Speaker 1:
For years, a number of San Diego based industries have been emitting carcinogenic toxins at a rate far higher than elsewhere in California. That's supposed to change after the San Diego air pollution control district voted unanimously last week to force industries to drastically cut their pollution. The new regulation would see companies reduce their emissions so that cancer risks are one 10th of their current legal limit. Joining me now with more is McKenzie Elmer who covers environmental issues for voice of San Diego McKenzie. Welcome back to the
Speaker 2:
Program. Hi, thanks. Great to be here. What are
Speaker 1:
The local industries that are actually emitting these kinds of cancerous toxins?
Speaker 2:
The story really focused on one large polluter. That's the, um, NASSCO or the shipbuilding industry over at the port of San Diego, but there's a lot of different types of industries that can potentially emit these cancer causing toxins like multiple landfills have, uh, high rates or high risks of cancer in San Diego. There's concrete industries that produce a lot of like dust particulates and other kinds of toxins, um, metalworking, plating industries. And actually in our story, we have a map. We posted all of the locations. So you can kind of look up where you live in context to where some of these industries are
Speaker 1:
And what exactly will these polluting industries have to change when these regulations take effect
Speaker 2:
Prior to the vote, the industry has only had to do was notify the public about every three to four years when they would submit a kind of inventory of all of their cancer-causing pollutants that they do emit to the district. So now they're going to have to notify the public in shorter timeframes. Also maybe have to meet with the public as well, and kind of a community meeting setting that remains to be seen how that's all going to work out, but they'll also have to start actually changing their practices or updating their technologies, uh, so that they're emitting less of these pollutants and have to kind of bring down their threshold of cancer risks in San Diego.
Speaker 1:
And what's been the response from these industrial polluters themselves. I have to imagine they're not too thrilled about this change,
Speaker 2:
Right? It is a, it is a cost to industries. Um, I tried to get in contact with some of them to try and get more context about just how costly updating their technologies to the best available. It's kind of the phrase in the policy speak the best available technologies. But initially before the vote, when these industries were submitting letters in response to the rule change NASSCO was quite against it. They were worried about how quickly they would have to change their technologies. And that kind of basically they wanted this process to slow down and they wanted the district to study the cost to industries in the area, but they sort of changed their tune during the actual public meeting. They said that they accepted the rule, uh, despite it being kind of a higher cost to them. But what they were more concerned about during the actual vote was something that the environmental advocates were actually asking for.
Speaker 2:
They wanted tighter limits on the amount of extensions. These industries could get to actually update their technologies. So the rule that they passed allows for industries to make changes within five years, but they can get additional three-year extensions. And as far as I read the rule, there's no limit to those three-year extensions. So the industries were just hoping that the district would allow for industries to kind of have more time in the future to update their technologies. And the advocates were really hoping for like a 10 year hard limit, but the district actually kept it kind of looser to allow for industries to make their changes.
Speaker 1:
If toxic pollution is higher in San Diego county, does that also mean that we have higher cancer rates? In other words, have the looser regulations also led to worse health outcome.
Speaker 2:
That's a really great question. And one that I have yet to really explore, it's quite hard if you talked a lot of public health experts to be able to link cancer to a very specific source or a pollutant or even location, but conceivably and statistically speaking, because we've had this sort of higher allowable cancer risk for many decades, conceivably, there are higher cancer rates, perhaps due to that, it's just, it's very hard to link the two things.
Speaker 1:
Let's talk about this regulatory agency, the San Diego air pollution control district. It's not something I think most people are very familiar with. There have been some pretty substantial changes to the structure of this agency. What were those changes and tell us how they laid the groundwork for this most recent crackdown on emissions.
Speaker 2:
The air pollution control district is basically a regional body. That's supposed to regulate local emission sources. They have to use, you know, like the basic state standards from the California air resources board. And then they can kind of decide how strict they want to be with their local industries, which is part of the reason why we saw San Diego had permitted such a high level of cancerous for such a long time. Whereas other areas of California, like the south coast air district, which includes the port of long beach, they actually had stricter standards than San Diego. And they have a lot of industry there, obviously. So that was interesting. But the board itself for the longest time was basically ruled and governed by the county board of supervisors. They were sort of like the shoe in board and would make decisions. And I spoke with current supervisor Nathan Fletcher about this because he was one of few Democrats on the county board of supervisors when they were still in control of this board.
Speaker 2:
And he said, he tried to propose stricter rules on these cancer causing toxins. But he himself told me, I tried to propose this rule and nobody knew how to even put anything on the agenda in effect the air pollution control district just didn't really do much governing, I guess, because the county board of supervisors was in charge. And I just depends on how ambitious your county board is on air pollution, whether those changes are gonna take place. And so the makeup of the board changed after Meriton Gloria. When he was formally in the assembly, he pushed bill AB six and it forced the air pollution control district to expand its board beyond just the county board of supervisors. And now they have, I think it's 11 members. I would include city council members from Lamesa San Diego and also members of the public who have, you know, air pollution, interests, or public health expertise, some advocacy members as well. So that I think we saw a real change because there was really no discussion. It was pretty obvious that the current board was ready to pass this rule. Despite the pushback from industries,
Speaker 1:
McKenzie, the presence of these pollutants is not evenly distributed across the county, which neighborhoods have historically seen the worst kind of, or the worst levels of this pollution.
Speaker 2:
From what I could tell by the mapping of the industries that I had from the district, the port of San Diego areas, traditionally always been one that's heavily affected by industry pollution just by its geographic location next to the port. So that's definitely a place where some of the highest cancer risks are. So if you look at the map, you can see also that there's a lot of cancer hotspots on the periphery of the city. So like where the landfills are, and that's kind of common for zoning. You know, you push industry out sort of towards the outskirts away from residences, but it is surprising. There are some clusters of cancerous from these industries scattered throughout the city. So it's not just your, your air is cleaner. If you don't live near the port or you don't live near the outskirts, there are various polluting industries throughout the region.
Speaker 1:
All right. I've been speaking with voice of San Diego environment reporter at McKenzie, Elmer and McKenzie. Thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for talking.
