EPA Gets Tough on Areas With Poor Air Quality

More than half the U.S. population, including 90% of Californians, live in areas with unhealthful levels of smog, and their communities will be required to cut pollution to meet a new, more stringent standard, Environmental Protection Agency officials announced Thursday.

“Exposure to ozone is a serious public health issue,” EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt said, identifying the communities that violate the new standard. “These ozone standards are strong medicine.”

Thirty-nine California counties are among 474 counties nationwide that violate the new health-based standard for ground-level ozone, the primary component of smog.

The 159 million Americans -- including 30 million Californians -- who live in these areas could experience aggravated asthma, reduced lung function and intensified chronic lung diseases, all of which are associated with elevated ozone levels.

By identifying the counties that violate the standard, the EPA is forcing state and local governments to make tangible efforts to clean up pollution and is spurring the federal government to approve regulations that help them accomplish the task.

The EPA designated “nonattainment” areas based on how far they have to go to achieve the new standard; the further they have to go, the stiffer their requirements for cutting pollution, but the more time they have to clean the air.

As expected, most of the counties were in California, the Northeastern United States and the Great Lakes region, with smaller pockets of pollution in the Southeast, Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, Colorado and Arizona. Large sectors of the country -- including the entire Northwest, Alaska, Hawaii, Florida, Mississippi and most of the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains states -- had no counties violating the ozone standard.

Eight national parks, including Yosemite, Sequoia, Kings Canyon and Joshua Tree, are in areas with harmful levels of ozone, according to the new designations.

Ozone, an odorless and colorless gas, is worst during the summer because it forms when emissions of nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds are heated by the sun. Cars, trucks and buses, factories, power plants, refineries, construction equipment and farm machinery are some of the biggest sources of this pollution.

States will have three years to develop their plans for meeting the new standard, and their deadlines for coming into compliance range from 2007 to 2021, depending on the severity of their problem.

The new standard is a result of a Clean Air Act requirement that the EPA set health-based standards for ozone and other common air pollutants, review them every five years and revise them if needed to protect human health. The Clinton administration announced the new standard in 1997, but implementation was delayed because of lawsuits.

Medical science has shown that even low levels of ozone aggravate asthma and other lung diseases, impair immune systems and can cause permanent lung damage.

Under the old standard, air was considered unhealthful when it measured above 120 parts per billion of ozone over a one-hour period. Now air is considered unhealthful if it measures an average of above 85 parts per billion over an eight-hour period.

The announcement means that about 100 counties will, for the first time, be required to take at least some of the steps to ease pollution that have been underway for decades in Southern California.

This could mean that residents of those counties would be required to get emissions tests for their cars, that proposed roads and highways would be scrutinized for their effect on air pollution, and that manufacturing facilities would have to install modern pollution controls when they build plants or expand or modify existing ones.

“Today’s decision brings millions more Americans under the nation’s smog-protection program, including millions of Americans who have never before had the benefits of these public health protections,” said Vicki Patton, a lawyer for Environmental Defense, an environmental group.

Most communities sought to avoid being on the EPA’s list. In the months leading up to Thursday’s announcement, dozens of local and state politicians appealed to Leavitt to omit certain counties. Initially, the states nominated only 412, although the EPA proposed 506.

Public health and environmental groups complained that the EPA had inappropriately removed some counties from the list in response to political pressure. “We had some political decisions that were made that took some counties out of nonattainment areas,” said Janice Nolen, director of national policy for the American Lung Assn.

For instance, DeSoto County in Mississippi, part of the Memphis, Tenn., area, was left off the list. So was Houston County, part of the Macon, Ga., area, Nolen said. Both should have been included, she added. Keeping them off the list means their vehicles, factories and road construction projects will not be subject to the same restrictions as in neighboring communities.

“It just makes it harder for communities to address their pollution problems,” Nolen said.

Leavitt and other EPA officials said they were confident their decisions were consistent and defensible. No area removed from the list had air measuring above the standard, said Jeffrey Holmstead, assistant EPA administrator for air programs.

The EPA will help communities meet the new standard with a variety of air pollution rules that have recently been completed or are in the proposal phase. One will clean emissions for diesel buses and trucks. Another, expected to take effect next month, will clean pollution from construction equipment and farm vehicles, which are the largest source of smog-forming nitrogen oxide emissions in California, said Jerry Martin, a spokesman for the state Air Resources Board.

One reason communities have been reluctant to be designated as violating the standard is that, depending on the severity of an area’s ozone problem, manufacturing facilities may need to install costly pollution controls or switch from coal to more expensive and less readily available natural gas. Communities also may have to find ways to cut pollution elsewhere when companies want to build plants.

“Worst-case scenario is that high control costs force businesses to close or cut back investments,” said Jeffrey Marks, director of air quality for the National Assn. of Manufacturers, the country’s largest industrial trade organization.

But EPA officials said that giving Americans cleaner air to breathe is worth that cost.

“Even though clean air isn’t free, the price we pay is very small in comparison to the health benefit we get,” Holmstead said.