Smog Panel’s Powers Upheld

Southern California’s smog-fighting agency has the power to force cities and private contractors to purchase fleets of low-polluting vehicles, a federal judge has ruled.

The decision, hailed Monday by environmental groups and the South Coast Air Quality Management District, at least temporarily reinstates a series of controversial fleet rules for trash trucks, transit buses and other vehicles that had seemingly been invalidated last year by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a little noticed part of its ruling, the Supreme Court left the possibility that the fleet rules were not preempted by federal law if they could be shown to be part of a state’s right to purchase equipment as it sees fit. The Supreme Court sent the case back to U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to decide that and other questions.

Judge Florence-Marie Cooper concluded in a ruling released Friday that the fleet rules fell under the state’s purchasing authority and thus were legal because the AQMD is acting as an arm of the state in regulating Southern California’s air pollution.

“This decision is a major victory -- not for pollution regulators but for air quality and public health,” California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, whose office helped defend the rules in court, said in a statement. “The district did not approve the rules in a bureaucratic vacuum, but in response to studies that showed that 70% of the cancer risk in [Southern California] air pollution comes from diesel exhaust.”

The Engine Manufacturers Assn., the Chicago-based trade group that challenged the rules, will probably appeal the decision, said spokesman Joe Suchecki. It opposes the rules because they effectively ban public agencies and many contractors that provide services for them from purchasing diesel engines in Southern California.

“The AQMD adopted regulations and has spent years trying to enforce them,” said Jed Mandel, the president of the engine manufacturer’s group, which consists of 27 companies, including General Motors, Ford, Caterpillar and Briggs & Stratton. “Now they are no longer regulations, they are state purchasing requirements? Obviously we think the judge’s conclusions are in error.”

The seven fleet rules adopted by the South Coast air district in 2000 and 2001 applied to public agencies as well as private contractors who provided services such as trash removal.

As a result of the rules, public and private agencies in the greater Los Angeles area have bought more than 5,500 trash trucks, transit buses and other large vehicles that run on cleaner alternative fuels, AQMD officials estimate. They projected that the rule was currently reducing about three tons per day of smog-forming nitrogen oxides, or roughly 1,100 tons per year. More than 60% of the region’s transit buses are running on cleaner alternative fuels, mainly natural gas.

However, the biggest result of the ruling may be that it upholds the authority of the local regulators to expand their reach as they attempt to reduce air pollution in the Los Angeles region, which still has some of the worst air quality in the country.

The Bush administration had entered the Supreme Court case on behalf of industry, angering some air quality officials, who argued that federal officials should either tighten pollution rules or allow state and local officials to pursue their own solutions.

South Coast officials and environmentalists said Monday that last week’s ruling may once again clear the way for the Port of Los Angeles to impose anti-pollution requirements on the businesses that have leases with the port, for example. That is one of the options being studied by a task force appointed by Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn that is seeking to reduce pollution at the port to 2001 levels.

“We are closely looking at this case in light of the issues at the Port of Los Angeles,” said AQMD’s lead counsel Kurt Wiese, adding: “There are things we will do in the future that are based on the authority the court clarified we had.”