Copyright © 1993 Dave Gross

> # It's here: Smog in San Luis Obispo

> #### Dave Gross

Climbing out of the central valley on the road from San Luis Obispo county to Sequoia National Park, you can pull over and stretch your legs at a scenic vista called Eleven Range Point. When the film comes back from the developer, you'll be able to pick out maybe half a dozen of those eleven ranges before they vanish into the central valley smog.

Meanwhile, on the valley floor in Visalia, not only can you not see the surrounding mountains -- you can't even see all the way down the road. Pick up the local paper and you might catch a mildly worried editorial about the possibility of "deteriorating air quality."

In Los Angeles things are getting much better -- which is to say that the air is now merely repulsive, not deadly. Still, the EPA warns that it may have to enforce "no drive days" in the L.A. area to keep pollutants in line with federal standards.

Silicon Valley is socked in with nearly everpresent haze. And even in the windy city by the bay, fog isn't the only thing that "comes on little cat feet" anymore.

In Visalia, where I stopped on my way up to the Sequoias, the smog is a haunting, tangible presence -- at least for someone like me from the friendlier skies of San Luis Obispo county. Even indoors, I felt the smog on my skin. I had an irrational feeling of contamination that filled me with the same sort of chill as I would have if I discovered a dead fly at the bottom of my glass of milk.

The people I was visiting live in a walled-off village of individually styled homes. An artificial moat flows through the compound and families often go out in the evenings and paddle-boat through each others' backyards while the landlubbers wave from their barbecues and swimming pools. The walls keep out the sounds of traffic and the security guard at the gate keeps out the scruffier Mexican-Americans. But the best walls can't keep out the smog, and can at best obscure your lack of vision.

Somehow it snuck up on Visalia while nobody was paying attention, gradually becoming thicker and thicker before anybody thought to complain. People seem to have adjusted. It's like the saying goes: If you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, it'll have the sense to try to get out; If you throw a frog in a pot of cold water, and then slowly bring it up to a boil, the frog will just sit there and cook.

I wondered to myself if it could it happen in San Luis Obispo -- if our "Come Up for Air" license-plate frames could become a bad joke right under our noses. I found out that it's already happening.

### It's Here

According to documents of the San Luis Obispo County Air Pollution Control District (APCD), county air already exceeds the state health requirements for particulates and for ozone, which is "the key constituent of photochemical smog." Furthermore, "ozone concentrations are generally increasing throughout San Luis Obispo County."

The Clean Air Plan (CAP) which was drafted by the APCD was designed to bring County air back within state guidelines. But what I discovered from careful reading of the CAP and other documents and from talking to experts in the field may surprise you. Neither the CAP, nor state guidelines, nor the federal Clean Air Act are designed to make our air look clean again. If the CAP is followed to the letter, and if our county never exceeds another state guideline, our skies may continue to get more hazy and our views less scenic.

"Under certain conditions," according to the CAP, "knowledgeable observers have associated a brownish haze with major NOx [nitrogen oxides] emission sources in San Luis Obispo county." Those of us who aren't so knowledgeable may have noticed the hazes, but not known about their chemical makeup.

Nitrogen oxides, particularly nitrogen dioxide, cause the orange-brown discoloration that most of us associate with especially bad smog. But our county doesn't exceed the state limits for nitrogen oxides in the air. These limits were designed to protect public health, not visibility.

In fact, even smoggy Los Angeles now meets federal clean air standards for nitrogen oxides -- after for years being the only area nationwide in violation of the standard.

Although the authors of the county Clean Air Plan acknowledge that improved visibility is "not a primary goal of the CAP," they say that "the CAP is expected to modestly improve visibility in the county" as a side effect of health-based reductions in pollutants -- including nitrogen oxides. (Because nitrogen oxides can break down into ozone, a part of the plan to reduce ozone levels in the county calls for reduced NOx emissions). The PG&E Morro Bay plant, for instance, which is a major source of nitrogen oxides on the central coast, is being modified to reduce pollution. PG&E says that it will probably be able to reduce NOx emissions at the plant by 90% over the next four years.

