San Diego Union Tribune, April 28, 2005

California regulators are expected to adopt the nation's toughest ozone pollution standard today on the heels of a new study that reports nine out of 10 state residents are threatened by unhealthy air despite big improvements during the last decade.

The recommended benchmark would have no immediate time frame for boosting California's air quality, which fails to meet less stringent federal standards in much of the state, including San Diego County.

However, the change would guide long-term state pollution policies and focus more attention on major pollution sources such as vehicles and ports. Also, it may prompt the federal government to toughen its ozone standard, which is under review. Unlike California's guidelines, the federal mandate is backed up by deadlines and penalties.

When the state Air Resources Board convenes this afternoon in El Monte, east of Los Angeles, it must decide whether to align with clean-air advocates who back the proposed standard.

State scientists last month suggested .07 parts per million as the new state rule to protect the health of children, senior citizens and people with breathing problems. They said meeting the proposed benchmark would help California avoid 580 premature deaths, 3,800 hospitalizations and 3.3 million school absences annually. It could take San Diego County more than a decade to reach the standard.

Opponents of the measure include small-government advocates who say it could do more harm than good by diverting funds from other health efforts.

The board's staff and independent observers say the 11-member panel likely will adopt the benchmark.

"This standard will set an important precedent," said Bonnie Holmes-Gen, vice president of government relations for the American Lung Association of California in Sacramento. "We need to have public health standards that clearly identify at what level the air is clean to breathe."

Today, the national association will issue its latest "state of the air" report, which draws attention to persistent air pollution problems. The organization said the air is getting cleaner in many parts of the nation, but that new health studies show ozone pollution is more dangerous than previously thought.

While California has led the country in pollution-reduction efforts, it's still widely regarded as the state with the most serious air quality problems. For example, California still accounts for 14 of the 25 most ozone-polluted counties in the nation. The association estimates that 32 million of the state's 36 million residents are exposed to unacceptable ozone pollution.

Ozone, a major component of smog, is formed through chemical reactions of engine emissions in the presence of sunlight. It is associated with reduced lung capacity and other medical conditions.

Statewide, about 4.2 million people live with lung diseases such as asthma and emphysema, and more than 35,000 people will die prematurely from those illnesses this year, the lung association said.

In San Diego County, where people drive almost 80 million miles a day, ozone pollution remains a major air quality problem. But the situation is improving because newer vehicles with better pollution controls are replacing older cars and trucks.

At the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District, supervisor Robert Reider said the major ozone sources fall under control of state and federal agencies that regulate vehicles and ports.

"All that's out of our hands," he said.

Still, the agency aims to continue reducing smoke from home fireplaces and agriculture burning, as well as the release of toxic emissions from factories.

The lung association's report card gives San Diego County – and 27 other counties in California – an "F" for ozone pollution. This region has received failing grades for ozone since the series of reports began six years ago.

However, the air quality grades mask the wide difference between counties such as Kern, which reported 292 unhealthy ozone days between 2001 and 2003, and San Diego, which reported 36.

The association gives an "A" to counties with no violations over three years.

"We are not grading on a curve," Holmes-Gen said. "It's either healthy air or not healthy air."

At the county air agency, Reider takes exception to the grading system.

"An 'F' is just misleading," he said. "Sure, we have work to do . . . but we are making good progress."

This month, San Diego County was removed from a federal pollution blacklist for tiny pollution particles called PM 2.5. During the last decade, the county has slashed its federal ozone violations from a high of 122 in 1989 to eight last year.

Last week, two free-market think tanks issued an index of leading environmental indicators. The index showed that the city of San Diego ranks second nationally – after the city of Los Angeles – when it comes to improvements in air quality, based on a comparison of air quality ratings from 1980 to 1991 and those from 1992 to 2003.

"Even cities with notoriously poor air quality . . . are beginning to make noticeable and measureable improvement," said index author Steven Hayward of the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute. "This can only be viewed as good news."

At the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which supported Hayward's study, analyst Joel Schwartz argues that California's proposed ozone standard creates minimal benefit for what could be billions of dollars of regulation-induced spending on a variety of cleanup measures.

"They have tunnel vision," Schwartz said of the state air board. "They take a good thing and take it too far to the point where it does more harm than good."

He argues that the money spent cleaning air today offers decreasing returns and takes away dollars from people's budgets for basic needs such as health care.

At the federal level, the ozone standard is .08 parts per million for an eight-hour period, a common time frame for taking measurements of air pollution.

San Diego County's air exceeded that goal eight times in 2004 and six times the year before, according to the county's air pollution agency. The agency attributes all of those violations primarily to smog drifting south from Los Angeles County.

California doesn't have an eight-hour ozone standard. Its air quality benchmarks aren't binding and don't directly create environmental benefits or economic costs.

"It's basically a goal," said Air Resources Board spokesman Jerry Martin.

However, those guidelines are influential because they establish the legal definition of clean air. Policy-makers use them when deciding on new environmental rules, such as what amount of pollutants to allow from engines sold in California.

"Thursday's vote is a sign of whether (Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's) administration is as committed to clear air as its predecessor," said a statement by the Environmental Working Group, an Oakland-based advocacy organization.

A new ozone benchmark would extend how long it takes for San Diego County to meet state air quality rules. If the standard were already in place, the county would have failed to meet it 56 times in 2003, county numbers show.

"We are already moving as fast as we can," said Reider at the county air agency. "So the establishment of the new higher standards moves the goal posts, but we still have the same game plan."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike Lee: (619) 542-4570; mike.lee@uniontrib.com