Santa Barbara County is a jewel of California’s, but if our leaders do not take the proper steps to ensure our livelihood, this jewel could become irreparably tarnished.
The California Air Resources Board only recently determined that the county had made enough progress on lowering ozone levels to move from “nonattainment” to “nonattainment transitional,” which means the higher standards we had to meet for air quality would be reduced to a reasonable level.
It took three years to meet those air standards.
The worst thing we could do would be to layer over another level of air standards that, again, could jeopardize many of the things we want and need to accomplish in Santa Barbara County.
But that’s exactly what the Environmental Protection Agency is trying to do with a more stringent regulation on particulate matter called PM2.5.
This matter is frequently a concern for agricultural areas — agriculture, tourism and the wine industry make up 15% of the county’s workforce, according to state records.
That’s why the Santa Barbara County Taxpayers Association is so concerned about the likely negative impact on the consumers and businesses in our community.
Many areas of California are already in nonattainment of the current National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) PM2.5 thresholds, and businesses have invested heavily to modify their operations and upgrade their equipment in an effort to come into compliance with these air quality standards.
Moving forward with more stringent NAAQS regulations will cause additional counties in California to fall into nonattainment status and leave current nonattainment areas even further behind.
These impacts are not isolated to the manufacturers and industries that must reduce emissions to comply with the NAAQS PM2.5 standards.
The compliance costs, restricted investment, permitting challenges and shuttered operations that stem from these regulations are passed along in the form of higher food, energy and transportation costs for consumers.
Santa Barbara County residents, and residents of California more broadly, are already struggling with an exorbitant cost of living and the impacts of elevated inflation.
Finalizing stricter NAAQS PM2.5 regulations will only add fuel to the inflationary fire and make it harder for Californians to make ends meet.
Tightened NAAQS PM2.5 standards also have the potential to jeopardize the infrastructure investments that our federal, state and local officials have prioritized for years.
Highway and transit projects in nonattainment areas may have their federal funding restricted if state and local officials cannot demonstrate that the project would be in compliance with NAAQS regulations.
This could disrupt years of delicate planning and threaten to halt crucial transportation infrastructure upgrades that our county, state and country rely on to get people and goods where they need to be as safely and efficiently as possible.
We are still recovering from the tremendous economic blow we suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our unemployment rate has been steadily going down, and last month, we reached 3.7% — an improvement from 4.5% in March.
We should be looking ahead to a bright future in which that rate goes down even more. Instead, we have to worry about the effects of more costly regulations that could reverse our progress.
The government’s role is to encourage a robust economy that is supported by tax revenues, not excessive fees and rates. It’s time for the EPA to understand that balancing our economic progress and maintaining our current clean air standards — which are entirely satisfactory to reach our clean air goals — go hand-in-hand.