By Randy Lee Loftis, The Dallas Morning News Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Nov. 25--Stand in southernmost Dallas County and you're breathing dirty air. Take one step south into Ellis County, which has North Texas' biggest industrial polluters, and suddenly the air is clean u at least in the eyes of the law.
That kind of legalistic line-drawing, which has irked environmentalists for years, will be on center stage as state and federal officials scramble to put a long-delayed tougher federal smog standard into play.
The action comes under a proposed legal settlement between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and health and environmental groups. The groups sued to make the EPA implement the tougher standard, which has been on the books but not enforced since 1997.
By April, officials in Texas and other states must tell the EPA which areas have illegally dirty air under the new rules; a year later, the EPA must finalize the list. If regulators go by past practice, they'll list all or part of particular metropolitan areas u Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, for example u as violators.
Inside such areas, limits on industries and other pollution sources are tighter than outside u even just a few yards outside. That's why new power plants serving the four-county area of Dallas, Tarrant, Collin and Denton u the zone that officially violates the current smog standard u are going up in Ellis County, just outside the violation zone.
But that violation zone is likely to expand under the newer, tougher standard to include Ellis as well as Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, Denton, Parker and Rockwall counties, state air-pollution figures show.
Officials at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality wouldn't discuss how they would choose the areas to go on the list. EPA officials haven't yet told the states how to compile those lists.
The new and old standards are often called the one-hour and eight-hour standards, reflecting changes in how the government measures smog. Industries challenged the new eight-hour standard in court, but the Supreme Court backed the new standard in 2001. Environmentalists sued to force the EPA to implement the standard.
Because the new standard allows less smog or ozone in the air than the current one, more areas will violate it. But even with more counties included, officials still face the same challenge of trying to control local smog with mostly local measures u something many experts say can't be done.
Only much broader controls by states and the federal government on major pollution sources such as power plants and cars will guarantee clean air, they say. But some worry that the regulators aren't willing to tackle those topics. They cite federal and state reluctance to tighten controls on coal-burning plants and automobile emissions and fuel efficiency, plus other sources.
'That basically leaves the decisions to [utilities],' said Jim Marston, head of the Texas office of Environmental Defense, one of the groups that sued to implement the new standard.
Federal officials acknowledge that smog isn't just a local phenomenon. They say they're working with the states to put more regional controls in place.
'We're seeing a lot of regional controls that will bring a lot of marginal ... [violators] into attainment,' said Tom Diggs, regional air planning chief for the EPA. Texas' most recent smog plans, he noted, include tighter limits on power plants and vehicle fuels for the eastern third of Texas, a step meant to improve Dallas-Fort Worth air quality.
The EPA won't regulate a broader area than necessary, Mr. Diggs said. 'We anticipate the areas will be large, but not a whole state,' he said.
But Mr. Marston said Texas and federal planners had missed previous opportunities to expand pollution controls, jeopardizing North Texas' chance for cleaner air.
In early September, people in North Texas and across the entire eastern United States found out how completely smog ignores county or state lines.
A gigantic blob of dirty air rose in the upper Ohio Valley u home to many big, coal-burning power plants u and moved east and south.
Within days, tens of millions of Americans from Vermont to Arkansas were breathing smoggy air. The cloud's southern end moved into North Texas before the cloud started breaking up.
Computer-generated tracking maps for Sept. 10 show an unbroken cloud of smog covering all or parts of 20 states and part of Canada.
Within that cloud, levels of ozone u the part of smog that hurts people's lungs u were high enough over eight-hour periods to make breathing difficult for sensitive people. The new smog standard seeks to lower that risk.
That and other incidents point out the futility of trying to cut smog with little more than ozone-action days, restrictions on hometown businesses and other strictly local measures, environmentalist say.
'You might not have to designate all of northeast Texas [as a violation area], but certainly you've got to look far beyond the four-county area,' said Mr. Marston of Environmental Defense. 'That would take care of building all those power plants in Ellis County.'
The EPA's Mr. Diggs said the agency would help the states craft solutions that combine local and regional controls.
The Ellis example Ellis County might be a small-scale illustration of the need for regional controls. Texas officials successfully argued in the early 1990s for limiting the Dallas-Fort Worth smog violation area u and therefore the tightest regulations u to Dallas, Tarrant, Collin and Denton counties.
Ellis County, the next county south, is home to cement and power plants whose emissions drift north. The state has ordered pollution cuts from cement plants, but rules on industrial pollution, especially on new sources, are looser there than in the four-county area. That's contributed to an industrial building boom there.
Although its air is legally clean, Ellis County has recorded ozone violations repeatedly in recent years, giving Gov. Rick Perry the option of asking the EPA to extend mandatory smog controls there. State officials have refused to take that step, saying existing control is adequate.
That leaves environmentalists hoping that the new smog standard changes things.
'Ellis County violates the one-hour standard, and it will violate the eight-hour standard,' said Katy Hubener of the Blue Skies Alliance, a North Texas clean-air advocacy group.
'It should have been included in the first place.'
To see more of The Dallas Morning News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.dallasnews.com.
(c) 2002, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
