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State looking to expand air-quality reporting to inform public of toxic hot spots

San Diego Union-Tribune - 3/12/2019

March 12-- Mar. 12--The California Air Resources Board is looking to beef up its mandatory air-quality reporting for industrial businesses, such as cement plants, refineries and oil and gas production.

The move would likely double the number of such companies in the San Diego region required to report, as well as shift the schedule for submitting emissions data from every four years to annually. Reporting is based on air monitoring or modeling that looks at, for example, the amount of fuel used over a specific time period.

To that end, the air board has been holding public workshops around the state, including in the city of San Diego on Monday.

The move is aimed at improving the air board's pollution mapping tool, so that residents can eventually better understand how they're impacted by local sources of air pollution, such as heavy metals and fine particulate matter from diesel emissions.

"This really is a paradigm shift for trying to get better and more granular, so we can better inform what goes into health-risk assessments," said David Edwards, assistant division chief of the air board's Air Quality Planning and Science Division.

Air board officials said they're specifically hoping to better understand the cumulative heath impacts of multiple emissions sources within a specific area.

"The classic example is four corners of a big intersection and each of them have a gas station, and there's an apartment complex behind two of them," Edwards said.

"Is there a clustering effect or a near-source impact that you wouldn't have if it was a gas station by itself?" he added. "Even though they're small sources, we want to be able to see how it adds up."

An official with the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District expressed some concern to state regulators at Monday's workshop that such reporting requirements could overburden the regional agency, unless it received additional funding.

"This is a large expansion of what we've done for mandatory reporting purposes," said Jim Swaney, chief of engineering at the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District. "So a lot more resources have to go into that to do this. Is this though the most cost effective way to achieve the goals that we're trying to achieve?"

The air board adopted in December proposed regulations for reporting toxic air pollution. However, prior to finalizing the rules, the board decided to explore pulling in more facilities into the program that could impact "community-level" air quality.

Twitter: @jemersmith

Phone: (619) 293-2234

Email: joshua.smith@sduniontribune.com

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