State smog test leaves polluters on the road < Previous page

"There are constraints in the federal Clean Air Act, such that you can't use all of the techniques" that might be proposed, said Scott Nester, the Valley air district's planning director.

Case in point: In a privately funded demonstration program, a nonprofit group called Valley Clean Air Now -- or ValleyCAN -- has issued 1,521 repair vouchers worth $760,500 to owners of polluting vehicles at 17 events in cities between Stockton and Arvin in the past three years. Owners can use the vouchers to have their emissions systems repaired at a designated shop.

Kerman farmer Paul Betancourt, the group's treasurer, says the program arose from an interest in finding a "faster, cheaper solution" to cleaning up the Valley's 43,000 gross polluters.

"If we could get those 43,000 cars dialed back to decent levels, I think that would be significant," Betancourt said. "It's an effective solution for a significant part of the problem."

But even if the repairs proved effective and funding sufficient, the lack of a long track record could work against any attempt to count their contributions in the air district's planning.

Established programs like Smog Check can be included in a cleanup plan with few questions asked. But new programs must prove themselves effective first.

In other words, the law sets up hurdles that discourage innovative attacks on thorny problems like gross polluters that slip past Smog Check.

Schwartz says the same "creditability" issue also discourages remote sensing's use alongside or in lieu of Smog Check.

"With no credit for remote sensing, there's no incentive to do it," Schwartz said.

Meanwhile, the creditability requirement protects programs like Smog Check, he said, because it gives agencies "no incentive to find out if your program is working. If you find out it doesn't work, you might lose your credit."

Legitimate questions remain about remote sensing, and they account for at least some of the official resistance.

Finding enough usable sensor sites is one of them. Freeway entrance ramps work best, especially if they are metered. City streets don't work very well because speeds vary and multiple lanes make it hard to tell one car from another.

Cost can be an issue, even if automated sensors are used. But estimates vary. The air board report calculated that remote sensing would cost more than $60,000 per ton of emissions reduced. But for the ValleyCAN program, costs were less than $15,000 per ton, according to Lawson, the Smog Check critic, who also is a ValleyCAN consultant.

Looking at the question differently, Peter McClintock, another consultant who has studied Smog Check, estimates that it costs $335 to find a gross polluting vehicle via Smog Check. Fees paid by vehicle owners for the test account for most of that. Remote sensing, in contrast, spends $155 to find a gross polluter, based on data McClintock gathered from a series of pilot projects.

But such details scarcely matter as long as funding for an attack on gross polluters remains meager.

ValleyCAN got $2 million in startup funds from ChevronTexaco but has had trouble raising more, Betancourt said.

"What we're finding from the corporate guys is that we don't fit their foundations' purposes," he said. "And the state doesn't have any money."

This year's best hope for more state money died before Labor Day when an Assembly committee bottled up a bill giving the air district authority to boost annual vehicle license fees by $30. The resulting cash -- as much as $78 million per year -- would have been earmarked for incentive programs aimed at reducing or offsetting emissions from motor vehicles.

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