States clash with EPA over Clean Air amendments.

• Author: McKenna, Michael
• Position: Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990

The next battlefield in the escalating conflict between the states and federal government is not likely to be something glamorous like welfare reform or unfunded mandates or school choice. Rather, it will probably be the little noticed but steadily ticking time bomb of enforcement of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA).

In more than a dozen states, officials responsible for trying to meet the excessive and unreasonable requirements of the CAAA have refused to play along in this game of pin the costs on the taxpayer.

How did we get to this point? Congress made the states responsible for "attaining" the act's requirements. The principal enforcement mechanism is its ability to cut off a state's federal funds for highway construction.

EPA has already threatened several states with the withholding of highway funds if they do not move quickly to institute a state-run, centralized automobile emissions testing regime. Inconveniently for the EPA, the amendments don't require such a regime--they allow private test and repair stations if a state can show such stations to be as effective as centralized, test-only stations in improving air quality.

California, which sensibly wants to try to rely on private stations first and move to state-run testing only as a last resort, was in the process of being sanctioned when the San Fernando Valley earthquake struck.

After the quake, all talk of sanctions was quietly dropped. EPA Administrator Carol Browner, who had been threatening a cutoff of federal highway money that would have cost California more than 200,000 jobs wrote somewhat sheepishly to Governor Wilson that the earthquake highlighted the "importance of all levels of government working together to meet the health and safety needs of our constituents."

Even after this admission of defeat, the EPA went back to California and, in mid-March, came to a "compromise" in which a smaller percentage of the vehicles will be subjected to centralized testing.

Explaining that California hadn't really beaten down the EPA, agency spokesperson Denise Graveline said that "we've always been willing to listen. The bottom line is that...