St. Louis meets air pollution standard

ST. LOUIS -- St. Louis has met federal air-pollution standards for the first time in 40 years, but it's out of compliance with ozone regulations scheduled for 2004.

Air monitoring shows the St. Louis area would have had 136 violations this summer under those stricter standards.

"We should congratulate ourselves, but we certainly can't backslide," Steve Nagle, director of planning for the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council, the metro area planning body, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for a story Sunday.

Missouri must prove to the Environmental Protection Agency that pollution will not worsen in the next 10 years.

In public hearings scheduled for this week, public health advocates, business representatives and environmentalists plan to discuss the best way to do that.