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Subscribe to PrintBy Russell Clemings / The Fresno Bee
For almost two decades, experts have said that one good way to reduce smog in places like the Valley is to find and fix the very dirtiest cars and light trucks. So-called gross polluters -- generally those emitting at least twice the allowable pollution -- make up fewer than one vehicle in 10. Yet they account for three-fourths of illegal emissions. [Look up your vehicle's smog test results and compare it with others]Studies have shown that many of those vehicles somehow evade the Smog Check program, which is supposed to get them off the road. But promising solutions must run a gauntlet of opposition from bureaucrats who won't acknowledge Smog Check's failings -- or accept that an alternative might work better.Just last year, an analysis showed that Smog Check is as likely to give a polluting vehicle a passing grade as to fail it, and that two in five failing vehicles will fail again within six months of being repaired.The state-run program's flaws leave local agencies like the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District grasping for ways to reduce motor vehicle emissions. The district's main answer: A plan to track down almost 3,000 gross polluters per year and take them off the road. The main problem: Not enough money.So instead, the district is launching a three-year program to target just 600 of an estimated 43,000 gross polluters on Valley roads. At that rate, it would take more than two centuries to round up all of the region's dirty vehicles.Doug Lawson, a former state Air Resources Board scientist and a longtime critic of the Smog Check program who now works for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., says Smog Check has a fundamental problem: It focuses on testing cars when it should focus on finding and fixing gross polluters.The program tests millions of clean cars per year. But in the process, it somehow misses perhaps hundreds of thousands of gross polluters -- and many tons of otherwise avoidable smog-forming emissions.And that, Lawson says, is the main argument in favor of alternatives: "If Smog Check were working as well as they say it is, then it would be finding and fixing the high emitters. But it isn't."State regulations generally define a gross polluter as a vehicle with emissions that are more than twice the legal limit for its year, make and model. To drive such a car is illegal, although enforcement is rare outside of registration.Beyond that, gross polluters are hard to categorize. Many are old, but some are nearly new, transformed into gross polluters by poor maintenance or tampering. Some are owned by scofflaws who don't register their cars and never get smog tests. Some get tests from dishonest shops.A surprising number fail the test, get repairs done, then pass, only to have emissions rise again within weeks or months. Whether that's because of inadequate repairs or new, unrelated breakdowns is not clear. But the state's own random roadside tests show about 40% of failed-then-repaired cars fail again in six months.Whatever the explanation, gross polluting vehicles are one of the few major potential sources left for big cuts in smog-forming emissions. The challenge lies in finding a way to identify them and get them off the streets, either forever or at least until they can be fixed properly.University of Denver chemist Donald Stedman thinks he has the answer. In the mid-1980s, his lab built a device that can measure emissions by focusing a light beam on a car's exhaust as it drives by. Ever since, he has been arguing that it is the best solution to catching the cars that slip through the Smog Check net and forcing their owners to fix them.More than a dozen studies have shown that the device can reliably scan hundreds of cars and pick out the handful with emissions that greatly exceed legal limits.Yet regulators at the state air board and federal Environmental Protection Agency have a long history of resisting proposals to use Stedman's "remote sensing" or similar technology to tackle the challenge of tracking down gross polluters between Smog Checks.The latest state air board study concluded that remote sensors were good at spotting high-polluting vehicles but would cost too much to be a worthwhile addition to the Smog Check program.Critics immediately attacked.The Inspection and Maintenance Review Committee -- a panel of outside experts set up by the Legislature to monitor the Smog Check program -- said that the study may have inflated remote sensing's costs by assuming, for example, that such a program would need three full-time attorneys. It also said the study glossed over Smog Check's shortcomings."When 40% of vehicles [that are] failed and then repaired are found failing again in roadside tests, and when 20% of vehicles passed in stations are failing on roadsides, it appears that Smog Check has some very serious problems and that existing tools and programs aren't solving the problem," the panel wrote.The committee's executive director, Rocky Carlisle, said the panel is waiting for an air board analysis to explain why 40% of repaired vehicles fail again.One of Carlisle's predecessors, Joel Schwartz, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said the new study began with the false assumption that Smog Check was working well and that the only