"Implementing the Clean Air Plan will definitely have a positive impact on visibility in the county," says Larry Allen, a senior air quality specialist with the county Air Pollution Control District. Dave Morrow, one of the primary authors of the CAP, agrees that any strategies to reduce ozone pollution will also help improve visibility, but if he'd had things his way, the CAP would address visibility issues directly. "I put that in there," he says, but it was taken out by the time the County Board of Supervisors approved it. Now, says Morrow, "it doesn't focus on visibility."

Allen notes that pollution isn't the only cause of hazy skies. Even "sea salt can diminish visibility," he says. "When you have a foggy day but the fog doesn't lift all the way, it may just be water droplets in the air, refracting sunlight. My belief is that the pollutant haze is episodic in nature and occurs primarily on burn days or on days when we have low temperature inversions. But there are a lot of other days when visibility is not that good and it's probably due to natural sources."

Still, Allen says of air pollution, "I think it's here. We don't see it here like we do in a major metropolitan area, but there are certainly days when there is reduced visibility as a result of air pollution."

Dave Morrow says that "from research and reading and my best guess, probably 30% of visibility-reducing haze comes from natural sources -- although a lot of times that's all at once, an extreme event like a fire." On a day to day basis, according to Morrow, 30% is probably a high estimate.

### Homegrown Smog

County residents can't blame their smog on outsiders, either. Our smog isn't creeping in from L.A. or the central valley. On the contrary -- we're smog exporters! According to Morrow, although 80% of the people in SLO County live on the coastal plain, the pollutants produced in this area tend to go straight inland. Airborne pollutants from San Luis Obispo, for instance, go right over Cuesta Grade and, according to Morrow, "the inland valleys" -- Atascadero & Paso Robles for instance -- "get hammered."

"There are some pretty major sources of pollution in San Luis Obispo County," Morrow says, citing the 40 boilers run by PG&E -- including the smokestacks in Morro Bay -- as examples. But PG&E has already begun work to dramatically cut emissions from these plants.

Which leaves one remaining major source of air pollution.

The automobile.

"The biggest controversy is reducing automobile pollution," says Morrow. "I've stood out and counted cars at 7:30 in the morning, and you find that 90% of the people are driving alone. It's tough for them to understand that every time they get in the car, something is coming out of the tailpipe that we're going to have to breathe."

According to APCD documents, on-road vehicles accounted for 39% of nitrogen oxide pollutants in 1987. At the time, generators like PG&E's Morro Bay facility accounted for another 40% -- now that these generators are becoming cleaner, automobiles will represent an even bigger slice of the polluting pie. "The automobiles statewide create 60% of the pollution," says Morrow, "but they aren't being asked to change as much as the stationary sources."

Morrow believes that it's necessary to reduce automobile use. There's some hope for electric- or solar-powered cars some time in the future, he says, but in the mean time, "it's easier to just fill up the front two seats in the car."

Or eliminate cars altogether. "The private automobile is a dinosaur," says Pat Veesart of the County Bicycle Advisory Committee. "It's on its way to extinction. All a thinking person has to do is go out to a highway and open your eyes and look. We are literally destroying our planet with the automobile."

According to Veesart, the Trip Reduction Ordinance (TRO) -- which calls for a 10% shift away from cars and toward bicycles for trips under five miles -- is the real teeth of the Clean Air Plan, although he acknowledges that "it's not being enforced at all."

"It's going to happen. [The TRO] requires businesses to reduce the trips their employees make. It calls for them to have a plan for achieving that goal."

What are needed now, according to Veesart, are economic incentives for leaving the automobile behind. "In Europe they're paying three or four dollars [per gallon] for gas. Once we start paying three or four dollars for gas in this country people will stop driving."

