Public Interest Briefs

An important victory has been won for clean air and for the health of all citizens living and breathing in Southern California. Since 1975, Center attorneys have appeared many times before the federal court in Los Angeles in an effort to complete government agencies to overcome bureaucratic inertia and provide for improved air quality. That effort has finally paid off. In August, the federal Environmental Protection Agency filed its official response to the district court’s order. In it, the EPA made a clean break with past policies, conceding all of the issues raised by the Center’s suit.

Brought on behalf of the California Lung Association and local medical groups, the Center’s suit sought to require the EPA to prepare extensive plans for days of heavy air pollution in the South Coast Air Basin. Congress set out specific air quality goals in the 1970 Clean Air Act and obligated each state to prepare its own detailed plan for achieving and maintaining these standards. The state implementation plan (SIP’s) were required to include programs for dealing with excessively heavy smog, including traffic controls and other measures to abate dangerous levels of air pollutants. As an “insurance policy” against failure on the part of the local agencies to do their part, the law also required the EPA to review the state plans and, if found deficient, to prepare substitute federal programs.

In spite of these detailed legal provisions, an adequate plan has never, until now, been prepared to deal with the ever present dangers of heavy smog days in Southern California. The reasons behind that failure lie in a story of bureaucratic entanglements with two agencies avoiding their legal obligations by pointing fingers at each other.

In 1972, the EPA ruled that the emergency plans submitted by California were sorely inadequate. Instead of preparing the required substitute program, the federal agency simply set out a schedule for the state’s Air Resources Board to correct the problems. When the ARB failed to comply, the Center went to court requesting an order to force the agencies to take action. The judge decided at that time to allow the state “another chance” to upgrade its plan without federal intervention. Late in 1975, when California submitted a second, virtually identical plan, the EPA approved it–despite the fact that it was still no better than previous plans.

The federal agency then claimed that there was no longer any basis for the Center’s lawsuit and asked the court to dismiss it. Center attorneys countered that the EPA’s approval was a “sham” action taken solely to get out of the suit and avoid preparing a substitute plan. The judge denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss and allowed Center attorneys to undertake an unprecedented discovery against the EPA in order to prove their contentions. Among documents obtained during these discovery proceedings were internal agency memoranda which revealed impermissible economic and political considerations behind the decision to approve California’s admittedly inadequate plan.

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