New Mexico Cattlemen Concerned
About Haze Regs Over Long Term

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Caren Cowan is concerned about the year 2064. More accurately, she's concerned about federal regulations that are to affect air quality by that year.

"It all goes back to the Clean Air Act," says Cowan, the executive director of the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association.

The Clean Air Act was passed some 30 years ago.

While a lot of the environmental laws were initially passed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they have triggers that are now coming due, Cowan says.

Cowan is part of a working group, representing various interests in New Mexico, that is developing a regional haze rule.

"It includes the oil and gas industry, the construction industry, the coal industry, plus all the regulatory agencies, the Forest Service, the BLM, the state land office, the tribes and environmental activists," Cowan says.

The standards now being developed — or more accurately, the procedures for developing the standards — will impact haze, as the name implies. This includes smoke, dust or any particulate matter that might cause a haze.

"Right now, they're just around class one air areas, which includes national parks and wilderness areas, but there's this huge move to declare a whole lot more of the West's wilderness areas," Cowan says.

One of Cowan's concerns is where all this is headed.

The Grand Canyon had a group that met over a four or five-year period in the early 1990s, Cowan says.

"They came up with what the standards ought to be for this part of the world," Cowan says.

Then the western governors became involved.

"They said, 'Gee whiz, nobody talked to us about this,'" Cowan says.

They, in turn, set up a western regional air group.

"There have been nine states participating in that process," Cowan says. "They came up with another process for doing this."

Each state of the Union has to develop a process by which they determine where they are and do their base monitoring for the years 2000 to 2004. Then they set their goal, a "reasonable" goal as determined by the government, for where they want to be by 2064.

"Now, our charge is to determine how we're to improve air quality back to natural by 2064," Cowan says of the process in the Land of Enchantment.

In 2018, the state's plan for complying with the rule will be reviewed to determine whether they are making reasonable progress toward their goal.

"If you're not," Cowan says, "then at that point, you have to begin to implement whatever it's going to take to address the issue."

The deadline for setting those goals and completing the rule is Dec. 31, 2003.

One of the options being discussed would allow industry to trade air quality credits as a way to hedge against violation of the rule.

"The mining companies and some of the big sources are looking at that as giving them a lot of flexibility in how they address things," Cowan says.

If a company or group doesn't meet its goals, under the proposed option, they could buy air quality credits from someone who was well below their goals.

"You can see where there might be some really high value in some of those things over time," Cowan says.

The problem Cowan says she's having is that big industry and government agencies are pushing for that option.

"Any time a government agency pushes me toward something, I'm a little leery," Cowan concedes.

She says she is also uncomfortable with pressure to make such decisions in a short time span.

"Basically, the environment department initially tried to tell us that we had to make all these decisions, and we were going to do it in a two-month timeframe," Cowan says.

Apparently, others in the working group trying to develop the new haze rule have similar misgivings. Several of the states have dropped out and, in New Mexico, some of those involved have expressed a desire to slow the process down.

"California and Nevada have opted out of this process," Cowan says. "Idaho is thinking about opting out."

Now the question is becoming how many states have to be involved in this process before they can market air quality credits.

"Colorado is also looking at this whole thing," Cowan says, "and trying to decide where they're going to fall."

Arizona is still on board and working on their rule, as is New Mexico.

"The New Mexico Environment Department hired a technical expert who just happened to work for one of the big mining companies in the west (Phelps Dodge) and who just happened to be working for Arizona and has drafted their whole plan," Cowan says.

The haze rule could significantly impact New Mexico and neighboring states in the Southwest, she says. The rule would deal with such things as controlled burns, a hot topic in the forests of the West after a summer of explosive forest fires.

"We're sitting here with I don't know how many acres of forests in this state that need treatment," Cowan points out, "and fire is definitely one of the tools that needs to be used."

The question, Cowan asks, is how much will they be able to use fire to thin forests?

The rule would also deal with matters such as dirt roads and the dust that is raised by the traffic on them.

"Do you know how many dirt roads we have in New Mexico?" Cowan says rhetorically.

A federal government interagency group apparently determined that air quality problems in New Mexico are the result of industry, according to a letter sent out by the group last April, and the U.S. Forest Service is saying that industry needs to be regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Cowan, however, points to last spring and asks what was going on in New Mexico in April. Massive forest fires were obviously impacting air quality in New Mexico and Arizona.

There have also been reports over the last few years that dust from storms in Asia is settling in the U.S.

"That's our fear on this whole thing," Cowan says. "New Mexico is not a pollution-generating state. We're a receptor. We're going to get stuff from Arizona, from Colorado, from Mexico, from California. We're scared to death that we'll make a misstep and find that our producers are being penalized for something that happened someplace else that we have virtually no control over."

Right now, the rulemaking process is concerned with areas around national parks and wilderness areas, but any action taken now could come back and haunt cattlemen if and when the rules are expanded to include areas where there are feedyards.