed for aggravating a variety of respiratory problems, most notably asthma. Children and elderly people are the most vulnerable.

Local regulators generally do not have jurisdiction over mobile pollution sources, which are primarily the responsibility of state and federal authorities. The Bush administration’s policies on mobile sources have dismayed local officials.

“The frustration is that so much more needs to be done on sources such as ships, aircraft and locomotives,” Atwood said.

Overall, regulators and environmentalists praised the new ozone limits, but expressed alarm that the new deadlines will allow harmful pollutants to linger in the air for many more years.

“It’s an issue of momentum and direction. We can’t afford to stand still,” said Mary Nichols, who pushed for the new ozone standards as the former secretary of the California Resources Agency.

“We just keeping moving the deadline further and further out, and I suppose the hope is that one day we’ll just meet it, but unfortunately hoping won’t make it so,” added Nichols, now the director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment.

EPA officials touted the new rules as being far better for public health than current regulations because eventually the air will be cleaner than it would have been under the old one-hour rules.

Jeffrey Holmstead, the assistant EPA administrator for air programs, said the new policy was designed to ensure that there would be “no loss of momentum” in the fight against ozone.

It is precisely that loss of momentum that environmental activists say they worry about.

“Our fear, No. 1, is we’ll see backsliding in California and around the country,” said Gail Ruderman Feuer, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The EPA has adopted rules designed to prevent that. The rules prohibit air districts from dropping any regulations that are on the books.

But environmental advocates fear that the extended deadline will greatly reduce the incentive for local officials to enforce those rules strictly.

EPA officials said there is no penalty should an air district see the number of unhealthy air days increase between now and the deadline.

Moreover, the new smog deadlines are not set in stone. Air quality officials in the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California can apply for extensions that would further push back the compliance deadlines, said Matt Haber, deputy director for air for the EPA region covering California.

Officials of the San Joaquin Valley’s air district expressed pessimism that their region can meet the new deadline. The eight-hour standard “is actually more difficult for us to meet,” said Anthony Presto, a district spokesman. “We’re concerned about being able to achieve the deadline.”

The San Joaquin Valley has amassed one of the worst cleanup records in the nation, local and state officials concede. Over the last 12 years, the EPA and local air district have missed at least 24 deadlines to clean the air. The air has grown so bad in the trough-like valley that pollution in the foothills of Sequoia National Park -- home to the world’s largest trees -- is often much worse in summer than it is in downtown Los Angeles.

In recent months, the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District became the first in the nation to seek the designation of “extreme noncompliance” with federal law.

The EPA adopted the new rules after settling a lawsuit with the American Lung Assn., which argued that the agency was not doing enough to protect public health.

Local regulators contend that other actions by the Bush administration may undercut the new standard.

In a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court, diesel engine manufacturers are challenging a district rule that requires cities and owners of vehicle fleets to replace worn-out diesel-burning vehicles with clean-fuel cars and trucks. The administration has sided with the industry, arguing that there should not be different emissions rules in various locales across the nation.

“We need the federal government’s help; we do not need them in this case to take a position that is contrary to improvements in clean air in this area,” said Peter Greenwald, a senior policy advisor for the South Coast district.

In other cases, regulators complain that the federal government has delayed measures that would cut emissions from trains, ships and construction equipment. Local regulators, however, are hopeful that several pending federal rules will help matters. An EPA regulation will lessen pollution from trucks beginning in 2007. And the EPA is expected to issue a new rule in the next few weeks that would clamp down on pollution from construction equipment.

Representatives of those industries disagree, saying that the region’s air problem is largely a result of the time it takes to persuade the public to try cleaner technologies.

“We already have the cleanest businesses in the world. This is not a question of letting business off the hook, it’s a question of how quickly consumers can start using cleaner products,” said Bob Wyman, an attorney at Latham and Watkins who represents a coalition of manufacturers in air policy matters. “We have those products, but it takes time to turn over old cars and individual trucks and we couldn’t do it by 2010.”

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this report.