Region seeks more power to fight pollution

Insisting there is no other way to meet looming federal deadlines to clean up the nation’s dirtiest air, Southern California air regulators will seek greater authority to regulate ships, trains and other large sources of air pollution.

“We’re at the end of our rope,” said William Burke, chairman of the South Coast Air Quality Management District board. “The state and federal governments simply have not acted quickly enough to address the public health crisis.”

Burke said the AQMD board will ask Congress to amend the Clean Air Act to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board to enact every available, feasible control on mobile sources, which he said are responsible for 80% of the region’s smog. The AQMD also wants expanded authority to regulate mobile sources, arguing that its current powers over vehicle fleets, for instance, are not enough.

The nation’s two largest railroads have sued the district for trying to impose tougher anti-idling laws on locomotives in the Los Angeles Basin than elsewhere, saying it cannot do so under federal law.

The Clean Air Act largely gives responsibility for such pollution sources to federal and state regulators, while local air districts oversee stationary sources such as oil refineries and power plants.

But regional air quality officials said the EPA has repeatedly postponed tougher regulations on locomotives, cargo ships and airplanes.

An EPA spokesman said new regulations should be ready “sometime this year.” The EPA had previously said technology to retrofit locomotives was not yet available. Environmental groups have accused the agency of stalling to aid industry.

To help its cause, the AQMD has hired two high-profile Washington lobbyists, while in Sacramento it renewed a lobbying contract to pursue new state laws if necessary.

At its January meeting, the board approved a one-year, $115,000 contract with Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s longtime chief of staff and former legislative director, Mark Kadesh, and his firm, and a one-year, $99,000 contract with Tony Podesta, a Democratic lobbyist in Washington, D.C.

The agency last month renewed contracts totaling $369,000 with former state Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) and a subcontractor for lobbying in Sacramento.

“We need all the help we can get,” said AQMD spokesman Sam Atwood.

The agency’s officials face a daunting task in bringing the Los Angeles region into compliance with tough standards for diesel soot and ozone by 2015 and 2020, respectively. Although air quality here has improved dramatically in the 30 years since the AQMD was created, Southern California still experiences 5,400 premature deaths a year because of air pollution, according to state estimates.

The AQMD maintains that the state air board’s plan for regulating mobile sources falls short by 100 tons a day in needed reductions of nitrogen oxides, key ingredients of smog. The agency also faults the state board for signing secret voluntary agreements with BNSF Railway and Union Pacific, which the AQMD says don’t require the railroads to do anything new.

BNSF spokeswoman Lena Kent said both railroads will spend $260 million on new locomotives and other technologies to reduce California emissions.

California Air Resources Board spokesman Jerry Martin said the state’s railroad agreements are already producing substantial emissions reductions, while the AQMD has accomplished nothing other than racking up huge legal bills from the railroads’ lawsuit.

State air board staff also said there have been significant cuts in diesel particulates in the last five years. But they said many of the measures recommended by the AQMD were not technically feasible or could cripple industry in the state. Martin said that although the AQMD might not be able to make the 2015 deadline for soot, “we think they can do it ... probably by 2017 or 2018.”

Working alone, the South Coast agency is not going to be as successful, said John White, a former AQMD lobbyist who as a state legislative aide helped craft language creating the air district. “For California to be successful in terms of reducing tons of air pollution, we have to have the governor and the air board also working together,” said White. Still, he and others said it was not likely that the AQMD would win special amendments in the federal Clean Air Act.

“I am very sympathetic,” he said, “but I’m not sure a regional agency is going to be granted broad new powers.”

White said, however, that the aggressive effort could pay off by pushing EPA “to the wall” by using pressure from Democratic members of Congress to take action on large pollution sources.

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janet.wilson@latimes.com

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Southland pollution

AQMD officials say they need more power over mobile pollution sources, such as trains, to lower future pollution levels significantly. They now regulate mostly stationary commercial sources such as oil refineries.

Sources of NOx* (2002)

Mobile sources: 91.8%

Stationary consumer sources: 4.4%

Stationary commercial sources: 3.8%

* Nitrogen oxides, key ingredients of smog, emitted in the Los Angeles air basin in summertime.

Source: South Coast AQMD