Public Interest Briefs

When Congress enacted the Clean Air Act in 1970, it tried to prod the states into assuming as much control over local air quality matters as they were willing and able to undertake. During the debates on the bill, Senator Prouty of Vermont pointed out that the Act’s purpose was to give each state “the right and duty” to develop its own state implementation plan (or “SIP”) determining how that state would accomplish the Act’s clean air goals.

Congress also provided a “fail-safe” mechanism for states which were reluctant to move on the issue. Former Congressman Springer of Illinois described the mechanism in this way: “If a state hangs back and fails to move out, the Federal Government will take over and make rules and regulations amounting to a state plan.” In other words, if an SIP submitted by a state was disapproved by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) as inadequate to meet the Clean Air Act’s goal and policies, the EPA was then required to prepare a substitute federal plan.

Fortunately, Congress did not stop there. Foreseeing the possibility that the new EPA might contract the twin bureaucratic diseases of “politics” and “timidity,” Congress added a provision to the Act enabling any citizen to go to court to force the EPA to comply with its duties. Just as the EPA was, in essence, to police the states, American citizens were to police the EPA.

The EPA took ill soon after it was born. California prepared a State Implementation Plan which included a program for meeting air pollution emergencies. The EPA ruled that the emergency plan did not meet federal standards requiring extensive traffic and stationary source control measures during such measures. Yet the EPA never prepared or issued any substitute emergency plan.

Thus although the South Coast Air Basin has, on numerous occasions, exceeded the air pollution levels deemed dangerous to human health, no adequate emergency plan has ever been prepared. The plan was caught between two levels of bureaucracy–each of which refused to make the first move.

During the last year, the Center has been in federal court in Los Angeles trying to compel the EPA to carry out its Clean Air Act responsibilities. Representing the California Lung Association and a group of Southern California physicians, the Center’s “citizen suit” seeks a court order requiring that the EPA prepare a substitute federal emergency plan for the Los Angeles South Coast Air Basin.

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