EPA Quietly Setting Out To Do
What It Promised It Wouldn’t

(Editor’s note: How many months has it been since Clinton EPA Administrator Carol Browner stood before Congress and the national media to promise that her agency’s Draconian new clean air rules wouldn’t impact agriculture? Savvy observers insisted at the time that she was lying through her teeth in a desperate effort to head off a congressional push to overturn the new rules. Well, it worked. Lawmakers rolled over, and now Browner’s agency is doing exactly what she swore before Congress it wouldn’t do. The following article deals mostly with a town problem, but the kicker is tucked in at the end. It would be well to note that the Associated Press has either forgotten Browner’s vow or considers it politically incorrect to mention it.)

PHOENIX —(AP)— Vacant lots. Unpaved roads and dirt parking lots. Plumes of dust. Breathing problems.

Combine them and you get a measure of the magnitude of Maricopa County's clean-air problem and what federal regulators say must be done to reduce it.

Since the county didn't fix its particulate pollution problem itself, the federal Environmental Protection Agency is about to step in with a proposed remedy of its own.

Carol Browner, administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, was expected to sign a plan today ( March 20) to fight the county's dirty-air problem. It's expected to apply to thousands of vacant lots, some as small as a 10th of an acre, and to hundreds of miles of unpaved roads and other aspects of the county's airborne grime.

That's just fine with Linn Wells, who lives on an unpaved stretch of street in northwestern metro Phoenix on which traffic has doubled or tripled since it was extended last year.

"We have just been eating, drinking and sleeping dust," Wells said.

But it's a nightmare for Steve Peplau, manager of Maricopa County's air-quality division.

"It's unrealistic," Peplau said Thursday.

Given the lot size to which the plan's expected to apply, "it could be half of a parking lot in the back of a bar," he said.

What's a proposal today will go through hearings and other adjustment processes before becoming final on July 18, but no matter what the lot size, the EPA plan won't bring the area into compliance with federal clean-air laws, said David Baron, a Tucson attorney who successfully sued to enforce the law.

Baron said he doesn't know how much the EPA plan would reduce levels of particulates, those tiny bits of dust, soot and grime that affect breathing and can lead to deaths among the young and the elderly, but he says he knows it's not enough: The agency's own computer models show it won't meet the standard.

Still, said Baron, "some progress is better than none. It will make the air cleaner."

EPA spokesman Randy Wittorp said the one-10th-acre standard — that's a space that could be as small at 60 feet wide by 70 feet deep — was drawn from the county's own dust-control rules which the plan would tighten while requiring stricter enforcement.

Property owners will have a variety of choices on how to keep the dust down, said Colleen McKaughan, EPA administrator for Arizona. They could pave the lot or street. They could put down gravel or apply a chemical treatment. Owners of vacant lots could plant vegetation, or put up a fence to keep pedestrians out, she said.

"This is not high-tech stuff," she added.

No one's sure how many such lots there may be in the county, but a survey will be made after the plan becomes final.

As for roads, there are 817 unpaved miles under county jurisdiction, although some may be gravel. Several years ago, Phoenix reported 146 miles of dirt road.

Farmers needn't worry just yet, but the EPA plan eventually will include controls on agriculture, which regulators estimate contributes 15 percent of the area's particulate pollution. Those rules will be drawn up over the next year and a half.