Photo by The Maricopa County Air Quality Department

The history of pollution control in Phoenix is a long, discouraging record of political compromises and half-hearted gestures.

“In the ’80s and early ’90s, the state wouldn’t take action unless someone filed a lawsuit,” Bahr says. “Overall, the history is one of someone having to push the elected officials.”

The regulatory foundation for pollution control efforts is the federal Clean Air Act, which was passed in 1970 and amended in 1990. (The Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970 to help enforce the provisions of the Act.) Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA has established national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for six primary air pollutants, including carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen dioxides, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter and ozone.

When an area fails to meet one of these standards, it is designated a non-attainment area for the pollutant in question – the equivalent of a failing grade on a school progress report. Under the Clean Air Act, the state must then develop what’s called a State Implementation Plan, or SIP. The SIP lays out enforceable strategies for achieving compliance – essentially a state’s promise to try harder and do its homework. The first Arizona SIP was submitted in 1972, and the state has been adding to those promises ever since.

The Act gives state and local governments considerable leeway in how they attack pollution. However, SIPs are subject to EPA approval. If the EPA deems a plan inadequate – or if that plan fails to achieve the desired results – the Act brings increasingly stringent measures to bear on the non-attainment area in question. If necessary, the EPA can issue sanctions against a state or, in some cases, take over enforcement of the Clean Air Act in that area.

However, that’s not a quick or efficient process. As an example, take this abbreviated history of Maricopa County’s non-compliance with PM10 standards, taken from the PM10 SIP:

• In 1990, Congress enacted the Clean Air Act Amendments. Maricopa County was deemed a “moderate” non-attainment area for PM10 and required to show improvement by 1994.

• In 1991, Arizona submitted its moderate area PM10 state implementation plan to the EPA, but it wasn’t approved until 1995.

• In April 1995, the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest (ACLPI) filed suit against the EPA, challenging its approval of the 1991 plan because it failed to address the 24-hour PM10 standard.

•  Meanwhile, the Phoenix area continued to exceed both annual and 24-hour standards for PM10. In May 1996, the EPA reclassified it from a “moderate” to a “serious” non-attainment area, allowing Arizona another 18 months to develop an appropriate serious area plan. The new deadline for attainment became December 31, 2001.

• In December 1997, Arizona submitted its serious area plan to the EPA. In February 1998, the EPA determined that the plan was inadequate in several ways. That triggered an 18-month time clock for mandatory application of sanctions and a two-year time clock for application of a federal implementation plan.

• In June 1999, the Maricopa Association of Governments’ Regional Council adopted a serious area plan for PM10 that contained 77 state and local government control measure commitments. ADEQ submitted this plan to the EPA in July 1999.

• In November 1999, EPA notified MAG of deficiencies in its plan. A revised plan was submitted in February 2000.

• In July 2002, EPA approved Arizona’s serious area PM10 plan for Maricopa County and granted Arizona’s request to extend the attainment deadline from 2001 (which had already passed) to 2006.

• In 2006, Maricopa County once again failed to attain PM10 standards. Arizona was given a deadline of December 31, 2007, to submit a plan for achieving a 5 percent reduction in PM10 emissions per year until the PM10 standard is attained.

• Arizona submitted that plan on December 26, 2007. Now the EPA has six months to determine if the plan is complete and another 12 months to approve or reject it.

“One of the things that you see is that it’s very slow-going,” says Joy Herr-Cardillo, an attorney with the nonprofit Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest who has been active in the center’s air quality efforts. “A lot of it’s frustrating for me when I’m sitting there waiting for the EPA to take action.”

The fact that we’re still failing to meet PM10 standards reflects poorly on the 18-year back-and-forth process recorded above. Clearly, the pollution controls proposed by the state and approved by the EPA were inadequate to meet air quality standards by 2006 – a deadline that had already been extended several times. In the absence of sufficient political will, it has been up to groups like the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest to keep the process moving forward. The ACLPI has taken numerous actions related to air quality over the years, generally with the aim of forcing the EPA to enforce its own requirements.

“The whole [Clean Air] Act was designed to have this private right of enforcement, this citizen’s suit provision,” Herr-Cardillo says.

“We haven’t won all of our cases, but we’ve won enough of them that it does keep the agencies on their toes,” she continues. “A lot of stuff ended up not getting litigated just by the act of bringing the suit…. Sometimes the 60-day notice [of intent to sue] is all it takes for people to get their act together.”