Press Mention St. Petersburg Times May 30, 2002
SACE Quoted
Groups plan to sue EPA on smog
In this mention
A coalition of environmental groups, including the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, announced plans to sue the EPA to force enforcement of stricter smog standards set five years prior and upheld by the Supreme Court. Stephen A. Smith, SACE's executive director, emphasized the need for political will to implement known pollution control solutions. Under the new standards, two Florida regions—Tampa Bay and Pensacola—would be designated as violating federal smog limits.
We know what to do. I think it's a matter of just having the political will to do it
Stephen A. Smith
Original clipping
PDF didn't open? Open it in a new tab →
Full transcript
Groups
plan to
sue EPA
on smog
Knight Ridder Newspapers
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 Thursday to sue the EPA to force it to act. The agency said it needed two more years before beginning to enforce the tighter restrictions.
The Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups want the EPA to rule that 108 cities — with a combined population of more than 165-million — violate federal smog standards.
Under the current, more relaxed rules, 73 areas — with 118-million people — are in violation.
Under the tougher standards, two parts of Florida flunk: the Tampa Bay area and Pensacola.
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, national policy director for the American Lung Association, a health advocacy group based in New York. Her group would be 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, Tenn., environmental group.
EPA officials said Thursday 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.
The new smog standards are 33 percent 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; Cleveland-Akron, Ohio; Charlotte, N.C.; Lexington, Ky.; Columbia, S.C.; Biloxi, Miss.; Columbus, Ga.; Macon, Ga.; and Fort Wayne, Ind.