Idaho Senate panel votes to loosen air-quality rules for field-burning

BOISE – Legislation loosening the air quality standards for when field burning will be allowed in Idaho cleared a Senate committee Wednesday after farmers from throughout the state spoke in favor of it.

The change affects only ozone, not particulate pollution, the type of pollution that field-burning creates. But under Idaho’s current laws – established in the wake of a lawsuit settlement in 2008 – Idaho agreed to set standards for the days it allows field-burning that don’t exceed 75 percent of any federal air quality standard, for any pollutant. Now, the federal government has tightened its ozone standard. If Idaho made no change, that’d mean a reduction in potential burn days for farmers.

“Idaho has background ozone that is here due to no fault of Idaho’s farmers,” said Erik Olson, a wheat grower from Boundary County. “Our practices have no impact on ozone. … We do not have any control with ozone.”

The DEQ’s Crop Residue Advisory Board, which was formed after the court settlement, debated the issue over the summer. Environmental and public health advocates on the board said they’d accept a loosening of the ozone standard, but only if there was a commensurate tightening of the threshold for particulate pollution, to keep the overall effect on air quality even.

Though farmers were receptive to the idea, the DEQ decided to press ahead with just loosening the ozone standard and keeping the particulate pollution requirement for burn days unchanged. In response, the three representatives on the advisory board from environmental and health groups resigned in December.

“It is not in anyone’s best interest to remain on a committee whose advice and expertise is not considered,” the three wrote in a Dec. 1 letter to Idaho Department of Environmental Quality Director John Tippets.

Tippets said last week that he was sorry to lose the advisory board members. “We feel bad about it – it’s been a good committee, they’ve been good members,” he said. But, he said, “We’re required to make decisions based on sound scientific data. … When we burn, we’re not putting any more ozone into the atmosphere.”

The board members from the Idaho Conservation League and Safe Air For Everyone, the group that filed the 2007 lawsuit that led to the settlement, say the DEQ hasn’t considered emerging science about the cumulative effects of particulate pollution and ozone pollution together.

Asked about that by the senators on Wednesday, Tiffany Floyd, head of DEQ’s air quality division, said there’s not yet any scientific evidence of that. “That compounding effect of pollutants continues to be evaluated,” she said, “but we don’t have that currently.”

Dr. Karen Miller, director of St. Luke’s Cystic Fibrosis Center of Idaho, spoke against the change. “When the particulate matter and pollution levels are high, we see a great increase in sick visits,” she said. “It’s pretty clear in our clinic that we have an increase in those visits when the particulate matter is high and when the ozone is high.”

She said, “I believe increasing the allowed level of ozone would increase these office visits and clinic visits and cost the state of Idaho money for patients who require … urgent care.”

Miller said she sees the most problems among her patients with COPD, asthma and cystic fibrosis “in July, August and the early part of September when the air quality is the poorest,” along with “January and a little into February when the inversion is quite bad, because that traps all the particulate matter down here.”

But Russ Hendricks of the Idaho Farm Bureau said that late-summer pollution is made much worse by wildfires, which aren’t regulated at all. He spoke in favor of the bill, SB 1009, saying it will provide more possible burn days.

Several farmers told the committee that they pick and choose from among the available burn days, to avoid local conditions like breezes that could impact their neighbors.

Floyd, of DEQ’s air quality division, told the senators, “I realize this can be counter-intuitive. How can increasing or providing for more burn days protect public health or simply be a better situation? Here’s why. Under the current program, there are days when smoke would disperse well … yet DEQ is prohibited from allowing burning due to the ozone levels.”

She noted that the Nez Perce Tribe’s field-burning program is based only on particulate pollution readings, and doesn’t take into account ozone pollution.

Floyd said the DEQ still would have to seek EPA’s approval for the change to its field-burning program, even if the bill passes, but she said she believes it’ll be approved.

Sen. Maryanne Jordan, D-Boise, cast the lone vote against the bill. She said she would have preferred a solution aimed at keeping the number of field-burning days even, rather than increasing them.

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Floyd told the senators, “If we thought we were jeopardizing public health in any way, we would not be proposing this change to you.”

Jonathan Oppenheimer, government relations director for the Idaho Conservation League, said, “These basically looser restrictions for increased flexibility for burning … we really feel violate the spirit of the agreement that had been reached that kept us all out of the courtroom eight years or so ago now.”

SAFE’s lawsuit initially resulted in a ban on field-burning in Idaho in 2007, until the agreement was reached in 2008.

Annual late-summer burning of grass-seed fields on the Rathdrum Prairie used to be a big issue in the Coeur d’Alene, Post Falls and Sandpoint areas, as smoke rolled into town and tourist areas. But there’s very little grass-seed farming left on the prairie; many of the former fields have been converted into subdivisions.

The bill still needs passage in the full Senate and House and the governor’s signature to become law.