Environmental groups plan to sue EPA over new smog standards

Environmental groups plan to sue EPA over new smog standards
Agency isn't enforcing tighter rules to rein in cities' pollution

By SETH BORENSTEIN
Knight Ridder News Service

WASHINGTON — Five years after the Environmental Protection Agency set strict new limits on smog and 15 months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the legality of the standards, the federal government still is not enforcing them.

A coalition of environmental groups announced plans yesterday to sue the EPA to force it to act. The agency responded that it needed two more years before beginning to enforce the tighter restrictions.

The Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council and environmental groups want the EPA to rule that 108 cities — with a combined population of more than 165 million people — violate federal smog standards. In Tennessee, this would include Nashville.

Under the current, more relaxed rules, 73 areas — with 118 million people — are in violation. The new rules would add 35 more areas, in which 47 million people live. Many of those communities are in the Southeast.

Putting a city on the official smog list starts a process that eventually yields a complex but systematic state-federal-local pollution control plan.

Each year's delay means hundreds of thousands of avoidable asthma attacks and thousands of unnecessary hospital admissions, said Janice Nolan, the national policy director for the American Lung Association, a health advocacy group based in New York. Her group is a plaintiff in the case.

"We know what to do. I think it's a matter of just having the political will to do it," said Stephen A. Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, a Knoxville environmental group.

EPA officials said yesterday that they were working to get the new regulations in place but had been delayed because the Supreme Court ruling did not clear up all the issues that the new limits raised, including how they should be implemented.

"There's a lot of things going on. We're not sitting on our hands doing nothing," EPA spokeswoman Prudence Goforth said.

The new smog standards are 33% tougher than those that have been in place since 1979. Under the new rules, a city would be in violation if air monitors found smog levels of more than 80 parts per billion four times over a three-year period.

Among other cities that appear to violate the new rules but not the old are: Detroit; Kansas City; Cleveland-Akron, Ohio; Charlotte, N.C.; Lexington, Ky;

Columbia, S.C.; Biloxi, Miss.; Columbus, Ga.; Macon, Ga.; and Fort Wayne, Ind.

"For those of us in the Southeast, we very much want to see the action taken, and we very much want the EPA to do its job," Smith said. "We need healthy air in the Southeast, and we certainly don't have it now."

Bill Kovacs, the vice president for environmental affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which unsuccessfully sued to stop the new standards, said the EPA's cautious approach was justified. It needs new smog data, he said, because what's available now is based on "junk input."

The EPA plans to craft a draft "implementation strategy" incorporating the Supreme Court ruling, existing smog data and the new standards, spokesman Joe Martyak said. That strategy should be finished in 2003, with a list of smog violators released in 2004.

Those dates trouble Howard Fox, an attorney for Earthjustice, an Washington environmental group. "If they're saying 2004 right now, what are they going to say next? 2005, 2006?," Fox said.

According to Earthjustice, the EPA is behind on at least 15 legal requirements under the Clean Air Act. For example, the EPA has not released fresh figures on the risk of toxic substances in areas nationwide. Until this week, the agency promised on its Web site that they would be available in "summer 2001."

Rudolf Husar, director of the Center for Air Pollution Impact and Trend Analysis at Washington University in St. Louis, said the delay in putting out the list of smoggy cities seemed unusually long.

"The data is out there," Husar said. "This is not a technical delay."