The Environmental Protection Agency is threatening to withhold highway funds and permitting approvals from California until the state agrees to redo more than 100 air quality plans.
California “has failed to carry out its most basic tasks under the Clean Air Act,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler wrote in a Sept. 24 letter to the state’s top air regulator, Mary Nichols. Wheeler said in the letter that California represents about a third of the air quality plans the EPA has in a backlog, neither approved nor denied, and some of those plans date back to pollution limits from the 1970s.
States are required to submit plans outlining how they’ll meet federal air quality standards for pollutants such as ozone and particulate matter that contribute to smog and soot. The EPA then is supposed to approve or disapprove those plans.
The EPA is now threatening to disapprove California’s plans if the state doesn’t withdraw them. If the EPA denies a state plan, that could trigger highway funding sanctions, withholding of federal air quality permits, and issuance of a federally mandated plan for the state, Wheeler said in the letter.
The move is the second EPA threat against California in recent weeks. The EPA, along with the Transportation Department, announced Sept. 19 it was eliminating the state’s authority to set its own greenhouse gas and zero-emissions vehicle standards. California regulators have said those limits are a critical piece of the state’s plans to cut both greenhouse gases and emissions of air pollutants.
A senior EPA official, though, told reporters Tuesday the agency’s move wasn’t a direct attack on California. The official said California has some of the worst air quality in the country and more than twice as many people living in areas that do not meet federal air quality limits than any other state.
“There is a strong reason for the focus here,” the EPA official said. “If you’re in a hole, then the first thing is to stop digging.”
But the EPA official didn’t provide a list of any other state facing a similar backlog of state plans and didn’t say whether the agency was considering similar threats against those states.
Former EPA officials blasted the move, arguing it flies in the face of the states’ rights the Trump administration claims to value.
The move is “also ironic, given that California has put in place the most protective air programs in the country,” Janet McCabe, who headed the EPA’s air office from 2013-2017, said in a statement.
“EPA should be working with the state, not looking for ways to publicly punish it,” McCabe, now director of Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute, added.
