Officials May Have to Quicken Pace of Air Cleanup in County

Local officials working to strip more and more pollutants from Ventura County’s smoggy skies may soon be slapped with a lawsuit forcing them to step up the pace.

At issue is the fact the county’s Air Pollution Control District has missed several interim deadlines outlined in its clean-air blueprint, which tackles pollution sources from smokestack emissions to fumes from dry-cleaners and auto body shops.

There isn’t time to spare in a county with the fourth worst air in the nation, argues environmental lawyer Marc Chytilo. As chief counsel of the Environmental Defense Center, he put the county on notice that a lawsuit may be filed as soon as Oct. 6.

“We need to keep making forward progress,” he said, or the county will face “a public health cost: Kids with asthma can’t go out and play when the air is bad. People with respiratory problems need to severely curtail their activities. Worker productivity is adversely affected.”

Business leaders are alarmed by the lawsuit threat, saying a costly legal battle could undermine some gains already made in reducing smog. Worse, they say, if the local clean-air plan is scrapped, that could lead to a draconian federal plan.

The local plan to satisfy federal clean-air standards, approved in 1995, resulted from a much-heralded alliance among business, environmental and government leaders.

A lawsuit has the potential to void all that hard work and compromise, worries Mitchel B. Kahn, president of the Ventura County Economic Development Assn., a key player in that alliance.

“We put together a plan, and the federal government accepted it,” fumed Kahn, an Oxnard lawyer. “Now [an environmental] defense group moves here from Santa Barbara, looks around for issues and says, ‘You have this plan, but you’re not moving fast enough. We’re going to sue you.’ Not that anybody asked them to, but they’re going to sue.”

Air quality officials, meanwhile, say they have tackled the biggest sources of stationary pollution in order to meet federal Clean Air Act standards by the final 2005 deadline.

They have sliced emissions from pollution sources under their control, such as factories and power plants, dry-cleaners and auto body shops.

“We’re ahead of schedule from a reduction standpoint,” said Mike Villegas, a manager at the Ventura County Air Pollution Control District.

To meet federal standards, he said, “You need to reduce your emissions by certain percentages by certain dates. We’ve met and exceeded that.”

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Yet, air pollution control officials acknowledge they have missed some interim deadlines set forth in the local emissions reduction plan.

Saying projections were overly optimistic, the district is seeking to push back--but not abandon--some incremental deadlines for regulating emissions.

District officials have drafted a new timetable for cutting pollution from commercial boilers, pleasure boats, house paint and even the gas tanks used for fueling lawn mowers.

Scott Johnson, the district’s planning manager, cautions there are no more easy targets for reducing emissions. Local air quality officials only have control over stationary sources of air pollution.

Other sources of smog do not fall under local control, particularly air quality enemy No. 1: motor vehicles. Cars and trucks account for more than half of the county’s air pollutants.

Given these constraints, Johnson said, some deadlines must be postponed.

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Furthermore, he said Ventura County is not a large enough market to force changes in some products, such as requiring paint manufacturers to reformulate paints to emit fewer pollutants. But as Los Angeles undertakes similar reduction measures, Ventura County’s skies will benefit from cleaner paint formulas.

The latest legal tussle in the air quality war comes as residents are breathing a bit easier and enjoying what could be the county’s cleanest year in decades. Although the smog season is at its peak, the county has violated federal standards for healthful air only twice this year.

The current struggle underscores the difficult task of meeting national standards--a task that is only going to get harder as the Environmental Protection Agency tightens its ozone controls.

Smog’s main ingredient, ozone, is a nasty air pollution stew of a chemical reaction. It forms when a mixture of hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxide simmer in the sunlight.

The county produces about 85 tons per day of hydrocarbons and another 73 tons per day of nitrogen oxides, based on 1990 figures.

To reach federal heath standards, hydrocarbon emissions will have to be reduced to 42 tons per day and nitrogen oxides to 42 tons per day, according to the local plan.

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Overall, the county must reduce ozone-causing emissions by 75 tons per day. About 4% of that amount--about 3 tons per day--would be effected by the deadline changes.

That total is too small to wage a legal war, said Ventura County Economic Development Assn. board member Bob Michels, a production manager for Imation Corp. in Camarillo.

“How many cars is that?” Michels asked. “One? Two? Maybe two smoking cars. And how many millions is [a lawsuit] going to cost the citizens of Ventura County?. . . . As a citizen, that sounds kind of crazy.”

A lawsuit is not a sure thing, said the Environmental Defense Center’s Chytilo. Before deciding whether to sue, Chytilo said he wants to see what responses the Air Pollution Control District and the business community formulate.

If the measures effected by the deadline changes are not practical, he said, the district should find others to offset the lost cuts.

This is not the Environmental Defense Center’s first foray into Ventura County air quality policies. A long-running lawsuit in the 1980s helped spur the writing of a federal clean-air plan for the county, which, in turn, prompted the local blueprint.

The EPA was forced to prepare the federal plan after the U.S. Supreme Court ended a lengthy court battle.

When the EPA approved Ventura County’s 1982 Air Quality Management Plan that failed to show the county would reach minimum health standards, the Citizens to Protect the Ojai hired the Environmental Defense Center and sued the EPA.

A 1988 settlement produced a court order requiring the EPA to devise a plan to clean up the county’s smog.