POLLUTION New air quality rules take effect after 7-year delay

Nineteen states meet the tougher new standards.
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WASHINGTON -- About 170 million Americans now live in areas that the federal government says are too smoggy to be healthy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will announce today. That's 60 million more than lived in such areas under previous EPA standards.
The air in the affected places hasn't changed much, but tough new standards that define what the federal government considers unhealthy are finally going into effect after seven years of delay.
At the same time, the Bush administration is adding new flexibility for regulators that could allow some communities to avoid imposing rules requiring cuts in pollutants from smokestacks and tailpipes.
The designation of smog violators to be announced today stems from new standards that are much tougher than the ones that have been in effect since 1979.
More people in smog zones
The number of counties officially designated as having unhealthy air will jump to about 470 from 221, putting 170 million people in official smog zones. Regions that rarely if ever had been found in violation of federal air rules -- including San Francisco Bay, suburban Detroit, Tulsa, Denver and Syracuse -- now will join the smog-clogged.
Nineteen states, primarily in the low-populated West or in places with steady air-cleansing winds, meet the new standards.
Once an area is put on EPA's air pollution list, the agency traditionally forces local officials to institute smokestack controls on power plants and other industries, require cleaner gasoline, enforce mandatory car emission inspection programs and impose other pollution restrictions.
But some counties added to this new dirty-air list may be excused from requiring stringent local measures because the Bush administration is trying to be more flexible, EPA's air quality chief said Wednesday.
That's what worries environmental groups, who generally applauded the EPA's smog moves, yet it's also what gave hope to business leaders.
"This isn't about the air getting dirtier; the air is getting cleaner," EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt said in a speech to the National Press Club Wednesday. "It's about our standards getting tougher and our national resolve to meet them."
More stringent
Today, the EPA will designate 470 counties as what it calls "nonattainment" areas under a new smog standard that was first drafted in 1997; it has been delayed ever since by court battles and bureaucratic inertia. The new smog standard is about one-third more stringent than the older 1979 standard. Some 110 million people lived in areas considered dirty under the 1979 standard.
State and federal officials agreed that 412 counties -- with about 150 million residents -- were obviously too smoggy. The EPA proposed 94 more counties as violators of the new smog rules, but those additions were opposed by their respective states.
Leavitt said that most of these marginal counties would be labeled as smoggy and forced to take some kind of corrective action.
"In the last 30 years we cut the pollution in half and now we're going to raise the bar for everybody. No exceptions," Leavitt said in his speech.
The 36 counties that will not be put on the smog list were not identified, but are scattered throughout the country, said Jeff Holmstead, the air quality chief at EPA. That means that no disputed metropolitan area -- such as San Francisco Bay and Denver -- will be entirely exempted from the tighter standards despite the wishes of state officials, Holmstead added.
Praise from critics
The action brought praise from people who usually attack the Bush administration's environmental policies.
"This is really a landmark in clean air," said Frank O'Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust, a Washington environmental group. "I give them credit for essentially acknowledging that smog is a widespread public health problem. But the problem here is that they are not going to move aggressively enough to solve that problem in a timely way."