Remaining Sources of Air Pollution Targeted

The fight for clean air in Ventura County has come so far that local smog fighters say they have nearly run out of places to further cut emissions.

Over the past three decades, regulators have attacked smoke and fumes coming from such sources as smokestacks, solvent tanks, boilers, auto shops, paint spray booths, dry cleaners and bakeries.

The air is still unclean, officials say.

But it is dramatically better than it was a decade ago. And unlike previous years, most emissions today come from the cars and trucks that clog Southern California highways--pollutants that fall outside the jurisdiction of the Ventura County Air Pollution Control District.

Although a few additional pounds of pollution can still be wrung out here and there, officials say, any further gains will require new technologies and result in only small improvements at big costs, leaving the local agency looking at a shrinking list of potential control measures.

“We have been very successful reducing smog-forming emissions, so successful there’s not much left to do to reduce emissions from stationary sources,” said Richard H. Baldwin, air pollution control officer for the county.

“The low-hanging fruit is long gone, and we’re now trying to regulate the more difficult things,” he said. “We’re getting toward the end of the rules we can adopt that will give us large emissions reductions.”

There is still room for improvement, however.

The district is preparing to target paints and solvents used by consumers and businesses. Those chemicals produce about a third of the smog-forming fumes now released in Ventura County--nearly five times the amount of pollution generated by all the county’s oil and gasoline operations.

Early next year, the air district’s governing board is expected to consider a measure to demand the reduction of solvent in residential and industrial paints. The regulation would eliminate about 700 pounds of hydrocarbon gases from Ventura County skies daily, reducing paint fumes by 10%, agency officials said.

A second rule would, in effect, require small businesses to switch to water-based solvents. Chemicals used to clean parts and tools at auto shops, colleges and lawn-mower repair businesses produce about 2 tons of air pollutants daily, but have never been regulated.

The control measure now under development would cut those fumes by 90%, said Mike Villegas, manager for rule development for the air district.

“These are small units, but they are everywhere,” Villegas said. “When you add them all together, it’s a lot of emissions.”

After those measures are in place, the local air district will shift its focus to monitoring air pollution and ensuring that the gains are not overturned. Amendments to several minor rules will be considered, but their effect on air quality will be minimal, Baldwin explained.

“We’re getting very close to the end of our remaining large controls, and everything else will be very small,” he said. “It will close a chapter.”

But environmentalists say it is much too soon to consider the fight for clean air finished.

They point to recent studies that indicate that even achieving existing federal standards fails to provide safety against smog.

To provide greater health protection, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed new standards for soot, dust and ozone three years ago. Ventura County does not now achieve the proposed ozone standard, which uses an eight-hour average reading to more accurately represent a person’s exposure while outdoors.

Simi Valley exceeded that limit 13 times last year, and three violations occurred in Ojai and Thousand Oaks. All cities in Ventura County meet the proposed soot and dust limit.

However, industry groups successfully challenged the new federal standards in court and it will be up to the U.S. Supreme Court to determine whether the limits are allowed to become law.

The current national ozone standard requires that air not contain more than 120 parts per billion of ozone for more than one hour at any location. “Most air quality bureaucrats recognize the one-hour standard is not sufficient to protect public health,” said Tim Carmichael, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Coalition for Clean Air. “There are limits to how much you can control pollution at an oil refinery, so we have to move from pollution control toward pollution prevention.”

Air quality has been improving rapidly in Southern California as advanced technologies, ranging from clean fuels to low-pollution consumer products, spread through the marketplace.

The results are apparent in the skies over east Ventura County.

The county is officially designated a severe region of the country for ozone pollution, but current trends could soon change that. Only two violations of the federal one-hour ozone standard occurred in the county last year, and so far this year there have been none.

The limits have being exceeded primarily in Simi Valley for just a few hours annually. A region is deemed to have met the ozone standard if it has no more than three violations in three years.

As a result, the EPA rated Ventura County as the 16th smoggiest region in the nation--a little better than Dallas, but slightly worse than Washington D.C.--between 1997 and 1999.

That is a significant improvement from the EPA’s previous reporting period, when the county was ranked the eighth worst place in the nation for ozone.

Those gains come at a time when population growth in the region is putting more cars on the road. They are joined by heavy trucks powered by diesel fuel moving goods for the nation’s galloping economy.

Even though a new car today is about 95% cleaner than one from a decade ago, there are more of them on the road and people are driving farther. As a result, factory and business emissions are declining, while pollutants from vehicles make up a bigger slice of the air-pollution pie each year.

For example, in 1983, cars, trucks and buses in the county contributed 78 tons daily of the nitrogen oxide and reactive organic gases that compose smog, or 46% of the emissions from all sources. Today, cleaner vehicles contribute less total pollution--about 60 tons daily--but a bigger proportion--57%--of all emissions, according to the air district.