The Smog Propagandist

You don’t hear much about Joe Coto, but if he were the head of the local smog police, it’s unlikely anyone would be selling pollution credits to build power plants in low- to middle-class communities.

It’s also unlikely that Coto’s smog police would have undertaken such a flawed report as the one heralded on the front-page of the Los Angeles Times on Saturday, which declared that the cancer risk from toxic air declined by 17 percent; it simply ain’t true. The report examined too few pollutants and relied on too few monitoring stations and computer modeling to project emissions. It wouldn’t pass muster by the local middle school science project review team.

The study is more politics than science and a big reason why guys like Bill Burke, who should have retired years ago on the fortune made by his L.A. Marathon, hangs onto the levers of power in this city; they find enablers like the South Coast Air Quality Management District to allow them to get away with their unredeemable quests for power. It’s shameful when the health and lives of 14 million people are at stake.

The life-threatening consequences of air pollution must be the No. 1 concern of any rational politician in Los Angeles, period. Coto knows it, and he’s not even a local boy.

Coto is a state Assemblyman from San Jose. As chairman of the 27-member Latino Caucus, he organized a two-day conference in Santa Monica that slipped under the media radar last November. He put on an array of speakers who testified about the deadly air pollution that hits communities of color the hardest. But there was no splash the next day in the papers across the region. “Getting press has not been our strong suit,” said Mike Welch, the assemblyman’s legislative director. “Coto likely will author bills resulting from policy initiatives.”

OK, fine, but the public would be better served if Coto had a bit more media savvy. As a resident of San Jose, it’s a virtual impossibility that Coto could ever replace Bad Bill Burke, the chairman of the governing board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District. But Burke belongs in that chair as much as Daryl Gates belongs at the helm of the LAPD or the Nightstalker Richard Ramirez as the night manager of the Biltmore hotel.

The program for the two-day conference included such leading names at Alan Lloyd, the former chair of the state Air Resources Board and now president of the International Council on Clean Air Transportation; Praveen Amar, director of Science and Policy at Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management; Alberto Mendoza, president of Coalition for Clean Air; Manuel Pastor, director of USC’s Program for Environmental and Regional Equity; and Mark Baldassare, president of Public Policy Institute of California.

They did not sit around for two days and dream up ways to spin the bad news of pollution that kills 2,400 people a year and sickens thousands more. Instead, the two dozen legislators heard testimony and began plotting a legislative attack that we’ll hear more about in the coming session.

Assemblywoman Jenny Oropeza of Long Beach was so moved by what she heard that she ended up distributing an op-ed column to newspapers about the conference. “Despite improvements, too many Californians remain exposed to the most toxic air in the nation,” she wrote. “This is especially true for those who live in low-income communities dominated by people of color. Sadly, 80 percent of Latinos live in areas that fail to meet federal Environmental Protection Agency air quality standards, as do 65 percent of African Americans and 57 percent of whites.”

L.A. Sniper obtained copies of some of the presentations made during the two-day conference. Among them:

• Concerns about pollution are greatest in Latino and African-American communities. Seven in 10 Latinos believe health threats due to air pollution are a “serious.”

• In Los Angeles, African Americans are 50 percent more likely and Latinos are twice as likely to be living near facilities that store, transfer and/or dispose of hazardous wastes.

• Compared to whites, Latinos, and Asians have a lifetime cancer risk that is one-third greater; African Americans experience a 40-percent greater lifetime cancer risk from ambient air toxics.

Angela Johnson Meszaros, a lawyer for California Environmental Rights Alliance, which has sued the AQMD over pollution credits, said the cancer study is bunk:

“They’re just lying! They’re lying because they’re not prepared to undertake the program that needs to be undertaken to clean the air. They’re unprepared and business is unprepared. We need to be very serious about what we allow people to pump into our air.”

