White House limits smog testing

By Seth Borenstein
Knight Ridder Newspapers

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive

Fewer air polluters are likely to be caught if agencies measure emissions from smokestacks less often, which critics say will happen under the new rule.

Under the change, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will limit how often federal and state environmental police can monitor some stacks. The rule applies to hundreds of companies that have smokestack emissions not monitored under specific EPA rules aimed at curbing such problems as acid rain from power plants and smog in cities with heavy air pollution.

In the late 1990s, the EPA at times would require large plants to monitor smokestacks more often than twice every five years, as spelled out in the Clean Air Act, if the companies weren't being checked under other EPA provisions. Industry groups sued the EPA to stop requiring such additional monitoring, saying it wasn't legal for the agency to do more than the act required. The EPA agreed and issued the new rule yesterday, saying neither it nor state environmental agencies could require pollution checks more than twice every five years in those cases.

"This regulatory rollback would make oversight and enforcement by states, the EPA and citizens extremely difficult, if not virtually impossible," Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and Vermont said in an objection to a court settlement preceding the rule.

EPA spokesman John Millett said the rule doesn't apply to most of the 15,000 major plants regulated under the Clean Air Act. "There are plenty of other means at the disposal of permitting authorities to address monitoring gaps," he added.

William Lewis, a Washington attorney representing the nonutility manufacturers who sued, said the new rule could apply to hundreds of plants, although the old rule requiring more monitoring had been used in only about a dozen instances.

Bruce Buckheit, the EPA's air enforcement division director from 1996 until he resigned in protest last month, conceded that the old rule rarely was invoked. But he said the threat of frequent monitoring was "an important tool" for environmental cops.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company