San Joaquin Valley plagued by dirty air looks toward Trump

FRESNO — California’s vast San Joaquin Valley, the country’s most productive farming region, is engulfed by some of the nation’s dirtiest skies, forcing the state’s largest air district to spend more than $40 billion in the past quarter-century to enforce hundreds of stringent pollution rules.

The investment has steadily driven down the number of days with unhealthy air — but on hot, windless days, a brown haze still hangs overhead, sending wheezing people with tight chests to emergency rooms and hundreds each year to an early grave.

Despite the air district’s efforts, the valley’s air still violates federal standards for sooty pollution that comes from industry, businesses and vehicles.

In California, where Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown is an outspoken leader in the global fight against climate change, the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District now is waging a very public campaign against enforcement of the landmark U.S. Clean Air Act that includes ever-tightening air quality standards the district says it cannot meet.

Officials in the relatively conservative region have seized upon the election of Donald Trump, who won the popular vote in half of the district’s eight counties in November — a far stronger performance than in most of California.

The district’s website prominently displays a report titled “Presidential Transition White Paper” that the director provided to the incoming Trump administration in calling for the elimination of the federal Air Act’s “costly bureaucratic red tape.”

District Executive Director Seyed Sadredin also reached out to Bakersfield Republican Kevin McCarthy, the GOP’s U.S. House majority leader. And he testified in Washington for a bill co-authored by McCarthy that would limit new air standards under the Air Act to once every 10 years, instead of five.

“Regulators in Washington have issued blanket regulations that would unfairly impact the Central Valley’s unique air challenges,” McCarthy said in a statement.

The San Joaquin Valley, with more than 4 million residents, produces nearly half the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables, annually generating $47 billion.

Its bad air is the byproduct of booming farms, oil production, two major highways, a web of rail lines — and the valley’s bowl-shaped geography. The Sierra Nevada and two other mountain ranges wall in the 250-mile-long (400kilometer-long) valley.

The pollution is aggravated in winter when residents burn wood in fireplaces. In the blistering summer, an atmospheric lid traps haze, sometimes darkened by mountain forest fires.

This summer, the San Joaquin Valley must report how it will meet a federal standard for fine particulate matter — harmful air pollution from dust, soot, smoke or chemical reactions.

Sadredin says there’s no way the district can meet the deadline. He contends the district could be subject to billions of dollars in annual penalties if it fails to comply within three years. At his request, language was inserted into McCarthy’s bill that would protect the district from sanctions for vehicle pollution, which he says is beyond his authority to control.

Sadredin said he hopes that with a Republican-dominated Congress and Trump’s election, regulators will be more sensitive to his district’s plight than during the Obama administration. Already, he said, officials at the Environment Protection Agency, now headed by business-friendly former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, have shown a “greater willingness to be cooperative.”

EPA officials said they have never exacted strict penalties on a district and that harsh action would kick in only if a district refused to file an air cleanup plan or submitted a grossly insufficient one.