SHOWDOWN: Industry claims cutbacks would hurt construction companies.
This Thursday a showdown looms in Sacramento over one of the most sweeping environmental regulations in years: capping diesel emissions from more than 180,000 off-road commercial vehicle engines. If enacted, the regulation would cost the state’s construction industry billions of dollars over the next 12 years.
The meeting of the California Air Resources Board will also put new board chairwoman Mary Nichols on the hot seat. Nichols has just taken over an agency in administrative turmoil after the abrupt departures of former board chair Robert Sawyer and executive director Catherine Witherspoon, with the latter saying advisers to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger intervened to slow down the agency’s aggressive environmental actions.
Citing premature deaths and other health risks from diesel emissions, air board staff last year unveiled a regulation to require off-road diesel equipment operators to reduce diesel particulate emissions 85 percent from 2000 levels by 2020 and to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions 32 percent over the same time frame.
The regulation targets a wide variety of equipment, including backhoes, tractors, skiploaders, forklifts and airport ground support equipment. Operators would either have to install pollution control equipment or replace current engines with cleaner-burning ones. The agency puts the total tab over the next 12 years at between $3 billion and $3.4 billion.
But the proposed regulation has prompted fierce opposition from the construction industry, which says the actual cost to comply will be closer to $20 billion and that a shortage of new engines could force many companies and operators out of business.
“What CARB has proposed is devastating to construction firms like ours,” said Andrew Vasconi, president and founder of A.J. Vasconi Constructors in Concord. “I would probably have to retire equipment and reduce my fleet size instead of replacing equipment.”
The outcry from the construction industry and an alliance of other industries was so strong that the air board backed away from adopting the regulation as planned in May and agreed to reconsider it this week.
In an attempt to sway the board, the Construction Industry Air Quality Coalition last week unveiled a counterproposal that delays final implementation from 2020 to 2025. It also eases up on the reporting requirements; instead of giving the air board an annual inventory, equipment operators would only have to do so every three years.
Coalition president Mike Lewis said the delay would give time for cleaner-burning engines to be more widely available. Federal law will not require those engines to be made until 2015; Lewis said five years is too short a time to switch out more than 100,000 engines.
Erik White, an air board staff worker, said this alternative “falls short.” He said that board may incorporate elements of the alternative to give more flexibility to the industry.