Clean-Air Panel Explores Funding

By Judy Fahys, The Salt Lake Tribune

May 16–Members of a new air quality task force have begun brainstorming ways to come up with funding for programs that will help make Utah’s air cleaner.

Organized by the state Department of Environmental Quality and its Division of Air Quality, the group is charged with coming up with ideas for ongoing funding for air-quality programs. It is made up of people from industry, the Legislature, environmental quality officials and environmental groups.

The creation of the task force follows a legislative session that left the Department of Environmental Quality’s overall budget flat at nearly $83 million, with one-time increases in state funding and decreases in federal dollars. While lawmakers gave many other state government programs big chunks of a $1.7 billion budget surplus, they gave state environmental programs an infusion of just over $1.5 million to study mercury and to address the federal government’s tougher, new air-quality standards.

That leaves the task force with the chore of suggesting to lawmakers the smartest way to cut pollution while not sticking any single interest group with too much of the cost.

Industry representatives were at Tuesday’s inaugural meeting to remind everyone they have faced increasing state fees even as they cut pollution. Truckers were there to discuss the impacts of, say, higher fuel taxes on their business. Environmentalists and the new advocacy group, Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, were on hand to remind everyone about the public health costs of failing to address pollution.

Said Rick Sprott, director of the air-quality division: “There were lots of good questions and discussion.”

He said lawmakers don’t have the time during their regular meetings to deliberate funding details like these. “The legislators need to hear from all of these interests before they go into session,” he said.

John Veranth, a longtime member of the state air-quality board and an air-pollution researcher, said in the remaining three meetings the task force plans to look at how other states fund environmental programs, among other things.

“It is a worthwhile exercise,” he said of the meetings, “if it opens up dialogue with the legislators.”

Gerald Ross, a member of the doctors’ group, said more money is needed to address environmental concerns in Utah. His group has been pushing, for example, for money to fund umbilical cord blood studies, which are an important tool in studying human exposure to mercury and other environmental contaminants.

“We would like to see a funding increase,” he said.

The task force will report to lawmakers, and possibly suggest legislation, in September.

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