Parts of rural Utah balked when federal environmental regulators included them in a crackdown on wintertime pollution.
Now Tooele and Box Elder counties, joined by ATK Launch Systems and three local cities, have taken their complaints to a federal appeals court, where they hope to show there's no good reason to regulate them under the Clean Air Act.
The Salt Lake City law firm Parsons Behle Latimer represents the Utahns in three separate requests, filed both in U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals in Washington, D.C., and Denver.
All three involve new maps the Environmental Protection Agency finalized in November that designate parts of mostly rural Box Elder and Tooele counties "non-attainment areas" for PM 2.5, the pollution stew of fine-particles and chemicals that sometimes make the air in northern Utah valleys unhealthy to breathe.
The state of Utah has three years to draw up pollution reduction plans for these designated areas, including Salt Lake, Davis, Weber, Utah and Cache counties, where there has been a years-long pattern of high-pollution spikes.
Tooele and Box Elder counties have not had the sort of bad record as those counties, so they pushed back when EPA included them in the Wasatch Front air-cleanup plan. But the counties and ATK were only partly successful in getting the non-attainment boundaries scaled back.
The state of Utah has opted to cooperate with the EPA for now on looking for PM 2.5 solutions, said Department of Environmental Quality Director Amanda Smith. Using computer models and other planning tools, the state is concentrating on finding a strategy to effectively cut PM 2.5 pollution and remain in compliance with federal law.
"If the data at the end of the day shows those areas [in Tooele and Box Elder counties] should not be included," Smith said, "then we will petition EPA for their removal."
Standards under the Clean Air Act are tied to health, and research increasingly points to the health hazards that PM 2.5 pose not only for sensitive groups, like the very young, the very old, and people with heart and lung disease, but also for healthy adults.
The appeals court case won't get rolling until the Denver court decides whether the case properly belongs in Washington, D.C., where the EPA says it does, or in Denver.
