When U.S. Senator Harry Reid came
up with the idea for the Grand Canyon Visibility
Transport Commission back in 1990, he was just probably
trying to protect Nevada industry, sources tell Electric
Nevada. [previous story]
Harsher
environmental legislation was then moving through the
U.S. House of Representatives and sources say Reid's
strategy apparently was to get out in front with a
politically-correct alternative -- the old
"appoint-a-commission" ploy, in a new guise. With his first U.S. Senate
re-election contest looming in 1992, the strategy would
allow Reid to both look "green" in the eyes of
environmentalists and at the same time please big
contributors in Nevada mining and other industries. Both
houses of Congress eventually accepted the Reid plan as
part of the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act. Six years later however, Nevadans
are learning that the actual result of Reid's plan, in
practice, could easily turn out to be just as harsh as
the House plan it was supposed to block. Permanent,
stringent EPA controls could be imposed on virtually the
entire state, costing private Nevadans billions of
dollars over the next two decades. The reason, says a spokesman for the
Nevada Manufacturers Association, is the provision in the
legislation requiring study of "clean air
corridors." "If the clean air corridors
provision had been left out of this bill, it would have
been a 1000 percent better," says the NMA's Ray
Bacon. Should a "clean air
corridor" be established over most of Nevada, he
says, "then the federal EPA can impose
'non-attainment' status on" virtually the entire
state -- a legal move which then would allow very
stringent EPA controls. Paradoxically, the very cleanliness
of Nevada air would mean those controls would never be
removed, says Bacon. For although the air over most of
the state is already some of the purest in the country,
it could never become pure enough to significantly affect
haze on various sites downwind which the plan was
intended to help. "The environmentalists get an
absolute 'A' here, for taking Catch-22 to the
limit," he said. Virtually all of Nevada would be
under the "clean air corridor" defined in a
draft report by the Grand Canyon Visibility Transport
Commission's appointed public advisory committee. And
because the report is a political compromise worked out
between commission appointees, the commission is expected
to largely accept the report and submit it, as a basis
for regulation, to the federal Environmental Protection
Agency. Sources in Nevada's state
environmental division told Electric Nevada that
the clean air corridor defined in the draft report was
selected arbitrarily. "In actuality, a clean air
corridor is any path that clean air moves through,"
sources said. "When there are storms in the L.A.
area, even southern California and Arizona make up a
clean air corridor." Nevertheless, under the draft
report, haze in the Grand Canyon or other federal parks
would cost Nevadans at least 5.8 billion dollars during
the next 20 years, says the NMA's Bacon. Under an earlier draft, the plan
prepared would have cost Nevada $900 million each year,
about $611 million of it being the annual cost of paving
all the dirt roads in Nevada. That was idea was removed
from the draft, said Bacon, "when it became clear
how stupid it was," and when data showed how
expensive the scheme would be. Not only government and business
representatives on the committee were against it, but
Sierra Club representatives too hated the idea of paving
all the roads into the back country. With the pave-all-roads idea
removed, that left a cost of roughly $290 million a year
for the 20 years, or $5.8 billion. But there are many other
recommendations in the current draft plan, says Bacon,
where no price tag has been specified. With the federal government's record
of cost overruns and entitlement spending, he says, it
would be asking for disaster to send anything with costs
this undefined to Washington. While some of the costs would be
levied on state government, and thus indirectly to
citizens, the biggest would be passed along as direct
costs to private citizens. Ideas being talked about for
recommendation in the commission's working committees
include a clean fuels program like California's,
year-round emission monitoring programs, higher fees for
permits, high-cost emission scrubbers, and fleets of
water trucks to water down construction sites and dirt
roads. 
"The
potential goes on and on and on. And since it is not
defined, no one can put a price tag on it," he says.
The NMA spokesman also questioned
the scientific foundations of the draft report.
"So far as I can see, it makes
absolutely no environmental, economic or logical sense to
go ahead and forward these recommendations when it has
been acknowledged that the science the report is based on
has major flaws in it.
"If the science is bad, you
should first fix the science," said Bacon.
Electric Nevada obtained the
public advisory committee's latest draft report, dated
April 9, and found the report acknowledges that the
technical foundation for its recommendations "is not
yet complete," and is "characterized by varying
degrees of uncertainty."
"The large size and complex
terrain of the Transport Region, the time and other
resources available for work, significant data gaps, and
the amount of information that could be modeled with
current technology were important limiting factors,"
says the draft. The resulting computer modeling "has
to date given a limited picture of the regional, and
particularly sub-regional, dynamics of both emissions and
economics."
"Nevertheless," continues
the draft report, "the Commission has sufficient
confidence in its overall understanding of the causes of
regional haze and its effects on visibility" to
support its recommendations.
Under those recommendations, says
Bacon, all Nevadans would pay higher utility fees, while
Nevada businesses would have to pay costs for extensive
studies required for preparation of the EPA permit
applications.
Even then, "it's going to make
no difference," he said, citing current backlogs and
the lack of action by EPA that Nevada businesses already
face in seeking permits.
"Las Vegas is going to suffer
the most," said Bacon, but added that northern
Nevada customers of Sierra Pacific Power and other
utilities will also have to pay higher rates.
While the Grand Canyon Visibility
Transport Commission originated in legislation conceived
and sponsored by Nevada's senior U.S. Senator, Harry
Reid, Nevada's other senator, Richard Bryan, also
supported the legislation. It was signed into law by
President George Bush.
Two years later, with Reid up for
reelection, Reid and Bryan both began distancing
themselves from the resulting commission. With six other
western Senators, they signed a 1992 letter to Arizona
Governor Fife Symington, commission chairman, protesting
the wide jurisdiction envisioned in the commission's
draft work plan and the large role set forth for federal
agencies.
"At no time was it envisioned
that the jurisdiction of your Commission should be
expanded beyond the Grand Canyon to include the 'Golden
Circle of Class I areas on the Colorado Plateau.'"
said the letter.
"The ... Commission was to be
an independent Governors' Commission which would result
in a consensus recommendation to the Environmental
Protection Agency and the National Park Services, not to
be developed by those agencies,"
However, the actual legislation
setting up the commission nowhere called it a
"Governors' Commission" and instead explicitly
identified its purpose as the protection of "Class I
areas" -- those already identified in 1977 by
Congress as 248 national parks, wilderness areas,
international parks and other areas that were to receive
the most stringent protection from increases in air
pollution.
The same legislation also delegated
authority to the EPA to select the states for the
commission, and thus determine its scope.
Nevada Manufacturers Association
spokesman Bacon says that, while the Commission has been
represented as merely an effort to stop pollution from
degrading air in western parks, other political agendas
are active behind the scenes.
One major motivation behind the push
to institute new environmental controls on Nevada, Utah
and other western states is, he says, an effort to end
the competitive advantage these states now have vis-a-vis
California. Many California environmental regulations are
even more stringent than Federal rules and have led
businesses to relocate out of the state.