Contacts:
Andrew Weisser, (818) 703-6444
aweisser@earthlink.net
or your local American Lung Association
at (800) LUNG-USA. www.californialung.org

Statement of Bonnie Holmes-Gen
Assistant V.P., Government Relations
American Lung Association of California

Oppose Senate and Assembly Republican Budget Proposals’ Attack on California’s Public Health and Environment

July 15, 2003

California’s trailblazing air quality laws and programs are under serious threat today because of the Republican Budget Proposals. The huge and unmitigated cuts required by these proposals endanger the health of Californians across the state.

The Republican Budget Proposal would cut the state Air Resources Board’s stationary source program by 45%. It is difficult to describe the devastation this size cut would cause to the checks and balances in place in this state to protect the public from exposure to smog, soot and toxic chemicals.

• Essential programs including oversight, monitoring and legal enforcement at the state’s biggest polluting facilities such as oil refineries would be disrupted.
• The state’s monitoring network would be slashed, possibly in half, handicapping state and local regulators in charge of tracking the public’s exposure to pollutants.
• New and revised regulations to reduce the public’s exposure to toxic emissions, including diesel soot and hexavalent chromium, would be delayed or stopped entirely.
• Programs to train local air quality regulators how to enforce air quality laws would end.
• The state’s work to analyze the harmful impacts of pollution and toxic chemicals on children, pursuant to the Children’s Environmental Health Protection Act of 1999, would end.
• Regulations that are vital to meet federal Clean Air Act requirements and avoid federal sanctions to the State would be delayed indefinitely.

The proposed cuts to statewide air programs would turn the clock back on California’s clean air progress. The cuts would mean the public would have to breath dirtier air, and public health would decline. The cuts would put the state on a course toward the imposition of federal sanctions that will cost the state money and jobs, including billions of dollars in public transit and road construction funding.

Californians already experience 6,500 premature deaths and 350,000 asthma attacks each year due to elevated levels of particulate pollution and smog. Dirty air is already associated with thousands of hospitalizations and emergency room visits every year and increased numbers of school absences.

More than 90% of Californians already live in areas with unhealthy air, and they don’t like it. The public has said time and again, most recently last week in a Public Policy Institute of California survey, that it wants to see more air quality regulation and not less. The brunt of the proposed cuts’ effects will fall on sensitive individuals including children, the elderly and people with asthma and bronchitis and other lung illnesses. Children in polluted already miss more school days, experience higher rates of asthma, and show a slow-down in lung growth than children who live in clean air regions. Aside from the human suffering these air-pollution related illnesses cost, they also cost Californians and their employers money in lost time at work, lost productivity, and high medical costs.

The public wants more public health protection, not less. The Republican Budget Proposal takes California on a radical detour from a clean air future. It simply goes in the wrong direction.

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