For Those in CA - SB 1549 Hearing date change

[James_Douglas]

This is to advise anyone, like myself, that had planned on going up to Sacramento for the hearing on SB 1549 that the good Senator Florez changed the hearing date on Friday from tomorrow April 8th to next week April the 15th.

This is but one of his tactics to keep folks away to as to sway his fellow Senators to go along.

Yu can red the bill here:

http://info.sen.ca.gov/cgi-bin/postquery?bill_number=sb_1549&sess=CUR&house=B&site=sen

As someone that has done professional level Transportation Research and Analysis, I have been upset that every five or so years the State Government goes down this path. The reason I am upset is that I have talked in the past with the staff researchers at the Air Quality Control Board, The Bureau of Automotive Repair (BAR), and the Department of Motor vehicles (DMV).

All staff researches agreed, in principle, that the way to determine what, if any, harm was being done to air quality by exempt automobiles was to analyze the following data:

• Take the DMV data and select out the pre-175 automobiles and group them by zip code into the various air quality districts.
  
• Make several sets of assumptions about the mileage actually driven by this group of automobiles.
  
• Get the various categories of pollutants from the BAR for the pre-1975 automobiles.
  
• Calculate the pollutants for the automobiles as a group by air quality district they are registered in (zip code) for each mileage assumption.
  
• A little mathematics later and the data will show what percentage for each pollutant pre-1975 automobiles contribute to any given air districts pollution.

As of the last time I checked will all the agencies, their staff researches informed me that no such research had been done to their knowledge. In fact, they asked my to forward the results to them should I do the research.

We all suspect that given a realistic assumption about the actual mileage driven that the result of such a study would conclude that pre-1975 automobiles do little to the environment. I would be suppressed if the results of such a study even fell out of the margin of error of the air quality districts air pollution sampling error.

I would recommend that anyone communicating with their representative ask for a copy of a study along the lines outlined above and tell them that until that is done that any legislation is premature.

Best, James

[James_Douglas]

It appears that we have been able to gut and morph the bill into nothing but a study of the CA "Year of Manufacture" program.

Even in this re-write it has not passed out of committee. Unless a radical change takes place this bill is dead.

Best, James

[tragic59]

That's great news! Thanks for the update.