Cape Girardeau County avoids ozone restrictions with DNR reversal of recommendation

Cape Girardeau County seems likely to avoid the burden of being named as an area with dirty air, but civic and business leaders are treating the struggle to escape new regulations as a call for action.

The Air Pollution Control Program staff at the Missouri Department of Natural Resources reversed a recommendation made late in 2008 that the county be paired with Perry County in a Southeast Missouri region suffering from ozone pollution. After objections from political and business interests that included a privately sponsored consultant's report, the DNR staff agreed to change its recommendation.

Instead of being named a "nonattainment" area for ozone pollution, Cape Girardeau will be listed as "unclassifiable." The new recommendation, if approved by the Missouri Air Conservation Commission on Feb. 3 and later by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, means the area will avoid regulations that could have hampered recruitment of new industry and forced existing business to make expensive investments in cleanup equipment.

Part of the reason Cape Girardeau County avoided a nonattainment designation was a promise from area leaders to take voluntary steps to control the pollution that causes ozone, said Jeff Bennett, air quality modeling chief in the DNR's Air Pollution Control Program. Those steps, Mayor Jay Knudtson and Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce president John Mehner said, include greater emphasis on transit services, asking gasoline retailers to do more to control fuel vapors and alerting residents when they should avoid mowing lawns to keep pollutants under control.

The original recommendation was based on readings at an air pollution monitor near Farrar, Mo., in southern Perry County. Cape Girardeau County was included with Perry County in a new nonattainment area because the department considers Cape Girardeau County polluters to be a major contributor to the readings that violate national ozone standards. There is no air pollution monitor in Cape Girardeau County.

Perry County will remain a named nonattainment area.

The DNR staff still believes Cape Girardeau County contributes to the poor readings but is not certain that it is the most significant contributor, said Jeff Bennett, air quality unit modeling chief in the DNR's Air Pollution Control Program.

"The technical finding is that Cape Girardeau County does have a significant impact downwind," Bennett said. "What the change is there is that there is a policy question about what is the EPA going to do about these newly designated areas."

Ozone is a three-atom molecule of oxygen. In the upper atmosphere, ozone protects the Earth from damaging solar radiation.

Ozone pollution at the surface occurs when sunlight reacts with volatile organic chemicals, or VOCs, and nitrogen oxides, a component of automobile exhaust. In high concentrations, it creates the haze on a summer day often referred to as smog. The chemicals that cause ozone build up during stagnant air periods.

36 days

The monitor at Farrar exceeded the federal eight-hour standard of 75 parts per billion on 36 days from 2005 to 2007. There were no days in violation during 2008, an improvement aided by a cooler and wetter-than-normal summer.

While the department considers Cape Girardeau County to be a contributor to Perry County's violations, a report sent to the DNR by the chamber and Cape Girardeau Magnet under the name the "Concerned Citizens for Economic Growth Coalition" disagrees. The report challenges the assumptions about the source of ozone pollution and contends the pollutants contributing to high readings in Farrar could be the result of "long-range transport" from metro areas to the east, north and south of Perry County.

Mehner said neither the chamber nor Magnet paid for the report. He declined to say where funding came from or how much the report cost to produce.

The report details the biggest sources of nitrogen oxides and VOCs in the region. For example, Procter & Gamble was the source of 213.5 tons per year of VOCs. TG Missouri in Perryville emitted 195.2 tons per year, and Nordenia produces 97.9 tons per year. The larger sources of nitrogen oxides include Buzzi Unicem, which emits 1,224.3 tons per year, Procter & Gamble, with 172.2 tons per year and Southeast Missouri State University with 134.3 tons per year.

The key to avoiding the nonattainment designation was the scientific material presented to the DNR, Knudtson said. "It became very apparent that we were on the brink of receiving a designation that would not only deal a huge blow to some major, major employers but would additionally greatly inhibit our ability to recruit new industry," Knudtson said.

What was once an urban problem is encroaching on rural areas as air quality standards are tightened. While no rules for the new tougher standard have been written, there are not many ways short of industrial cutbacks that could be imposed to reduce emissions, Mehner said. And, he added, the science shows that even those steps may not help at Farrar.

"We are happy we are not going to be nonattainment," Mehner said. "We are using it as a wake-up call to take any actions we might have voluntary control over that could be contributing."

rkeller@semissourian.com

388-3642

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