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SCCA Magazine |
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The pause that refreshes
By William E. Davis, Executive Vice President, SCCA
What happened in Sacramento in mid-December
with the California Air Resources Board (CARB)
can best be described as a pause, a break in the
action or a chance to catch your breath, rather
than a game-ending victory. In the offroad rule,
everybody gets an extra four years before they
start compliance. In the on-road rule,
construction companies get a two-year pause, and
maybe more, for at least parts of their fleets
under an expanded low-use exemption. That’s it
for now.
There’s a bit of housekeeping work
remaining with the onroad rule. Negotiations
over what CARB calls “15-day changes” will
probably take 60 to 90 days to hammer out
regarding the “low-use exemption” for
construction trucks. What types of vehicles, how
many miles they can travel and what hoops you’ll
have to jump through were sketched out in our
one-page proposal. It‘ll be interesting to see
how many pages it takes to cover the final
regulation and what we actually end up with.
How
we got to this happy state is somewhat more
complicated. It started with you. Those industry
fund pennies per hour you pay every month turned
into billions in savings to our industry through
the hard work of the Construction Industry Air
Quality Coalition (Mike Lewis and Clayton
Miller) and its board and consultants, which
includes many SCCA members. The data generated
by the Construction Industry Research Board
provided the facts and figures necessary to make
our case that the construction industry was
pounded by this recession and is still
struggling. Todd Bloomstine made sure those
numbers got circulated around the Capitol.
Many
from outside our industry were also instrumental
in making the case that we are over-regulated.
Here are just a few:
• Dr. James Enstrom, UCLA,
and Dr. Stanley Young, National Institute of
Statistical Sciences, exposed the Hein Tran
credentials fraud and helped lead the attack on
CARB “science” about the health effects of
diesel particulate matter.
• Dr. Robert Harley
at the University of California published a
paper showing CARB was grossly overestimating
construction fuel use, which, combined with a
Sierra Research study paid for by AGC, proved
CARB over-estimated emissions from the
construction fleet by 370 percent.
• ARTBA
helped stop EPA from granting a waiver for CARB
to enforce the rules until the mess is cleaned
up.
• Thousands of contractors who attended
countless workshops and CARB hearings.
At the
end of the day we can only say thank you to all
of the players and gird our loins for the
inevitable return of the regulators and their
enforcement officials. They never sleep.
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