SCAQMD must reject flawed Rule 2305
On May 7, the Governing Board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District is set to vote on a proposed rule that would cost jobs, raise consumer prices and likely do little to improve air quality. Proposed Rule 2305 is truly a bureaucratic disgrace for the ages.
The SCAQMD has been trying since at least 2016, when it adopted an Air Quality Management Plan with an estimated cost of $14 billion, to find a way to raise taxes. The agency staff discussed a $20 increase in the DMV’s auto registration fee and a one-cent increase in the gas tax. They even proposed legislation to create a new four-county district that would be authorized to put a sales-tax hike on the ballot for voter approval.
None of these things worked out. The agency still has no means of paying for its plan to offer generous subsidies for the purchase of electric cars and trucks.
That’s where Proposed Rule 2305 comes in. It would mandate that the owners of large warehouses take action to ban non-electric trucks from their facilities.
There are problems with this proposal. Typically, warehouse owners own warehouses, not trucks, and they can’t control the truck purchases made by their customers. Another problem is that large zero-emission trucks are not yet commercially viable. So the air-quality regulators are offering the warehouses an alternative method of compliance. If they can’t tell their customers to buy different trucks, they can simply pay a huge tax, called a “mitigation fee.”
What a surprise.
The rule, which applies to warehouses in the four-county air district with greater than 100,000 square feet of indoor floor space in the same building, would impose a “Warehouse Points Compliance Obligation” to be calculated by taking the weighted annual truck trips and multiplying it by a “stringency” factor and an “annual variable.” Warehouses could meet their “obligation” by earning points for implementing specified emission-reducing measures. Compliance would be complex and costly.
However, no matter how many hoops the warehouse owners are forced to jump through, there’s no guarantee that any of this will make the air in Southern California one bit cleaner. If zeroor near-zero-emission trucks don’t exist in sufficient numbers, taxing warehouses to pay for subsidies to buy nonexistent trucks makes little sense.
The trade and logistics industry in Southern California directly employs more than 500,000 people and indirectly supports another 273,000 local jobs, according to a 2017 study by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation. About 90% of those jobs are in Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. In 2015, the average annual wage earned by trade and logistics workers was $63,130. If companies choose to rely on out-of-state warehouses, many jobs will be lost without helping to meet air quality goals at all.
The SCAQMD is trying to meet various standards for the reduction of pollutants, but the agency does not have jurisdiction over “mobile” sources of emissions, which are under the control of the California Air Resources Board. This “Indirect Source Rule” is intended to work around that jurisdictional issue.
But Proposed Rule 2305 is a pointless attack on Southern California businesses, the workers they employ and the consumers who buy the products that arrive in their warehouses. More than a year into a pandemic that has devastated jobs and incomes, the only sensible vote is “No.”