role for remote sensing would be to catch a handful of vehicles that evade it.He termed it "a perfect example of how regulatory agencies can get the answer they want by crafting the questions carefully. ... The way they frame the question is, 'How cost-effective is it to have remote sensing pick up the few crumbs that are missed by Smog Check?' Well, of course it's not going to be cost-effective."One reason Smog Check's support is so entrenched may lie in the odd workings of the main federal air pollution law.Complying with that law, the Clean Air Act, is a primary purpose of both the state and the Valley's air district. It may be even more important than actually reducing smog because failing to comply with the law can jeopardize federal highway funding and severely restrict business expansion.Here's how it works: The law requires states and air pollution districts to write plans showing how they will cut pollution. Those plans contain long lists of control measures, with a tally of the gains expected from each.But here's the catch: The measures have to be not just feasible, but they also have to be acceptable to the EPA, which oversees Clean Air Act compliance. To be acceptable, a measure typically needs a long track record, from which expected emission reductions can be calculated. Measures that EPA officials have not approved, for whatever reason, do not count toward meeting the district's target. A local agency could adopt them anyway, but it would not get credit for them. So it has scant incentive.In short, just because a pollution control technique may hold promise, that doesn't mean the federal government will deem it acceptable for a cleanup plan. And if it's not acceptable -- "creditable," in the bureaucratic lingo -- it doesn't help the district meet its Clean Air Act obligations."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.One bill that did make it into law allows the air district to accept clean donated cars and offer them free to owners of cars that fail Smog Check. But it has an annual cap of 200 cars.So all that's left, for now, is the Valley air district's plan to buy back 600 polluting cars over the next three years. Many of those 600 cars may not even turn out to be gross polluters.The district plans to identify likely candidates from Smog Check records and other data. Owners of those cars will be invited into the program and given a new smog test, a step that makes the buyback program "creditable." But even if their cars pass that test, the owners can still hand over the keys and collect $1,000 on the assumption that the car might be a high polluter anyway.On Sept. 15, ValleyCAN brought its testing equipment, Bureau of Automotive Repair technicians and Fresno City College automotive service students to the college campus for one of its "Tune In and Tune Up" events. It offered free smog tests and issued $500 repair vouchers for vehicles that failed the tests.One early failure was a 1994 Ford Explorer that spewed 1,260 parts per million of hydrocarbons -- unburned gasoline -- at idle. That's several hundred times the emissions of a new car. Its carbon monoxide levels were also high. And its "check engine" light shone steadily on the dash."It's been on for eight years," said the Explorer's owner, John Channel of Laton. "Nobody's ever been able to figure out why."Channel left with a $500 voucher and a list of needed repairs, downloaded from his vehicle's computer by two of the college's students. His was one of 351 vehicles tested that Saturday morning. Of those, 229 -- almost two-thirds of those tested -- failed and qualified for a repair voucher.Since the ValleyCAN effort is voluntary and run by a nonprofit, its emissions reductions don't help the Valley meet its Clean Air Act burden. But even when a buyback or repair program is creditable, as the Valley district's buyback effort would be, only a small share of the credits can be claimed by the sponsor. Most go to the Smog Check program, on the questionable theory that the polluting vehicle would be found and fixed at its next regular Smog Check even if it weren't repaired or junked first.Stedman nevertheless hopes that a project now under way in Southern California will build public support for attacking gross polluters in general and using his remote sensing device in particular.The South Coast Air Quality Management District plans to spend $4 million on an incentive-based program to find and repair or junk more than 1,000 gross polluters in the next year. The district will use remote sensing devices to take more than 1 million measurements of vehicles.Owners of vehicles that appear to be gross polluters will then be invited for a free Smog Check test. Doing the second test ensures that the district at least gets credit for any emission reductions until the vehicle's next regularly scheduled Smog Check. Owners of failing vehicles can get $500 for repairs or $1,000 for scrapping their cars if repairs prove too costly.According to the district, it's the first government program in the nation to couple remote sensing with a repair or scrapping program. Participation is voluntary for owners of vehicles flagged by the sensors.Stedman views the South Coast program as a challenge to other agencies, including the Valley district and the state. And as a sign that sentiment may be turning in his favor: "I think it may be looking better now than ever before."