Meszaros said the pollution-credits program exposes AQMD’s hypocrisy:

“In September 2006, the district changed its rules to make available more pollution credits to allow building 11 more fossil fuel power plants in the basin. Without the district making that rule change, those facilities could not be built. Collectively, if they’re built, those facilities would put 16 metric tons per year of CO2 into the air – it’s more than 5 percent of the state’s current inventory. And here’s the district at the same time coming out with a report that says, ‘We can’t regulate stationary sources any more!’”

She’s run out of patience with the local smog police. “We can’t realistically estimate the level of danger from the air that we breathe. They suggest that they can come up with some very specific numbers … but the fact of the matter is, they have no idea. They’ve only looked at a tiny subset of the pollutants. Secondly, we have almost no information about any of these pollutants.”

Meszaros said she met with AQMD’s executive officer Barry Wallerstein to suggest a more complete study. “We asked why there weren’t more monitors and why there weren’t more pollutants that they were covering – he said it costs a lot of money to do this report, $3 million. It’s more money than I have, certainly, but the district’s got $300 million worth of assets and a $100 million per year budget. It’s a drop in the bucket when you consider the costs to people’s health.

The real answer: A complete report would not have generated such a rosy headline.

Like they had any choice

Smart move by the County Federation of Labor to spend $1 million on the campaign to win voter support for a 9 percent telephone tax February 5. Can you imagine if they’d let the mayor hanging on this one? Good luck at the negotiation table anytime this century. Even subway contracts would have gone out-of-state. Or, maybe naming rights would have been sold for Miguel Contreras high school.

But it’s still amazing how hard the City Council made things for itself: By approving a major DWP rate increase and granting city employees raises all within the past six months, voters might wonder how we can be headed for the poorhouse now. In fact, City Hall can’t even stay even: the 9 percent tax will not fully replace the 10 percent tax that telephone companies successfully challenged in court. Instead of asking voters to maintain the status quo and approve a 10 percent tax, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and his pollsters figured it would be easier to sell the ballot measure if it could be seen as a tax decrease. A decent strategy if you don’t have faith in the intelligence of the electorate or believe libertarian crackpots can carry more than a block or two of a Valley precinct.

We wish City Hall would have leveled with voters and made Proposition S maintain the full $270 million funding.

Power to the unwashed

We’re big fans of bottom-up democracy, even when it means the sometimes nutty neighborhood councils end up with more say in Los Angeles. The messier democracy becomes, the better.

So how much better can it get than to allow the 89 councils to bring three motions or resolutions to the City Council every year under a two-year pilot program? The City Council votes on the proposal next week, and they’d be loonies to snub their noses at it, even though it means allowing more voices and players under the tent at City Hall.

“I think three is a reasonable number to test the process, and then in two years we’ll come back and figure out if there’s a better way to do it and there probably will be,” said Councilmember Richard Alarcon, who chairs the Education and Neighborhoods Committee, which approved the idea.

The Times’ ever-cautious wags get it wrong – again

If you saw the bizarre editorial in Saturday’s L.A. Times, the one full of deep thoughts about the transit funding meeting today, January 10, you might have found it odd that the name of the organizer, former Santa Monica Mayor Denny Zane, was omitted. Nor was there any sense that this campaign for a regional transportation program is bubbling up from the community level – and not occurring through the graces, brilliance, or initiative of elected leaders. But aside from the distant tone lacking any real perspective, a factual error cropped up in the lecture.

The editorial raises questions about whether transportation ballot measures would be getting “special tax privileges not given to other state priorities, such as education,” if they could pass by a 55 percent majority instead of two-thirds. In fact, voters in 2001 approved Proposition 39, which allowed for such special treatment for local education bond measures.

Editorial writers should agree with the courts: a precedent is set for transportation to follow suit.

Antonio moves granite hearts

While the pundits search New Hampshire cellars and attics looking for clues to Hillary Clinton’s comeback, let us suggest one. It was all because of our very own Mayor Ambition’s presence on the campaign trail. The dude’s made a career stealing credit due others, so let’s beat him to the punch: You did it all, Antonio.

Greg Katz contributed to this column. Send insults and ammo to BigAl@lasniper.com.