Joining sister organizations in Utah and Tooele counties is the Salt Lake County Clean Air Coalition, which was formally introduced on the Capitol steps Tuesday morning.
Reps. Dave Jones and Joanne Milner announced the formation of the coalition, explained its three-fold mission and asked for citizen participation."We've now reached the point where a handful of experts can no longer do the job alone," Milner said. "What's needed now is an active citizen involvement at the grass-roots level because real change in air quality will only come when everyday citizens choose to get involved."
Unlike the Utah County Clean Air Coalition, which has aimed most attacks at Geneva Steel, the Salt Lake Coalition faces issues that are less clear-cut.
"It is definitely a disadvantage," Jones said. "The problem with Salt Lake City is that we have a lot of small causes of air pollution and PM10. It is a broader, more diffuse problem to get people to deal with so many smaller issues." Yet he and Milner are hopeful that Salt Lake residents will organize as successfully as the groups in Utah and Tooele counties.
The Salt Lake County coalition's initial issues are the Governor's Commission on Clean Air, the proposed Thousand Springs Power Plant in northeastern Nevada and the Utah Bureau of Air Quality.
"We think that they (Bureau of Air Quality) don't go quite far enough . . . with transportation problems. Improved traffic flow can significantly improve the air pollution that's caused by automobile traffic," said Marc P. Valdez, coalition member and an assistant researcher at the University of Utah department of meteorology.
Valdez suggests the bureau propose synchronized traffic lights to improve traffic flow and reduce pollution, develop mass transit and ride-sharing systems and adopt stricter emission standards at the Hercules plant, the University of Utah heating plant and the airport.
There should also be a requirement that homes cannot be sold unless wood stoves within them meet Environmental Protection Agency standards, Valdez said.
Valdez warned that Salt Lake County could become another Los Angeles if Utahns fail to anticipate the city's growth.
"Everything depends on how quickly the city grows. If we don't plan ahead for the freeways that will be built or the transportation problems, then 30 to 40 years in the future we can see something like L.A. developing here."
The coalition will have public meetings at the Salt Lake County Complex on the second Thursday of each month.