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Prepared Witness Testimony The House Committee on Energy and Commerce
'Bump-Up' Policy Under Title I of the Clean Air Act
Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality
Mr. Samuel Wolfe
Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the Subcommittee. My name is Samuel Wolfe. I am Assistant Commissioner for Environmental Regulation for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today regarding the Environmental Protection Agency's bump-up policy under Title I of the Clean Air Act. Even though the EPA created the bump-up policy in an effort to help areas affected by ozone transport, New Jersey cannot support revising the Clean Air Act to accommodate the EPA policy. The policy does nothing to address transport. It simply rewards an area's failure to attain air quality standards by extending deadlines beyond the two years that the law allowed without requiring any additional action to address air pollution. The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments created five classes of ozone nonattainment areas to reflect the severity of each area's ozone problem, ranging from marginal to extreme. The classification system followed the principle that a more severe problem would require more work and more time to correct. For that reason, the law requires areas with more severe problems to take more actions to reduce air pollution, and allows those areas more time to attain the federal air quality standard. Under the law, areas that fail to attain the standard by the statutory deadline could get the deadline extended for up to two years. If they still failed after that extension, they would be "bumped up" to a higher classification, giving them more time but also requiring that they do more to control air pollution. The EPA's 1998 "bump-up" policy extended the attainment deadlines for moderate or serious nonattainment areas when pollution transported from outside the area interfered with its ability to demonstrate attainment by the deadline. More than many states, New Jersey appreciates the need to address transport. Over a third of the air pollution in our State is transported from outside our borders. However, we cannot support codifying into law a policy that simply provides extensions and does nothing to address transport. Granting these cost-free extensions would be easier to justify if a bump-up forced an area to impose costly or onerous requirements to control air pollution. This is not the case. From the beginning, the EPA classified most of New Jersey as severe nonattainment areas. As a result, New Jersey has had to implement almost all of the ozone pollution control measures required under Title I of the Clean Air Act. We required our major sources of ozone precursors to install reasonably available control technology. We required vapor recovery at gas stations. We run an enhanced program for motor vehicle inspection and maintenance, which is much easier to create now than it was when we started. The truth is that these types of Title I measures are now the "low hanging fruit" of emission reductions. Areas that fail to meet their attainment deadlines can put these measures in place without difficulty or great expense. It would also be easier to justify these extensions if the areas that received them were merely passive victims of transport from upwind. Unfortunately, many of these areas themselves contribute to poor air quality downwind. Extending attainment deadlines, without requiring additional action, means that these areas affected by transport will continue to receive unabated air pollution from outside their borders. This air pollution will harm the health of the area's own residents, as well as the health of people who live and work downwind. New Jersey itself provides a good example of the problem. Again, more than a third of our air pollution comes from outside our borders. At the same time, air pollution from inside New Jersey affects other states downwind. For that reason, we have filed a petition with the EPA to restrict emissions from facilities upwind of us, while states downwind of us have filed similar petitions targeting facilities in New Jersey. We participated in the research that made it clear that ozone transport is a significant issue in the United States, especially in the eastern half of the country. We have also worked actively with other Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic States and with the EPA to develop regulatory programs and legal actions that would address transport. At the same time, it was never an option to do nothing while we wait for the transport problem to be solved. For that reason, we continued to pursue sources of air pollution that affected our own residents as well as people downwind. Among other things, we reached an agreement with the operator of the three largest coal-fired electric generating units in the state, which will bring advanced air pollution controls to those units. Giving a free pass to areas affected by transport does not solve the problem of transport. What will solve the problem of transport is a strong national effort to reduce the formation of ozone air pollution throughout the country, complemented by continuing state and local efforts to find and implement cost-effective ways to reduce air pollution within our borders. We therefore ask that the existing bump-up provisions of the Clean Air Act be left in place. Thank you for this opportunity to testify. I am happy to answer any questions you may have.
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