The Valley has its fingers crossed as the state air board prepares to meet Thursday to allocate funds from Proposition 1B to clean up pollution caused by the movement of goods along the state’s trade corridors. We wrote about the upcoming hearing in a Sunday editorial.
The formula proposed by the Air Resources Board staff would give the lion’s share of the funding to Southern California. Why are we not surprised?
Geography and climate make the Valley unique. A ton of pollution does more damage here than elsewhere. The Bay Area, with 6 times more emissions per square mile, has clean air. Air quality in the South Coast air district is only slightly worse than the Valley's worse, even though it has 10 times more emissions per square mile.
The state has identified four major goods movement corridors. One of them is the San Joaquin Valley. It accounts for 45% of the total traffic in all the corridors combined — yet ARB staff proposes spending only 25% of the Proposition 1B mitigation funds here. Southern California would get 55%.
The Valley and the South Coast air district are statistically similar in terms of number of violations of clean air standards — but ARB staff proposes to give South Coast more than twice as much in funding.
The Valley has been neglected and deprived for decades. Now we have to conclude that, at least according to the ARB staff, the lives of children and adults in the Valley are worth less than the lives of those in Southern California. Is that really part of the ARB calculus?
Many years ago SoCal was worse in air but I believe it is worse here now. We get it coming from North and Sorth. It is amazing that the ARB would be less concerned with us when their familes are here to. TYhis shows me that they don't think it is a big problem here. Living in a rural community smelling and seeing the smoke from agricultural burning I think the City should send out wood chipping trucks for them to use cause if they cut them in small pieces and sent them through the waste pickup they would end up in the city yard to be chipped into compost. There are better ways if people just think about it. There is that common sense thing again or lack thereof.