Air District sounds alarm on state’s greenhouse gas reduction proposal

Although the Air District acknowledges and supports the importance of extending the California Cap & Trade program and appreciates several provisions of the bills, including increases in the amount of penalties that violators of air quality regulations pay, the District has expressed four primary areas of concern in the proposed legislation.

The four primary areas of concern by the Air District are:

• The preemption of local air district authority to regulate greenhouse gases.  California Air Districts have expertise in regulating GHG’s and it will require all experienced agencies to effectively develop and enforce reduction efforts.
• Funding necessary, but not identified for additional air monitoring program and air quality plan efforts.  Shifting resources to these potential new requirements would cause, cutbacks in other critical program areas still required by state and federal regulations. The Air District would have to sacrifice other programs to focus on these new objectives.
• Requirements for additional local air monitoring and community plans need to be initiated at the Air District level.  Compliance efforts are more successful when initiated locally.
• The Air District continues to object to the CalEnviroscreen method to identify disadvantaged communities in the Bay Area.  The Bay Area Air District went through an extensive 10-year process to map and identify disadvantaged communities and to discount that effort is detrimental to residents living in these communities who are disproportionally impacted by air pollution in the region.

View press release(110 Kb PDF, 1 pg, posted 7/13/2017).