THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 9, 1994 TAG: 9410080025
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
Virginia won a major victory over the federal leviathan last week: The Environmental Protection Agency backed away from a threat to withhold the state's highway funds if it did not agree to unnecessary and cumbersome vehicle-emissions testing in Northern Virginia. Gov. George Allen and Secretary of Natural Resources Becky Norton Dunlop deserve credit big time for sticking to their guns and making EPA run up the white flag.
EPA had insisted that the 1990 amendments to the federal Clean Air Act mandated the tough new emissions testing. It would have required that testing and repair be carried out under different roofs, rather than correcting any failure on the spot at the service station, as Virginia now permits. The EPA suspected local service stations of winking at failures by the cars of favored customers.
EPA's proposed solution? A dozen centralized emission-testing centers in Northern Virginia. (Hampton Roads would have come later.) Cars that failed the inspection would have to be repaired elsewhere, then returned for a retest. Fail twice, and retest twice. Meanwhile, citizens could catch up on War and Peace in long lines at the inspection centers.
Secretary Dunlop proposed a compromise: Independent inspectors would rent space in service stations, allowing motorists whose vehicles fail the test to get repairs done promptly. After much hemming and hawing, Mary D. Nichols, the EPA's top administrator for air, appears to have agreed. But the devil is in the details. EPA might yet seek to cause damage when the agreement is finally hammered out on paper.
Why did EPA suddenly see the light? Perhaps because it was feeling the heat. Maine, the first state to install the expensive new testing equipment, began operating it on July 1. After a month of long lines, computer foul-ups and test results that sometimes passed and failed the same car on the same day, state officials threw up their hands and suspended the program. The Pennsylvania legislature, fearful of an election-year explosion of voter anger, voted to suspend implementation until next year. Gov. Robert Casey says he will veto the bill; he wants the program killed altogether.
Forcing the EPA to accept a different testing program is indeed a victory, but the fact remains: There is no scientific basis for all this flailing about. Thanks to catalytic converters, auto exhaust is 90 percent cleaner today than it was 20 years ago. What EPA is targeting is that last few percentage points of pollution, which becomes exponentially more expensive to remove the closer one comes to 100 percent clean.
Also, as anyone who has ever been caught in traffic knows, buses and heavy-duty diesel trucks emit a good deal of the exhaust out there. Yet, thanks to the trucking and public-transit lobbies, these vehicles are exempt from testing.
Secretary Dunlop, Gov. Allen and Virginia's senators and members of Congress all deserve credit for foiling the EPA carjackers. Now if it could only see sense on issues such as wetlands and ozone and get its collective head out of the clouds and its feet firmly back on Earth. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
MS. DUNLOP
by CNB