Most of the people interviewed for this article agreed that economic incentives were effective and efficient ways of reducing air pollution. Dave Morrow, for instance, noted that "downtown San Luis Obispo has the highest alternative transportation use. Why? Because it costs $2.50 a day to park downtown. When you have a cheap resource, it's wasted."

Larry Allen says that "market-based strategies" such as "additional gas taxes, or a smog tax on motor vehicle registration, or perhaps the use of toll roads during peak hours, or management of pricing for parking -- all of these are very effective at modifying driving behavior by individuals, but they're also the least popular and they're very difficult to enact locally."

"In the Bay Area," notes Morrow, "they tried to address the automobile problem with things that hit people in the pocketbook, but at the public hearings people vehemently opposed that. It's almost a juvenile response."

I asked Pat Veesart if we ultimately needed a plan as radical as is used in Amsterdam -- where the automobile is being forced out of the city almost entirely and replaced by bicycles. He told me that that's exactly the approach needed, and pointed to the less radical success stories in a number of American cities which have been designed around the bicycle -- Davis, California; Boulder, Colorado; and Eugene, Oregon for example.

### Land Use Planning is Key

Although county population increased by 30% between 1980 and 1988, and vehicle registration in the county increased by 34%, the number of miles driven in the county went up by 50% in the same time period.

Why is this? One problem is land use. According to Dave Morrow, the San Luis Obispo city general plan is a disaster. "We're not building housing in town for the workers. The land use patterns worsen the commuting."

Morrow says that San Luis Obispo's new slow-growth general plan will double the already bad jobs-to-housing ratio in the city. As a result, more people who work in San Luis Obispo will have to live out of town and will commute daily to work -- adding to congestion and causing more pollution.

This is a problem throughout California, Morrow said. "We found people in our surveys who work way down in Vandenberg and live in Los Osos because the housing is cheaper."

"Land use planning is the ultimate answer to society's air quality and congestion problems," says Larry Allen. "We need to correct a lot of mistakes we've made in the past. We've allowed our communities to sprawl out and make us dependent on the private automobile.

"That's a long-term solution, but it is a key element. Land use planning is ultimately the key to good air quality in the future. Getting away from urban sprawl and moving toward more compact development."

### High Tide

When I told Dave Morrow about my trip to the Sequoias, he confirmed my fears. "Over in the central valley," he said, "the pollution is really impacting Sequoia National Park. They have measured higher smog levels at 7,000 feet in the park than in downtown L.A. They're considering putting up signs in the park saying that it's not healthy to engage in strenuous physical activities like hiking. And as many as one of three trees in Sequoia may be dying as a result of the smog."

It was hard for me to believe -- and the consequences shook me. If Californians are willing to put up with Los Angeles, which they seem to be able to do in ever increasing numbers; If they're able to adjust to air that is no longer transparent; If they don't mind killing off a national park... Then is anybody going to care when the smog comes to San Luis Obispo?

I asked Larry Allen if we had reached the high-water mark: "Let's put it this way -- the clean air plan is designed to reduce emissions out into the future based on 1987 emission levels. If fully implemented, the clean air plan will reduce levels by about 40% up to the year 2000. However there have been changes in state law, and we're in the process of changing the clean air plan for the new mandates.

"As it's currently written, we would have reached the high water mark and would see a reduction [up to the year 2000]. Beyond that period, as population growth increases, you would expect to see emissions increase after a certain time."

Paul Allen, also with the APCD, is more optimistic. "We believe that the clean air plan establishes a way that citizens of the county of San Luis Obispo can turn [air quality] around, so we can accommodate growth and minimize violations of state standards."

Dave Morrow is more guarded about the future. "There aren't any reasons why we can't meet the standards. It's just a political problem. Some people just aren't ready."

I asked Larry Allen what message he would give to county residents concerned about air quality: "Air pollution is caused by everybody -- not just by these big smokestack sources -- people cause air pollution by driving, by burning in fireplaces, by starting their barbecues. It's important for people to think about the impact they have on the environment."